I really appreciate you showing the problems with Type 1 arguments, but what I don’t understand is how Type 2 arguments can seem convincing to you.
Type 2 arguments fully rely on priors, which is what you are supposed to have before any observations, in this case, before anything that happened to you in this life. The first problem is that these true priors are unchangeable, because they already existed on the first second of your life. But more importantly, I feel that arguing what the priors should be is the complete misuse of the concept. The whole point of Bayesian reasoning is that it eventually converges, regardless of the priors, and without observations you cannot possibly prefer one prior to another. If I “change my priors” after reading this post, these are not true priors anymore—it is me updating on the evidence/observation. And so we are back to Type I.
It is as if, recognizing that you can’t argue for something from observation, you are trying to find the support from outside of observation, but it doesn’t really work in this case. What would you base the argument on, if everything, including your thoughts and intuitions, is either based on observation or isn’t based on anything at all?
I really appreciate you showing the problems with Type 1 arguments, but what I don’t understand is how Type 2 arguments can seem convincing to you.
Type 2 arguments fully rely on priors, which is what you are supposed to have before any observations, in this case, before anything that happened to you in this life. The first problem is that these true priors are unchangeable, because they already existed on the first second of your life. But more importantly, I feel that arguing what the priors should be is the complete misuse of the concept. The whole point of Bayesian reasoning is that it eventually converges, regardless of the priors, and without observations you cannot possibly prefer one prior to another. If I “change my priors” after reading this post, these are not true priors anymore—it is me updating on the evidence/observation. And so we are back to Type I.
It is as if, recognizing that you can’t argue for something from observation, you are trying to find the support from outside of observation, but it doesn’t really work in this case. What would you base the argument on, if everything, including your thoughts and intuitions, is either based on observation or isn’t based on anything at all?