I definitely agree that Bayesianism is overrated and overused. I do wonder if some of these pitfalls could be avoided if people started using actual Bayesian statistics, rather than this fake pop-bayes thing where people make single numerical estimates (like saying “10% chance of apocalypse”) and nudge the number up and down a bit in response to news.
Maybe I’m being a grumbly math nerd here, but outside of toy examples, actual bayesianism involves updating distributions, not single numbers. And you need to actually run calculations using bayes formula, not guesstimate it.
Yeah, I think that articulates a lot of my criticism of it. It seems like people generally aren’t very good at making guesses about probabilities of things in general so we shouldn’t expect that we can engage in “Bayesianism” in our head and magically create really good predictions.
I definitely agree that Bayesianism is overrated and overused. I do wonder if some of these pitfalls could be avoided if people started using actual Bayesian statistics, rather than this fake pop-bayes thing where people make single numerical estimates (like saying “10% chance of apocalypse”) and nudge the number up and down a bit in response to news.
Maybe I’m being a grumbly math nerd here, but outside of toy examples, actual bayesianism involves updating distributions, not single numbers. And you need to actually run calculations using bayes formula, not guesstimate it.
Nice distinction!
I’d agree that pop-Bayesianism is overused while more rigorous Bayesianism is underused.
Yeah, I think that articulates a lot of my criticism of it. It seems like people generally aren’t very good at making guesses about probabilities of things in general so we shouldn’t expect that we can engage in “Bayesianism” in our head and magically create really good predictions.