Alejandro1 comments on Open Thread, October 16-31, 2012 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: OpenThreadGuy 16 October 2012 10:43PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (271)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Alejandro1 09 November 2012 07:06:36AM 0 points [-]

The classical way of explaining the difference is through the example of a coin that you know is biased, but you don't know whether heads or tails is favored and by how much. What is the probability that the next toss will be heads?

Supposedly, a frequentist would say that there is an objective answer, given by the bias of the coin which also equals the proportion of heads in a long run. You just don't know what it is, the only thing you know is that it is not 1/2. A Bayesian would say by contrast that since you have no information to favor one side over the other, the probability (degree of belief) you have to assign at this point is 1/2.

This only explains the question of Frequentism vs Bayesianism as philosophical interpretations of "what probability is". The practical issue of Frequentism vs Bayesianism as concrete statistical methods is often tangled with this one in discussions, but it is really a separate matter.