Why We Should All Think Like Bayes
Bayes’ Rule is a rule for determining the probability of an event given prior knowledge, and observations related to the event. It’s commonly used in many probabilistic algorithms, such as Bayesian inference, and structures such as a Bayesian network. Bayes’ rule also plays a really important role in social networks, and some argue we should use it even more. Despite the namesake, Bayesian networks are not a good representation of social networks as they are acyclic, but instead Bayes’ rule can be applied to a standard social network.
We can take advantage of Bayes’ rule in a social network by using it when nodes communicate to each other. Each person (node) has a set of beliefs about the world already, and when they communicate with other people and take in new information about they world, typically they don’t simply throw out their prior knowledge and replace it with the new knowledge. A person usually either rejects the incoming knowledge, or blends parts of it into their prior beliefs. This is a social example of Bayes’ rule. Their previous beliefs (prior) are changed according to the new information to become their new beliefs (posterior), but their new beliefs are not the same as what the new information says, it heavily takes into account their prior beliefs. This is an example of Bayesian inference, and plays a large role in how we process information taken in from social networks.
Additionally, some people such as author Julia Galef argue that while we do subconsciously use Bayes’ rule when taking in information, we don’t use it well. And that we should use it in a more conscious manner to decide how much of an affect new information will change our current beliefs, and almost never have new information completely override your beliefs. I agree that taking a more conscious approach would be a good way to think, and if adopted on a large scale, could be an affective way of processing the vast amounts of mis- and dis-information present in our social networks today.
References:
https://towardsdatascience.com/what-is-bayesian-inference-4eda9f9e20a6
The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef