Open Thread, April 27-May 4, 2014

NancyLebovitz

You know the drill - If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

And, while this is an accidental exception, future open threads should start on Mondays until further notice.

You know the drill - If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

And, while this is an accidental exception, future open threads should start on Mondays until further notice.

I have to say, I seriously don't get the Bayesian vs Frequentist holy wars. It seems to me the ratio of importance to education of its participants is ridiculously low.

Bayesian and frequentist methods are sets of statistical tools, not sacred orders to which you pledge a blood oath. Just understand the usage of each tools, and the fact that virtually any model of something that happens in the real world is going to be misspecified.

Part of it is that Bayesianism claims to be not just a better statistical tool, but a new and better epistemology, a replacement and improvement over Aristotelian logic.

0ChristianKl12y

There are a bunch of issues involved. It hard to speak about them because the term Bayesianism is encompasses a wide array of ideas and everytime it's used it might refer to a different subset of that cluster of ideas. Part of LW is that it's a place to discuss how an AGI could be structured. As such we care about the philosophic level of how you come to know that something is true. As such there an interest into going as basic as possible when looking at epistemology. There are issues about objective knowledge versus "subjective" Bayesian priors that are worth thinking about. We live at a time where up to 70% of scientific research can't be replicated. Frequentism might not be to blame for all of that, but it does play it's part. There are issues such an the Bem paper about porno-precognition where frequentist techniques did suggest that porno-precognition is real but analysing Bems data with Bayesian methods suggested it's not. There are further issues that a lot of additional assumptions are loaded into the word Bayesianism if you use that word on LessWrong. What Bayesianism taught me speaks about a bunch of issues that only have indirectly something to do with Bayesian tools vs. Frequentist tools. Let's say I want to decide how much salt I should eat. I do follow the consensus that salt is bad and therefore have some prior that salt is bad. Then a new study comes along and says that low salt diets are unhealthy. If I want to make good decisions I have to ask: How much should I update? There no good formal way for making such decisions. We lack a good framework for doing this. Bayes rule is the answer to that problem that provides the promise of a solution. The solution to wait a few years and then read a meta review is unsatisfying. In the absence of a formal way to do the reasoning, many people do use informal ways of updating towards new evidence. Cognitive bias research suggest that the average person isn't good at this. [...] That sentence is quite ea

-1Emile12y

Can you point to examples of these "holy wars"? I haven't encountered something I'd describe like that, so I don't know if we've been seeing different things, or just interpreting it differently. To me it looks like a tension between a method that's theoretically better but not well-established, and a method that is not ideal but more widely understood so more convenient - a bit like the tension between the metric and imperial systems, or between flash and html5.