This seems extremely pertinent for LW: a paper by Andrew Gelman and Cosma Shalizi. Abstract:
A substantial school in the philosophy of science identifies Bayesian inference with inductive inference and even rationality as such, and seems to be strengthened by the rise and practical success of Bayesian statistics. We argue that the most successful forms of Bayesian statistics do not actually support that particular philosophy but rather accord much better with sophisticated forms of hypothetico-deductivism. We examine the actual role played by prior distributions in Bayesian models, and the crucial aspects of model checking and model revision, which fall outside the scope of Bayesian confirmation theory. We draw on the literature on the consistency of Bayesian updating and also on our experience of applied work in social science.
I'm still reading it so I don't have anything to say about it, and I'm not very statistics-savvy so I doubt I'll have much to say about it after I read it, but I thought others here would find it an interesting read.
I stole this from a post by mjgeddes over in the OB open thread for July (Aside: mjgeddes, why all the hate? Where's the love, brotha?)
I'm not expert enough to interpret.
But I know Shalizi is skeptical of Bayesians and some of his blog posts seem so directly targeted at the LessWrong point of view that I almost suspect he's read this stuff. Getting in contact with him would be a coup.
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