Blueberry comments on What is Bayesianism? - Less Wrong

81 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 26 February 2010 07:43AM

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Comment author: byrnema 27 February 2010 01:15:43AM *  2 points [-]

The frequentist can account for the biased toss and determinism, in various ways.

My preferred reply would be that the 50/50 is a property of the symmetry of the coin. (Of course, it's a property of an idealized coin. Heck, a real coin can land balanced on its edge.) If someone tosses the coin in a way that biases the coin, she has actually broken the symmetry in some way with her initial conditions. In particular, the tosser must begin with the knowledge of which way she is holding the coin -- if she doesn't know, she can't bias the outcome of the coin.

I understand that Bayesian's don't tend to abstract things to their idealized forms ... I wonder to what extent Frequentism does this necessarily. (What is the relationship between Frequentism and Platonism?)

Comment author: Blueberry 27 February 2010 08:44:42AM 4 points [-]

What is the relationship between Frequentism and Platonism?

To quote from Gelman's rejoinder that Phil Goetz mentioned,

In a nutshell: Bayesian statistics is about making probability statements, frequentist statistics is about evaluating probability statements.

So, speaking very loosely, Bayesianism is to science, inductive logic, and Aristotelianism as frequentism is to math, deductive logic, and Platonism. That is, Bayesianism is synthesis; frequentism is analysis.

Comment author: byrnema 27 February 2010 01:42:35PM 1 point [-]

Interesting! That makes a lot of sense to me, because I had already made connections between science and Aristotelianism, pure math and Platonism.