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> Why do you think this matters? I said that in passing, maybe I should have omitted it - the main point with the priors is that the respondents didn't know th
by fenomas 2y ago
> Why do you think this matters?
I said that in passing, maybe I should have omitted it - the main point with the priors is that the respondents didn't know them. It's normal for a study to compare N things to a control by testing N+1 similarly-sized groups, because subjects are not biased by priors they don't know about.
> So do you think their paper is correctly titled?
I didn't say anything about that, and have no strong opinion. (I'm not here to defend every aspect of the paper!)
- tripletao 2y agoCan you clarify what you think the paper says that's correct? If you're unwilling to provide an opinion on the paper's literal headline claim, then I don't know what we're discussing here. > because subjects are not biased by priors they don't know about It feels like you want the subjects to be "unbiased", "without any prior"? That concept doesn't exist, though. If no prior is supplied, then the subjects will make their best guess based on general past experience; but that's still a prior, just an idiosyncratic personal one. Very few people would put numbers to the forest vs. supermarket mushroom, but it's the same general thought process. If that prior matches the actual distribution, then good. If the actual distribution contains more machines than expected, then the interrogator is more likely to misjudge a machine as a human. By analogy, if I think mistakenly that a mushroom came from a supermarket but it actually came from a forest, then I'm more likely to misjudge it as non-poisonous. The binary choice version makes it obvious that the prior is 50%, and forces the interrogator to respect that. The paper's version has sent us into this epistemological tarpit, which seems strictly worse to me.