FutureIQ

From Instinct to Insight - How Do We Really Decide? Bayesian Thinking - Future IQ

7,456 views • Apr 11, 2025
Open in YouTube

Concepts in this episode

Browse all concepts ›
  1. Bayesian Inference mental-model

    A conclusion depends not only on the evidence in front of you, but also on the belief you brought to it. Rational updating combines both, changing confidence only as much as the new evidence warrants.

  2. Priors mental-model

    A prior is the belief already in place before current evidence arrives; sound judgment depends on noticing that starting point and letting evidence move it by an appropriate amount.

  3. Bayesian Updating mechanism

    Bayesian updating treats belief as a running estimate: combine your current confidence with each new observation, then carry the revised belief into the next judgment.

  4. Borrowed Priors mechanism

    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.

  5. Trapped Prior mechanism

    A trapped prior is a belief that has become resistant to correction: it filters, dismisses, or reinterprets incoming evidence so that the belief itself never has to change.

  6. Confirmation Bias mechanism

    Confirmation bias lets prior belief judge the evidence meant to test it: attention preserves supporting hits, interpretation excuses conflicting misses, and memory turns the resulting imbalance into apparent proof.

  7. Source Credibility as Evidence principle

    Evidence is weighted not only by what is claimed, but by who supplies it. A source with a strong track record can make new information powerful enough to overcome your prior belief.

  8. Relationship Priors mental-model

    In relationships, ambiguous behavior is filtered through accumulated expectations. The same missed action can become evidence of neglect or an ordinary consequence of a busy day, depending on the prior history of trust.

Description

Do you really believe in facts? Or are you just believing what you want to believe? In this episode, we talk about something called Bayesian Updating – a fancy way of saying how your brain mixes your past beliefs (priors) with new evidence to make decisions. But here’s the twist: your priors (like what your family, school, or culture told you) can change how you see the evidence! We use a fun example with an aptitude test and talk about how your bias can sneak in, even if you think you're being smart. Learn why people sometimes ignore good data, how your brain builds beliefs, and why you should always check if your thinking is based on facts or old stories. This episode connects to lots of cool Future IQ topics like bad decisions, groupthink, preference falsification, and costly signaling. So if you understand this, the rest will make WAY more sense! More Videos For You: Believing is Seeing: https://youtu.be/bxx-My8J_kM You are in a Cult: https://youtu.be/eEfmHpstjSg Showing Off Is Important: https://youtu.be/0YEBK7eR3Ek Your Unpopular Opinion Is Popular: https://youtu.be/Pwh90BkWRt8 Why We Make Bad Decisions: https://youtu.be/CBIm7TqXQ4w Rohit Sharma Lost 12 tosses in a row - Fixed or Coincidence?: https://youtu.be/EY4WCmIJLcY Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter: @ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra @shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference : Wikipedia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZGCoVF3YvM : 3blue1brown on Bayesian Theorem https://lesswrong.com : community for understanding priors and helping reduce your biases https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bJ2haLkcGeLtTWaD5/welcome-to-lesswrong: Intro to LessWrong https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/towards-a-bayesian-theory-of-willpower: Theory that willpower can be explained using bayesian updating 00:00 True Future IQ Style 00:11 Are You An Evidence Based Person? 01:49 Evidence Isn't Evidence?! 03:15 Let's Get Deep Into This 05:35 Beliefs & Priors 06:21 How Does Prior Affect Evidence? 08:04 Where Do These Bias Begin? 10:11 Is All Of Life Bayesian Updating? 13:09 In Professional Life? 13:53 In Social Life? 14:13 In Politics? 14:55 Why Is This Important? 16:23 Science Of Incorrect Decisions #futureiq

Transcript

Subscriber transcript

Subscribe to @TheFutureIQ, then sign in with Google to unlock full transcripts and transcript search.