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.

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.

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.

Various bits of Jaynes's "Confidence intervals vs Bayesian intervals" seem holy war-ish to me. Perhaps the juiciest bit (from pages 197-198, or pages 23-24 of the PDF):

I first presented this result to a recent convention of reliability and quality control statisticians working in the computer and aerospace industries; and at this point the

... (read more)

4IlyaShpitser12y

---------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------- [etc.] Ugh. Here is a good heuristic: "Not in stats or machine learning? Stop talking about this."

6sixes_and_sevens12y

The term "holy war" or "religious war" is often used to describe debates where people advocate for a side with an intensity disproportionate to the stakes, (e.g. the proper pronunciation of "gif", vi vs. emacs, surrogate vs. natural primary keys in the RDBM). That's how I read the OP, and it's fitting in context.