A flat prior is what you believe before you know anything: equal weight on every possibility, no assumptions sneaking in through the back door.
It is an honest starting point, and a slightly embarrassing one, because it requires admitting that you do not yet know what you think.
That is roughly where I am.
For most of my life, I have been all over the place: geographically, professionally, intellectually. I like things that can be measured, tested, and argued with, and I tend to distrust explanations that rely too heavily on a good story. For a long time, I assumed that meant my interests belonged in mathematics and the natural sciences.
Unfortunately, the questions I cannot seem to put down are mostly about people.
Why do some communities flourish while others dissolve? Why do some people become obsessed with improvement while others plateau? How does a small group create an outsized impact? Why do certain ideas spread while others disappear? What does it actually mean for a person, organization, or system to create value?
I don’t know.
So I am starting over academically in mathematics, partly because I trust numbers more than I trust good narratives. Including my own.
This site is where I work through those questions in public: reading notes, half-built projects, papers I tried to replicate, proofs I am trying to understand, bits of analysis, and a running record of things I have changed my mind about.
The goal is not to look impressive or arrive at a Theory of Things. It is to avoid deciding what my intellectual project is before I have done the work.
Maybe these questions are connected. Maybe I only want them to be. Maybe the most interesting parts of human life resist quantification altogether.
For now, all of those possibilities get equal weight.
If a question keeps bothering me, it will probably end up here.