I feel sort of weird about the ‘trapped prior’ point, because I think it’s more reasonably pointed at academic fields than individual people? Like, it is not that surprising for an academic field to have ‘core beliefs’ that everyone who disagrees with is ‘not in the field’, given the forces that people in the field can exert on each other. One fun example of this is PhilGoetz’s post Too Good To Be True, wherein he points to a claim that out of 60 studies studying vaccines and autism, none of them find any link, and then observes that by standard frequentist analysis, ~3 of them should have been significant at the p=0.05 level, and getting none of them significant at that level is pretty unlikely without suppression. And it’s obvious why there would be suppression; no one wants to give ammunition to the enemy.
Separately, it feels like it doesn’t really distinguish ‘justified priors’ from ‘unjustified priors’. If you tell me that a psychology experiment found evidence of psychic effects, I will basically just not believe it. But hopefully if you transported my mind to a universe where psychics were real, I would believe the corresponding studies in those universes—because I had seen things like dowsing being used by oil companies in that universe. This is, from the perspective of a new study, ‘my prior’, but that prior is built out of all of the evidence that I’ve seen before. It’s kind of fair to call my position on psychics a “trapped prior” but it feels more fair to call it “a mountain of evidence”.
I feel sort of weird about the ‘trapped prior’ point, because I think it’s more reasonably pointed at academic fields than individual people? Like, it is not that surprising for an academic field to have ‘core beliefs’ that everyone who disagrees with is ‘not in the field’, given the forces that people in the field can exert on each other. One fun example of this is PhilGoetz’s post Too Good To Be True, wherein he points to a claim that out of 60 studies studying vaccines and autism, none of them find any link, and then observes that by standard frequentist analysis, ~3 of them should have been significant at the p=0.05 level, and getting none of them significant at that level is pretty unlikely without suppression. And it’s obvious why there would be suppression; no one wants to give ammunition to the enemy.
Separately, it feels like it doesn’t really distinguish ‘justified priors’ from ‘unjustified priors’. If you tell me that a psychology experiment found evidence of psychic effects, I will basically just not believe it. But hopefully if you transported my mind to a universe where psychics were real, I would believe the corresponding studies in those universes—because I had seen things like dowsing being used by oil companies in that universe. This is, from the perspective of a new study, ‘my prior’, but that prior is built out of all of the evidence that I’ve seen before. It’s kind of fair to call my position on psychics a “trapped prior” but it feels more fair to call it “a mountain of evidence”.