🧩 Philosophy 7h ago · Dev.Roland

The Masochistic Prior

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In Bayesian statistics there’s the concept of the Uniform Prior - in the absence of evidence, assume all options are equally likely to be true. I often find myself using an alternative strategy, which I’ll dub “the masochistic prior” - in the absence of evidence, whichever option is most painful to believe is the best reflection of reality.This can manifest in mundane ways. When I was a struggling university student, blaming ancient professors with thick accents would have been an easy excuse. T

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