That's very cool. Is the idea of agents with limited resources updating on questions that are less fine-grained than the ones that their incoming evidence would allow them to answer already out there in the literature other places? Because even independent of the application to polarization, that's super interesting.
Thanks for writing this, very cool model! I'd be interested in seeing how much this changes if you extend the model to include others' beliefs as evidence (as you mention when talking about whether disagreements persist). In particular, it seems natural to think that Polder's fans and critics would find it at least a little useful to talk to each other -- since they're tracking different things -- and so even if they think the other is biased, presumably this might slow polarisation?
Thanks for writing this. As a layman, I think of Bayesian epistemology as an idealized, rational model of updating beliefs on the face of new evidence. An ideal that no one can live up to but there's some value in trying. So it's not that surprising to see that we run into problems when we relax that "idealized, rational" bit by making our questions conditional on the evidence. I'd also expect to see empirical evidence for this in the behavioral science literature (humans are gonna bias). But not sure how that would affect the usefulness of bayesian epistemology as an idealized model of human behavior (a claim on how we ought to update). It was never intended to be a good predictor of human action anyways (I think? Layman disclaimer.).
Excellent post. Would like to see it applied to law, e.g. "holdout" jurors. For my part, I tried to create a "simple" Bayesian model of law cases here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.07854
That's very cool. Is the idea of agents with limited resources updating on questions that are less fine-grained than the ones that their incoming evidence would allow them to answer already out there in the literature other places? Because even independent of the application to polarization, that's super interesting.
Thanks for writing this, very cool model! I'd be interested in seeing how much this changes if you extend the model to include others' beliefs as evidence (as you mention when talking about whether disagreements persist). In particular, it seems natural to think that Polder's fans and critics would find it at least a little useful to talk to each other -- since they're tracking different things -- and so even if they think the other is biased, presumably this might slow polarisation?
Excited to see your future work on this!
Thanks for writing this. As a layman, I think of Bayesian epistemology as an idealized, rational model of updating beliefs on the face of new evidence. An ideal that no one can live up to but there's some value in trying. So it's not that surprising to see that we run into problems when we relax that "idealized, rational" bit by making our questions conditional on the evidence. I'd also expect to see empirical evidence for this in the behavioral science literature (humans are gonna bias). But not sure how that would affect the usefulness of bayesian epistemology as an idealized model of human behavior (a claim on how we ought to update). It was never intended to be a good predictor of human action anyways (I think? Layman disclaimer.).
Great piece!
Excellent post. Would like to see it applied to law, e.g. "holdout" jurors. For my part, I tried to create a "simple" Bayesian model of law cases here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.07854