Does anybody better versed in the debate have a comment?
Though I was not addressed by that, here goes anyway:
That people are happy doing whatever works doesn’t make them part Bayesian and part Frequentist in LW’s meaning any more than eating some vegetables and some meat makes one part vegetarian and part carnivore. Omnivores are not insiders among vegetarians or carnivores.
Bayesians—those who really do care, as you put it—believe something like “learning works to the extent it models Bayesian updating”. When omnistatisticians decide to use a set of tools they customize for the situation, and make the result look clean and right and not silly and even extrapolatable and predictive, etc., and this gets a result better than formal Bayesian analysis or any other analysis, Bayesians believe that the thing that modeled Bayesian updating happened within the statisticians’ own minds—their models are not at all simple, because the statistician is part of the model. Consequently, any non-Bayesian model is almost by definition poorly understood.
This is my impression of the collective LW belief, that impression is of course open to further revision.
LW has contributed to the confusion tremendously by simplistically using only two terms. Just as from the vegetarian perspective, omnivores and carnivores may be lumped into a crude “meat-eater” outgroup, from the philosophical position people on LW often take “don’t know, don’t care” and “principled frequentist” are lumped together into one outgroup.
People will not respect the opinions of those they believe don’t understand the situation, and this scene has repeatedly occurred—posters on LW convince many that they do not understand people’s beliefs, so of course the analysis and lessons are poorly received.
Though I was not addressed by that, here goes anyway:
That people are happy doing whatever works doesn’t make them part Bayesian and part Frequentist in LW’s meaning any more than eating some vegetables and some meat makes one part vegetarian and part carnivore. Omnivores are not insiders among vegetarians or carnivores.
Bayesians—those who really do care, as you put it—believe something like “learning works to the extent it models Bayesian updating”. When omnistatisticians decide to use a set of tools they customize for the situation, and make the result look clean and right and not silly and even extrapolatable and predictive, etc., and this gets a result better than formal Bayesian analysis or any other analysis, Bayesians believe that the thing that modeled Bayesian updating happened within the statisticians’ own minds—their models are not at all simple, because the statistician is part of the model. Consequently, any non-Bayesian model is almost by definition poorly understood.
This is my impression of the collective LW belief, that impression is of course open to further revision.
LW has contributed to the confusion tremendously by simplistically using only two terms. Just as from the vegetarian perspective, omnivores and carnivores may be lumped into a crude “meat-eater” outgroup, from the philosophical position people on LW often take “don’t know, don’t care” and “principled frequentist” are lumped together into one outgroup.
People will not respect the opinions of those they believe don’t understand the situation, and this scene has repeatedly occurred—posters on LW convince many that they do not understand people’s beliefs, so of course the analysis and lessons are poorly received.