SilasBarta comments on Case study: abuse of frequentist statistics - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Cyan 21 February 2010 06:35AM

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Comment author: SilasBarta 22 February 2010 12:51:23AM 4 points [-]

Now that I understand the situation better, I thought I'd share this interesting coincidence.

Last Friday, I was talking my friend's brother, a PhD candidate in electrical engineering (by all I could tell, a very intelligent man), who had to teach a statistics class to grad students in education. He told what it was like to teach one of their 8-hour lessons, where he had to explain many of the things in the frequentist toolbox.

I told him about my interest in information theory and Bayesian statistics and asked if the course covers any of that. While he showed some familiarity with the term "Bayesian", he hadn't heard of any of the related concepts like likelihood ratios and mutual information (!!!).

Bad sign.