I haven’t read Bolstad, but I think that grokking the first 3-ish chapters of Jaynes seems like a reasonable requirement for being able to explain why probability looks the way it does. The actual “methods” chapters after that aren’t really useful/necessart for undergrads, except for the simple stuff like “given some data, what’s the likelihood ratio for your hypothesis? How about the null hypothesis?” You could always jump into teaching without re-reading that, but iunno.
Yeah, the early stuff in Jaynes is pretty comprehensible (the ideas are clear if not all the proofs). Intro stats classes tend to be very light on the proofs, though. They’re very much “here’s probability”, not “here’s why probability”. I’ll definitely reread Jaynes again before teaching, but I want to finish Bolstad and work through some of the problems before that.
I haven’t read Bolstad, but I think that grokking the first 3-ish chapters of Jaynes seems like a reasonable requirement for being able to explain why probability looks the way it does. The actual “methods” chapters after that aren’t really useful/necessart for undergrads, except for the simple stuff like “given some data, what’s the likelihood ratio for your hypothesis? How about the null hypothesis?” You could always jump into teaching without re-reading that, but iunno.
Yeah, the early stuff in Jaynes is pretty comprehensible (the ideas are clear if not all the proofs). Intro stats classes tend to be very light on the proofs, though. They’re very much “here’s probability”, not “here’s why probability”. I’ll definitely reread Jaynes again before teaching, but I want to finish Bolstad and work through some of the problems before that.