Thanks for the comment. The lack of math is a problem, and I think you’ve said it nicely:
That something else always seems to come down to magic. It may be called IBE, or model validation, or human judgement, but however many words are expended, no method of doing it is found. It’s the élan vital of statistics.
Reading this book, Agnostic Inquirer, is quite the headache. It’s so obscure and filled with mights, maybes, possibly’s, and such that I constantly have this gut feeling that I’m being led into a mental trap but am not always sure which clauses are doing it. Same for IBE. It sounds common-sensically appealing. “Hey, Bayes is awesome, but tell me how you expect to use it on something like this topic? You can’t? Well of course you can’t, so here’s how we use IBE to do so.”
But the heuristic strikes me as simply an approximation of what Bayes would do anyway, so I was quite confused as to what they were trying to get at (other than perhaps have their way with the reader).
Thanks for the comment. The lack of math is a problem, and I think you’ve said it nicely:
Reading this book, Agnostic Inquirer, is quite the headache. It’s so obscure and filled with mights, maybes, possibly’s, and such that I constantly have this gut feeling that I’m being led into a mental trap but am not always sure which clauses are doing it. Same for IBE. It sounds common-sensically appealing. “Hey, Bayes is awesome, but tell me how you expect to use it on something like this topic? You can’t? Well of course you can’t, so here’s how we use IBE to do so.”
But the heuristic strikes me as simply an approximation of what Bayes would do anyway, so I was quite confused as to what they were trying to get at (other than perhaps have their way with the reader).