The Skeptic, the Bayesian, Empiricism and Claims to Know:

Hypotheses non fingo-Sir Isaac Newton. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.-David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. The eighth virtue is humility-Eliezer Yudkowsky. A note: I may remake this a longer multi-part essay at some point, but I think starting here would be a good place since I see emphasis on this kind of knowledge overmuchin related communities.A Telling of Priors, Perspectives and Quantum Worlds:Let’s imagine a scenario to explore how one considers priors: I approach a friend (Al) with a coin sitting on my thumb, heads up, I flip the coin and cover it before they see. I then ask Al “heads or tails?” They call heads, to which I ask “how confident are you in your prediction?” Al answers, “oh, I’d say about 51%, I know that fair coins tend to land on the side facing up around 51% of time since I have no reason to think this coin is any different, I would make the same estimation.” Another friend (Bri) walks past, they see I am covering my hand but have no knowledge of the coin flip or what might be under there. I ask Bri, “what is under my hand?” They guess, “a coin, tails side up.” Asked how confident they are, Bri proclaims: “I am certain, I guess I’d put the odds at 99%, I don’t know why I just have a strong gut feeling about it.”I think most readers will rationally agree that Al is making a more reasonable prediction, he is deriving a prior estimate by examining what information he has and making inferences from empirical data accessible to him as to the likeliest outcome. From my own empirical training, I would consider this the ‘correct’ approach. Bri, meanwhile, has insufficient information to draw any empirical prior probabilities. What does she do instead? Like a good Bayesian, she just guesses. Now, what is the true prior probability? If we step back as an outside observer, it is either heads or tails, it is already determined, there is nothing probabilistic going on, however, the information available to Al gave