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lessdazed comments on A History of Bayes' Theorem - Less Wrong
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I shared the link to this post on an IRC channel populated by a number of people, but mostly by mathematically inclined CS majors. It provoked a bunch of discussion about the way frequentism/bayesianism is generally discussed on LW. Here are a few snippets from the conversation (nicknames left out except my own, less relevant lines have been edited out):
11:03 < Person A> For fucks sake "And so at age 62, Laplace — the world's first Bayesian — converted to frequentism, which he used for the remaining 16 years of his life."
11:04 <@Guy B> well he believed that the results were the same
11:04 <@Guy B> counterexamples were invented only later
11:05 < Person A> Guy B: Still, I just hate the way that lesswrong talks about "bayesians" and "frequentists"
11:05 <@Guy B> Person A: oh, I misinterpreted you
11:06 < Person A> Every time yudkowsky writes "The Way of Bayes" i get a sudden urge to throw my laptop out of the window.
11:08 < Person A> Yudkowsky is a really good popular writer, but I hate the way he tries to create strange conflicts even where they don't exist.
11:10 <@Xuenay> I guess I should point out that the article in question wasn't written by Yudkowsky :P
11:10 <@Dude C> Xuenay: it was posted on lesswrong
11:11 <@Dude C> so obv we will talk about Yudkowski
11:13 <@Dude C> it's just htat there is no conflict, there are just several ways to do that.
11:13 <@Dude C> several models
11:16 <@Dude C> uh, several modes
11:17 <@Dude C> or I guess several schools. w/e.
11:17 <@Entity D> it's like this stupid philosophical conflict over two mathematically valid ways of doing statistical inference, a conflict some people seem to take all too seriously
11:17 <@Guy B> IME self-described bayesians are always going on about this "conflict"
11:17 <@Guy B> while most people just concentrate on science
11:18 <@Entity D> Guy B: exactly
11:18 <@Dude C> and use appropriate methods where they are appropriate
Summing up, the general consensus on the channel is that the whole frequentist/bayesian conflict gets seriously and annoyingly exaggarated on LW, and that most people doing science are happy to use either methodology if that suits the task at hand. Those who really do care and could reasonably be described as 'frequentist' or 'bayesian' are really a small minority, and LW's way of constantly bringing it up is just something that's used to make the posters feel smugly superior to "those clueless frequentists". This consensus has persisted over an extended time, and has contributed to LW suffering from a lack of credibility in the eyes of many of the channel regulars.
Does anybody better versed in the debate have a comment?
Though I was not addressed by that, here goes anyway:
That people are happy doing whatever works doesn't make them part Bayesian and part Frequentist in LW's meaning any more than eating some vegetables and some meat makes one part vegetarian and part carnivore. Omnivores are not insiders among vegetarians or carnivores.
Bayesians - those who really do care, as you put it - believe something like "learning works to the extent it models Bayesian updating". When omnistatisticians decide to use a set of tools they customize for the situation, and make the result look clean and right and not silly and even extrapolatable and predictive, etc., and this gets a result better than formal Bayesian analysis or any other analysis, Bayesians believe that the thing that modeled Bayesian updating happened within the statisticians' own minds - their models are not at all simple, because the statistician is part of the model. Consequently, any non-Bayesian model is almost by definition poorly understood.
This is my impression of the collective LW belief, that impression is of course open to further revision.
LW has contributed to the confusion tremendously by simplistically using only two terms. Just as from the vegetarian perspective, omnivores and carnivores may be lumped into a crude "meat-eater" outgroup, from the philosophical position people on LW often take "don't know, don't care" and "principled frequentist" are lumped together into one outgroup.
People will not respect the opinions of those they believe don't understand the situation, and this scene has repeatedly occurred - posters on LW convince many that they do not understand people's beliefs, so of course the analysis and lessons are poorly received.