Your memory eventually drives confidence in each hypothesis to 1 or 0
post by Crazy philosopher (commissar Yarrick) · 2024-10-28T09:00:27.084Z · LW · GW · 1 commentsContents
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Our memory tends to contain less and less information. We forget certain things, and our memory about others become simplified, and a complex article boils down to “X is bad, Y is good, try to do better".
One unexpected consequence of this is how it impacts our sense of probability: to describe the probability binary, it only requires 1 bit of information, but to describe the probability as a percentage, you need a lot more bits!
Because of this, a person's confidence in the most likely hypothesis in his opinion tends to 1 over time, and the probability of all other hypotheses that he had time to think about tends to 0. Every time he remembers a hypothesis, a person will less and less often remember the nuance that “the probability of hypothesis A = X”, he will simply remember “And this is the truth (that mean the probability of A = 100%)”.
Every time you remember a hypothesis, this effect contributes. Therefore, just after thinking about a hypotheses, you should write down your confidence. Also, you should to remember this bias to notice it, when you use a hypothesis you thought a lot of time ago.
PS: memory is bad, writing is good, try to do better.
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comment by Rafael Harth (sil-ver) · 2024-10-28T09:38:54.705Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Feels empirically true. I remember cases where I thought about a memory and was initially uncertain about some aspect of it, but then when I think about it later it feels either true or false in my memory, so I have to be like, "well no, I know that I was 50/50 on this when the memory was more recent, so that's what my probability should be now, even though it doesn't feel like it anymore".
Seems like the fact that I put about a 50% probability on the thing survived (easy/clear enough to remember), but the reasons did not, so the probability no longer feels accurate.