Open thread, Oct. 5 - Oct. 11, 2015

MrMind

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

I felt was extremely prejudiced

What do you mean by "prejudice"? The "textbook definition" basically amounts to "applying Bayesian priors to humans" and that doesn't seem like a bad thing.

For people you haven't interacted with it isn't, for other people it's the posteriors you should apply, not the priors.

3Richard_Kennaway11y

The OED says "Preconceived opinion not based on reason or actual experience; bias, partiality; (now) spec. unreasoned dislike, hostility, or antagonism towards, or discrimination against, a race, sex, or other class of people." The further definitions given are either shades of this one or other senses not relevant here (e.g. legal terminology). From a brief glance at the web, other dictionaries say the same. The second half of the OED's definition is but a currently prominent instance of the first half. That part is probably what you mean by "the textbook definition", but I don't know what textbooks you've been reading. Probably books by progressives that you study to keep your wrath warm. "Not based on reason or actual experience." "Unreasoned." That is the core of the concept, is it not? In Bayesian reasoning, that, without the pejorative overtones, is what your prior is. Your state of belief, represented as a probability distribution, before you have seen the data to which you intend to apply Bayesian reasoning. I am not seeing that in your use of the phrase "Bayesian prior", which you seem to be waving as a rationalist password without noticing the step that it implies, of looking at data and updating from it. Without that, it is not a prior — there is nothing that it is prior to. No, for you "applying Bayesian priors to humans" means stopping at your priors without any awareness that a prior is an expression of ignorance to be improved on, not knowledge to be clung to.

3ooo11y

I tend to ascribe a naïve etymology of pre-judgement to 'prejudice', so I suppose that is the sense I was using it there, but I really wasn't appealing to any "textbook definition" I know of.