SarahC comments on So You Think You're a Bayesian? The Natural Mode of Probabilistic Reasoning - Less Wrong

48 Post author: Matt_Simpson 14 July 2010 04:51PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 14 July 2010 09:00:51PM 3 points [-]

This is very interesting. Thanks!

When I heard about Bayesian and Frequentist, I thought Bayesianism made more intuitive sense because I was used to working with random variables. (It's the intuition of someone more used to chalkboards than lab coats.)

I wonder if people appear to be "natural frequentists" because we are better at thinking "how many" than "how likely." "How likely" is a prediction about the future; and it's easy to think that your wishes and hopes can influence the future.

Maybe what we're really bad at is internalizing the Ergodic Theorem -- understanding that if something happens a low percentage of the time, then it's unlikely to happen.