Borrowed Priors
Many beliefs begin as social inheritances rather than conclusions: family, school, media, religion, and culture supply the starting assumptions from which later evidence is judged.
A conviction you experience as your own may have been installed before you ever examined it—first spoken by a parent, repeated at school, and reinforced by the media or religion.
E1The prior arrives before the proof
You do not meet every question empty-handed. Other people and institutions supply priors: initial expectations about what is true, normal, dangerous, or desirable. Those expectations then become the baseline against which new information is interpreted. The borrowing is easy to miss because the source fades while the belief remains; what began as received testimony eventually feels like direct knowledge. This also helps explain believing is seeing: inherited expectations can influence which evidence looks credible enough to notice or accept.
E1Inherited does not mean mistaken
A belief’s social origin tells you how it reached you, not whether it is false. Families, teachers, traditions, and authorities can transmit hard-won knowledge as well as error. The relevant test is whether the belief survives contact with evidence—not whether you discovered it unaided.
Trace one conviction upstream
Choose one belief you state with confidence and write down where you first encountered it: family, school, peers, culture, media, religion, or another authority. Then separate the reason you inherited it from the evidence you would use to defend it now. If you cannot name any independent evidence, treat it as a starting hypothesis rather than a settled conclusion.
E1Episodes that teach this
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From Instinct to Insight - How Do We Really Decide? Bayesian Thinking - Future IQ
· explained at 4:54
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"You might get prior from your family and culture... from your school... from the media... religion is another source."