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It is not the case that Treating prior experience as lexically superior to testimonial evidence is a dogmatic asymmetry incompatible with Bayesian norms of rational belief updating.
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Reasons For
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Reason for
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1.
Direct experience provides immediate sensory access to facts; testimony requires trusting intermediaries, introducing systematic vulnerabilities.
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2.
Prior experience calibrates one's ability to evaluate testimony reliability itself—uneducated priors make Bayesian updating worse, not better.
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3.
Some domains (mathematics, distant history) offer no direct experience; asymmetric weighting protects against testimony in domains where we're epistemically helpless.
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Reasons Against
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Reason against
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1.
Bayesian rationality requires updating beliefs proportionally to evidence strength, not source type. Testimony and experience are both evidence.
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2.
Privileging prior experience assumes it's inherently more reliable, but testimony from experts often outperforms individual experience in accuracy.
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3.
Lexical prioritization of experience prevents rational incorporation of testimony that should shift credence given its evidential weight.
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