Statisticians no longer spend much time arguing Bayesianism vs frequentism
Did they, when the Sequences were written? My impression was that the camps were well-established then, and well-established now, and the main difference has been that the Bayesians have had their tools improved by additional compute more than the Frequentists have; currently the question seems to be ‘Bayesianism’ vs. ‘pragmatism’ in much the same way that the debate in physics seems to be ‘MWI’ vs. ‘shut up and compute.’
Like, out of those four areas, I was trained in three of them before I found Less Wrong, and maybe I just had good professors / got lucky but I came in predisposed to think Eliezer’s view was sensible for all of them, but also lots of people were pragmatists because it worked out better in a social context. (The few exceptions, like a decision analysis professor who flatly insisted on Bayesian probability, were because you really couldn’t make sense of the class if you were interpreting everything as a frequentist. But all the analyses were simple enough that you didn’t really use what a statistician would call ‘Bayesian methods’ rather than just the Bayesian interpretation of probability.)
I think Eliezer’s presentation of the Bayesianism vs frequentism arguments in science came from E. T. Jaynes’ posthumous book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, which was written about arguments that took place over Jaynes’ lifetime, well before the Sequences were written.
Did they, when the Sequences were written? My impression was that the camps were well-established then, and well-established now, and the main difference has been that the Bayesians have had their tools improved by additional compute more than the Frequentists have; currently the question seems to be ‘Bayesianism’ vs. ‘pragmatism’ in much the same way that the debate in physics seems to be ‘MWI’ vs. ‘shut up and compute.’
Like, out of those four areas, I was trained in three of them before I found Less Wrong, and maybe I just had good professors / got lucky but I came in predisposed to think Eliezer’s view was sensible for all of them, but also lots of people were pragmatists because it worked out better in a social context. (The few exceptions, like a decision analysis professor who flatly insisted on Bayesian probability, were because you really couldn’t make sense of the class if you were interpreting everything as a frequentist. But all the analyses were simple enough that you didn’t really use what a statistician would call ‘Bayesian methods’ rather than just the Bayesian interpretation of probability.)
I think Eliezer’s presentation of the Bayesianism vs frequentism arguments in science came from E. T. Jaynes’ posthumous book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, which was written about arguments that took place over Jaynes’ lifetime, well before the Sequences were written.