Keep in mind that he and other physicists do not generally consider “probability that it is noise, given an observation X” to even be a statement about the world (it’s a statement about one’s personal beliefs, after all, one’s confidence in the engineering of an experimental apparatus, and so on and so forth), so they are perhaps conflating much less than it would appear under very literal reading. This is why I like the idea of using the word “plausibility” to describe beliefs, and “probability” to describe things such as the probability of an event rigorously calculated using a specific model.
edit: note by the way that physicists can consider a very strong result—e.g. those superluminal neutrinos—extremely implausible on the basis of a prior—and correctly conclude that there is most likely a problem with their machinery, on the basis of ratio between the likelihood of seeing that via noise to likelihood of seeing that via hardware fault. How’s that even possible without actually performing Bayesian inference?
edit2: also note that there is a fundamental difference as with plausibilities you will have to be careful to avoid vicious cycles in the collective reasoning. Plausibility, as needed for combining it with other plausibilities, is not a real number, it is a real number with attached description of how exactly it was made, so that evidence would not be double-counted. The number itself is of little use to communication for this reason.
Keep in mind that he and other physicists do not generally consider “probability that it is noise, given an observation X” to even be a statement about the world (it’s a statement about one’s personal beliefs, after all, one’s confidence in the engineering of an experimental apparatus, and so on and so forth)
It’s about the probability that there is an effect which will cause this deviation from background to become more and more supported by additional data rather than simply regress to the mean (or with your wording, the other way around). That seems fairly based-in-the-world to me.
The actual reality either has this effect, or it does not. You can quantify your uncertainty with a number, that would require you to assign some a-priori probability, which you’ll have to choose arbitrarily.
You can contrast this to a die roll which scrambles initial phase space, mapping (approximately but very close to) 1⁄6 of any physically small region of it to each number on the die, the 1⁄6 being an objective property of how symmetrical dies bounce.
They are specific to your idiosyncratic choice of prior, I am not interested in hearing them (in the context of science), unlike the statements about the world.
That knowledge is subjective doesn’t mean that such statements are not about the world. Furthermore, such statements can (and sometimes do) have arguments for the priors...
By this standard, any ‘statement about the world’ ignores all of the uncertainty that actually applies. Science doesn’t require you to sweep your ignorance under the rug.
Keep in mind that he and other physicists do not generally consider “probability that it is noise, given an observation X” to even be a statement about the world (it’s a statement about one’s personal beliefs, after all, one’s confidence in the engineering of an experimental apparatus, and so on and so forth), so they are perhaps conflating much less than it would appear under very literal reading. This is why I like the idea of using the word “plausibility” to describe beliefs, and “probability” to describe things such as the probability of an event rigorously calculated using a specific model.
edit: note by the way that physicists can consider a very strong result—e.g. those superluminal neutrinos—extremely implausible on the basis of a prior—and correctly conclude that there is most likely a problem with their machinery, on the basis of ratio between the likelihood of seeing that via noise to likelihood of seeing that via hardware fault. How’s that even possible without actually performing Bayesian inference?
edit2: also note that there is a fundamental difference as with plausibilities you will have to be careful to avoid vicious cycles in the collective reasoning. Plausibility, as needed for combining it with other plausibilities, is not a real number, it is a real number with attached description of how exactly it was made, so that evidence would not be double-counted. The number itself is of little use to communication for this reason.
It’s about the probability that there is an effect which will cause this deviation from background to become more and more supported by additional data rather than simply regress to the mean (or with your wording, the other way around). That seems fairly based-in-the-world to me.
The actual reality either has this effect, or it does not. You can quantify your uncertainty with a number, that would require you to assign some a-priori probability, which you’ll have to choose arbitrarily.
You can contrast this to a die roll which scrambles initial phase space, mapping (approximately but very close to) 1⁄6 of any physically small region of it to each number on the die, the 1⁄6 being an objective property of how symmetrical dies bounce.
Such statements are about the world, in a framework of probability.
They are specific to your idiosyncratic choice of prior, I am not interested in hearing them (in the context of science), unlike the statements about the world.
That knowledge is subjective doesn’t mean that such statements are not about the world. Furthermore, such statements can (and sometimes do) have arguments for the priors...
By this standard, any ‘statement about the world’ ignores all of the uncertainty that actually applies. Science doesn’t require you to sweep your ignorance under the rug.