>There's good reason to believe tons of sociological theories. The problem is figuring out whether the pro or con factors win out, and figuring out if you've na

>There's good reason to believe tons of sociological theories. The problem is figuring out whether the pro or con factors win out, and figuring out if you've nailed down every single factor. Being simple, clear, and well-reasoned in the realm of people's behavior is not enough to give you very good accuracy. This is all argument in favor of a weak prior, not to ignore the existence and utility of a prior completely. Ideally, you have solid (relevant) empirical data that informs your prior but if you're seriously evaluating "advice" then I'd venture to say that you're probably lacking such data. Imo, the critique to be had of what I said above is that there's no clear general way to form good priors and thus the advice is somewhat empty. But that's just life -- there's no magic bullet algorithm to discover truth and one has to use his/her brain to do the best they can. Many who seem to well in this area tend to like the Bayesian framing of beliefs, and personally I've found it useful to guide my own thinking as well.