jsteinhardt comments on A Fervent Defense of Frequentist Statistics - Less Wrong

43 Post author: jsteinhardt 18 February 2014 08:08PM

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Comment author: jsteinhardt 20 February 2014 04:44:05AM 0 points [-]

One of the criticisms I raised is that merely being able to point to all the local optima is not a particularly impressive property of an epistemological theory. Many of those local optima will be horrible! (My criticism of VNM is essentially the same.)

Many frequentist methods, such as minimax, also provide local optima, but they provide local optima which actually have certain nice properties. And minimax provides a complete decision rule, not just a probability distribution, so it plugs directly into actions.