Dave_D comments on Beautiful Probability - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 January 2008 07:19AM

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

Comments (109)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Dave_D 14 January 2008 09:10:53PM 1 point [-]

I admit that I am still not quite sure what a "Bayesian" is as opposed to and "Old style" statistician (though I am very familiar with Bayes theorem, prior probabilities, likelihood ratios, etc).

That being said, the example at the beginning of the post is a great example of "after the fact" reasoning. If researcher number #2 had required 1,000 trials, then you could say that our interpretation of his results are the same as, say, "researcher #3" who set out to have 1,000 trials no matter how many cures were observed. Since (I would imagine) we would all agree that the conclusion of researcher #3's results are the same (if not stronger) than researcher #1's, than one must come to the conclusion that the interpretation of researcher #1's results are the same as researcher #2's, REGARDLESS of how many trial is takes researcher #2 to get his desired results. And (again, I *think*) we can all agree that just isn't the case.

I would also like to second Elver's comment above; it is another example of "after the fact" reasoning.

Sort of like shooting, and declaring whatever you hit to be your target.