Iteration Dogma
From Rest of What I Know
The Iteration Dogma is the belief that adapting to evidence is far superior to picking the right prior. It is commonly employed in the startup-mindset of searching for Product-market fit where it is considered boringly true.
Examples
- Searching for product-market fit is the primary example.
- Bayesian updating under prior-support, distinguishability of hypotheses (particularly truth from alternatives in the KL divergence sense)
- Popper-style empirical science with falsifiable conjectures formed which are iteratively refined through targeted refutation
Where It Does Not Work
The iteration dogma is a bad idea to employ in fields where global convergence are not possible. e.g. finding the roots of a polynomial employing Newton-Raphson will result in slow convergence if in the wrong place.
