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ChristianKl comments on XKCD - Frequentist vs. Bayesians - Less Wrong Discussion

18 Post author: brilee 09 November 2012 05:25AM

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Comment author: JonathanLivengood 09 November 2012 08:19:50AM 10 points [-]

Fair? No. Funny? Yes!

The main thing that jumps out at me is that the strip plays on a caricature of frequentists as unable or unwilling to use background information. (Yes, the strip also caricatures Bayesians as ultimately concerned with betting, which isn't always true either, but the frequentist is clearly the butt of the joke.) Anyway, Deborah Mayo has been picking on the misconception about frequentists for a while now: see here and here, for examples. I read Mayo as saying, roughly, that of course frequentists make use of background information, they just don't do it by writing down precise numbers that are supposed to represent either their prior degree of belief in the hypothesis to be tested or a neutral, reference prior (or so-called "uninformative" prior) that is supposed to capture the prior degree of evidential support or some such for the hypothesis to be tested.

Comment author: ChristianKl 09 November 2012 03:01:35PM *  2 points [-]

If not using background information means you can publish your paper with frequentists methods, scientists often don't use background information.

Those scientifists who don't use less background information get more significant results. Therefore they get more published papers. Then they get more funding than the people who use more background information. It's publish or perish.

Comment author: JonathanLivengood 09 November 2012 06:46:32PM 2 points [-]

You could be right, but I am skeptical. I would like to see evidence -- preferably in the form of bibliometric analysis -- that practicing scientists who use frequentist statistical techniques (a) don't make use of background information, and (b) publish more successfully than comparable scientists who do make use of background information.