I’m taking a grad level stat class. One of my classmates said something today that nearly made me jump up and loudly declare that he was a frequentist scumbag.
We were asked to show that a coin toss fit the criteria of some theorem that talked about mapping subsets of a sigma algebra to form a well-defined probability. Half the elements of the set were taken care of by default (the whole set S and its complement { }), but we couldn’t make any claims about the probability of getting Heads or Tails from just the theorem. I was content to assume the coin was fair, or at least assign some likelihood distribution.
But not my frequentist archnemesis! He let it be known that he would level half the continent if the probability of getting Heads wasn’t determined by his Expectation divided by the number of events. The number of events. Of an imaginary coin toss. Determine that toss’ probability.
It occurs to me that there was a lot of set up for very little punch line in that anecdote. If you are unamused, you are in good company. I ordered R to calculate an integral for me today, and it politely replied: “Error in is.function(FUN) : ‘FUN’ is missing”″
I’m taking a grad level stat class. One of my classmates said something today that nearly made me jump up and loudly declare that he was a frequentist scumbag.
We were asked to show that a coin toss fit the criteria of some theorem that talked about mapping subsets of a sigma algebra to form a well-defined probability. Half the elements of the set were taken care of by default (the whole set S and its complement { }), but we couldn’t make any claims about the probability of getting Heads or Tails from just the theorem. I was content to assume the coin was fair, or at least assign some likelihood distribution.
But not my frequentist archnemesis! He let it be known that he would level half the continent if the probability of getting Heads wasn’t determined by his Expectation divided by the number of events. The number of events. Of an imaginary coin toss. Determine that toss’ probability.
It occurs to me that there was a lot of set up for very little punch line in that anecdote. If you are unamused, you are in good company. I ordered R to calculate an integral for me today, and it politely replied: “Error in is.function(FUN) : ‘FUN’ is missing”″