XKCD - Frequentist vs. Bayesians

brilee

Is this a fair representation of frequentists versus bayesians? I feel like every time the topic comes up, 'Bayesian statistics' is an applause light for me, and I'm not sure why I'm supposed to be applauding.

http://xkcd.com/1132/

No, it's not fair. Given the setup, the null hypothesis would be, I think, 'neither the Sun has exploded nor the dice come up 6', and so when the detector goes off we reject the 'neither x nor y' in favor of 'x or y' - and I think the Bayesian would agree too that 'either the Sun has exploded or the dice came up 6'!

neither the Sun has exploded nor the dice come up 6

Given the statement of the problem, this null hypothesis is not at all probabilistic - we know it's false using deduction! This is an awful strange thing for a hypothesis to be in a problem that's supposed to be about probabilities.

2noen14y

I think the null hypothesis is "the neutrino detector is lying" because the question we are most interested in is if it is correctly telling us the sun has gone nova. If H0 is the null hypothesis and u1 is the chance of a neutrino event and u2 is the odds of double sixes then H0 = µ1 - µ2. Since the odds of two die coming up sixes is vastly larger than the odds of the sun going nova in our lifetime the test is not fair.

12Eliezer Yudkowsky14y

Um, I don't think the null hypothesis is usually phrased as, "There is no effect and our data wasn't unusual" and then you conclude "our data was unusual, rather than there being no effect" when you get data with probability < .05 if the Sun hasn't exploded. This is not a fair steelmanning.

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XKCD - Frequentist vs. Bayesians

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XKCD - Frequentist vs. Bayesians

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