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Craig_Heldreth 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?
In my laboratory statistics manual from college (the first edition of this book) the only statistics were frequentist, and Jaynes was considered a statistical outlier in my first year of graduate school. His results were respected, but the consensus was that he got them in spite of his unorthodox reduction method, not because of it.
In my narrow field (reflection seismology) two of the leaders explicitly addressed this question in a (surprisingly to me little-read and seldom-referenced) paper: To Bayes or not to Bayes. Their conclusion: they prefer their problems neat enough to not require the often-indispensable Bayes method.
It is a debate I prefer to avoid unless it is required. The direction of progress is unambiguous but it seems to me a classic example of a Kuhn paradigm shift where a bunch of old guys have to die before we can proceed amicably.
A very small minority of people hate Bayesian data reduction. A very small minority of people hate frequentist data reduction. The vast majority of people do not care very much unless the extremists are loudly debating and drowning out all other topics.
Another graduate student, I have in general heard a similar opinions from many professors through undergrad and grad school. Never disdan for bays but often something along the lines of "I am not so sure about that" or "I never really grasped the concept/need for bayes." The statistics books that have been required for classes, in my opinion durring the class, used a slightly negative tone while discussing bayes and 'subjective probability.'