All of Christopher Clark's Comments + Replies

I agree with some of the sentiments in this post, but I think the claim in the second paragraph "Unfortunately, the CDC has repeatedly given advice with lots of evidence against it", is poorly supported. It suggests that the CDC has given advice that is not just incomplete or somewhat off-base, but that is ineffective and should be ignored. I don't think the points that deal with advice meet that standard:

Packages: The CDC quote explicitly refers to packages from China, so this more a matter of missing advice about what to do in other cases ... (read more)

That makes a lot of sense, but it does require you to know your utility function ahead of time. When this is not the case we might still want to propagate whatever you know about the prior forward to the posterior as a kind of caching operation for use in future decisions.

2Pattern
You don't necessarily need to know your utility function, just the utility of what is being decided between or a preference ordering may do. (Solving/making progress on a specific problem may be easier than working on an abstract problem.)