Confirmation bias as a misfire of normal Bayesian reasoning

2023-02-18

Figure 1. Excerpt from website

A brief, but interesting argument that confirmation bias is just an example of applying an informative prior. This is an argument that has been made before and one that I have been thinking about a lot. There’s a lot more that could be said about this.

The author, Scott Alexander, makes several other observations using informative Bayesian priors as conceptual arguments, such as Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality.

Scott Alexander. Confirmation bias as a misfire of normal Bayesian reasoning. Slate Star Codex blog, 2020-02-12. Available in html format.