What I mean to imply by “I don’t even have a slight preference to either direction” is not that I assume a 50% prior probability to each side; it’s that I don’t assume a prior probability. Assuming one would be uninformative noise, since I don’t know enough about it to have an opinion—and it would be both harmful and irresponsible. Harmful since it would commit me to a prior for something that I don’t want to have any priors about—once I write down a percentage, I’ve committed to that percentage, and I’ll be more likely to update based on it, even though it has next to nothing behind it and I don’t want to go anywhere near it—and irresponsible because, if I do it in public, it’ll give other people something to update on, even though it’s little better than getting a percentage out of a random number generator.
I’m deliberately ignoring evidence that could be used to update because I don’t think that I’m obligated to have an opinion on literally everything in the world. My time is better spent elsewhere. And I’m deliberately ignoring the non-trivial priors I would base a probability estimate on if I ended up in an absurd counterfactual world where I absolutely had to give one because they’re a product of the environment in which I was raised, they’re not old enough to be justified in the Burkean sense, and I don’t think that the processes by which those environmental opinions are formed have anything more than the most tenuous connection to the actual truth, whatever it is.
What’s your opinion on the situation in Mali?
What I mean to imply by “I don’t even have a slight preference to either direction” is not that I assume a 50% prior probability to each side; it’s that I don’t assume a prior probability. Assuming one would be uninformative noise, since I don’t know enough about it to have an opinion—and it would be both harmful and irresponsible. Harmful since it would commit me to a prior for something that I don’t want to have any priors about—once I write down a percentage, I’ve committed to that percentage, and I’ll be more likely to update based on it, even though it has next to nothing behind it and I don’t want to go anywhere near it—and irresponsible because, if I do it in public, it’ll give other people something to update on, even though it’s little better than getting a percentage out of a random number generator.
I’m deliberately ignoring evidence that could be used to update because I don’t think that I’m obligated to have an opinion on literally everything in the world. My time is better spent elsewhere. And I’m deliberately ignoring the non-trivial priors I would base a probability estimate on if I ended up in an absurd counterfactual world where I absolutely had to give one because they’re a product of the environment in which I was raised, they’re not old enough to be justified in the Burkean sense, and I don’t think that the processes by which those environmental opinions are formed have anything more than the most tenuous connection to the actual truth, whatever it is.
Background reading: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#mu