minusdash comments on Beyond Statistics 101 - LessWrong

19 Post author: JonahSinick 26 June 2015 10:24AM

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Comment author: minusdash 27 June 2015 12:32:25PM 2 points [-]

I'm not talking about back and forth between true and false, but between two explanations. You can have a multimodal probability distribution and two distant modes are about equally probable, and when you update, sometimes one is larger and sometimes the other. Of course one doesn't need to choose a point estimate (maximum a posteriori), the distribution itself should ideally be believed in its entirety. But just as you can't see the rabbit-duck as simultaneously 50% rabbit and 50% duck, one sometimes switches between different explanations, similarly to an MCMC sampling procedure.

I don't want to argue this too much because it's largely a preference of style and culture. I think the discussions are very repetitive and it's an illusion that there is much to be learned by spending so much time thinking meta.

Anyway, I evaporate from the site for now.