From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Oct 15 2002 - 02:51:14 MDT
For those who may be struggling, as I am, to understand how
the world appears divided between the Bayesians and the
non-Bayesians, here are two quotes from an early book by
Jaynes:
"When a problem of statistical inference is studied long enough,
sometimes for decades, one is always forced eventually to a
conclusion that could have been derived in three lines from
Bayes' theorem."
"We are not afraid to use Bayes' theorem to work any proposition
whatsoever back and froth from one side of our symbols to the
other. I think that in refusing to make free use of Bayes'
theorem, modern writers are depriving themselves of the most
powerful single principle in probability theory."
I always approve when mathematicians use the word "whatsoever".
And leave us never be afraid to use a powerful tool.
These two quotes are from page 165 of an old type-writer written
book of Jaynes http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/mobil.pdf .
Lee
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:17:35 MST