You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

DanielLC comments on Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Gondolinian 26 January 2015 12:46AM

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

Comments (431)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: DanielLC 02 February 2015 07:48:48AM 0 points [-]

I think it's more that there are times when frequentists claim there isn't an answer. It's very common for statistical tests to talk about likelihood. The likelihood of a hypothesis given an experimental result is defined as the probability of the result given the hypothesis. If you want to know the probability of the hypothesis, you take the likelihood and multiply it by the prior probability. Frequentists deny that there always is a prior probability. As a result, they tend to just use the base rate as if it were a probability. Conflating the two is equivalent to the base rate fallacy.