The Masochistic Prior

In Bayesian statistics there’s the concept of the Uniform Prior - in the absence of evidence, assume all options are equally likely to be true. I often find myself using an alternative strategy, which I’ll dub “the masochistic prior” - in the absence of evidence, whichever option is most painful to believe is the best reflection of reality.This can manifest in mundane ways. When I was a struggling university student, blaming ancient professors with thick accents would have been an easy excuse. The true explanation - that I was inattentive & needed to get my act together - was much more difficult to accept. The principle generalizes to life’s harder moments too. Like all of us eventually must, I’ve had to grapple with the death and illness of loved ones. It’s easy to appeal to some divine authority in theses moments. And yet, even when we make these appeals, we still cry and mourn over loss. I think at a deep level, we suspect a much harsher truth. The people we love aren’t in a better place. They are not, and that’s it.Joe Carlsmith defines Deep Atheism as a kind of fundamental mistrust of nature [1], a philosophical disposition that refuses to look away from the horrors of the world, even if those horrors are manifest in the most fundamental aspects of our existence. It is the kind of atheism that demands we look at life the way it is, without an obligation to wrap those truths in comforting platitudes or lies, no matter how terrible that truth might be. It is also the type of atheism that demands we get our act together and start fixing the problem.Over 100 billion humans have lived throughout history and during that time over 90 billion have died. Every single one of those lives have been completely destroyed, the patterns composing them irreversibly reduced to random noise. And save for a vanishingly small fraction, every single one of those deaths have been non-consensual, something forced upon them by a cruel, unthinking, and uncaring universe that’s entirely