This is part of my commitments to:
Transparency
see Alphaville
cultivating and communicating self knowledge
WIP: Work in Progress/Public
Priors—and their updating—are crucial to Bayesian statistics.
“Update your priors” became a rallying cry of Self-identifying Rationalist communities in the early 21st Century.
You can think of Priors as:
1. Preconceived Notions: Think of priors as your "starting points" or "preconceived notions." They're the beliefs, experiences, or assumptions that you bring to the table before you start learning something new.
2. Mental Filters: Priors act like mental filters that shape how you perceive and interpret information. They can influence your judgments and decisions.
3. Building Blocks: Priors are the building blocks of your knowledge and understanding. They help you make connections between different pieces of information.
Along with updating, it helps to:
State them: enunciate what you mean—ahead of time. Or at least as early as feasible
Date them: provide the time context where feasible. This can include both publish (e.g. social media & blog posts) and private (journaling, conversations…)
Experiences: of relevance, that resonate
provenance of ideas: personal intellectual history
Stefan’s WIP “Me Manual” Like SUP's commitment to transparency and self-knowledge, this guide provides a window into personal patterns and ways of thinking. Where SUP focuses on stating and updating beliefs, the Me Manual captures how these beliefs manifest in working relationships and natural tendencies.
‣ A collection of tools and approaches for growing and tending to digital knowledge. This connects to SUP by providing practical ways to implement the "stating and updating" of knowledge over time, particularly through tools that enable bi-directional linking and knowledge visualization.