I think the “basically a hack” argument isn’t entirely without merit in this case, bayesian or frequentist—from what is said in the article, BeerAdvocate chose m without a lot of attention to:
frequentist hat: the relative rate of Type I and Type II errors.
Bayesian hat: the relative probability of a rating increasing versus decreasing with the addition of more reviews.
I think the “basically a hack” argument isn’t entirely without merit in this case, bayesian or frequentist—from what is said in the article, BeerAdvocate chose m without a lot of attention to:
frequentist hat: the relative rate of Type I and Type II errors.
Bayesian hat: the relative probability of a rating increasing versus decreasing with the addition of more reviews.