Predicting the Future with Bayes' Theorem
Farnam Street (Shane Parrish), after Thomas Bayes · 2022
"Good judgment under uncertainty means continuously updating your probability estimates as new evidence arrives, weighting that new evidence against what you already knew (your 'priors') rather than either ignoring new evidence or overreacting to it as if nothing else mattered."
Bayesian updating means treating your existing beliefs ('priors') as probabilities rather than fixed facts, then adjusting those probabilities up or down whenever new evidence arrives, in proportion to how strong that evidence actually is — rather than either dismissing the new evidence entirely or discarding your prior knowledge and starting over as if the new data were the only information that mattered.
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The Map is Not the Territory
"Our mental models of reality are reductions. When the model contradicts reality, the model is wrong, not reality."