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I’m a frequentist* not a bayesian so maybe I’m already biased but literally anyone who talks about their “priors” in real life should be shot out of a canon

#statistics #bayes #bayesians #* ok so I think bayesian modeling and statistics is great and theres a decent point about actual vs perceived probabilities but #I think approaching it from a epistemological point of view as to how we interpret statistics makes more sense than using bayesian inference

Protein is expensive.

How much protein can your body really use?

#science #bayesians #bodybuilding #protein

Book I am reading in April 2014

#books #statistics #bayesians

The TA for our Bayesian course emailed this a minute ago. I almost died. At the end, he put: PS: Happy April Fools. So cold.

#bayesians #april fools

A watched Markov Chain never boils.

Lecturer Ben Goodrich, Columbia Statistics Department

#columbia #statistics #bayesians

Guts

I studied philosophy at Oxford and in ethics was drawn to John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism. Human happiness as a basis for morality seemed more attractive than rules and commandments and all the thought experiments seemed to suggest the 'right' thing to do drops neatly out of weighing all the consequences of your actions and choosing the course with the best or least worst consequences. Great. The problem is I've increasingly realised for me it doesn't work. Why? In truth I have to admit I first realised I had a problem because utilitarianism looks bad. When people see you weighing 'secular' values, like money or resources against 'sacred' ones like the value of a life or rights or fairness it 'feels' wrong. And here is the clue I think. It feels wrong. Listening to a Philosophy Bites podcast I heard someone say the job of ethics is to accurately describe our innate 'felt' sense of what is right. When I first heard it I thought it was plumb wrong. I thought the job of ethics was to lay down a rational, internally consistent code of behaviour and then win everyone round to living by it. The trouble is like bills of rights and codified legal systems and utilitarianism it's too hard and there will always be exceptions and situations and messiness in human affairs which are important but don't fit. So I'm coming round to the view that it's a lot simpler than I thought. Our minds are Bayesian probability engines. We take the sum total of all we know, have seen and done and form instinctive 'gut' judgements on things which we then test against new data. That's how we work. Bayesian probability means following your gut on something you've never seen, done or know anything about may not be the best approach - get some data or ask someone. But on things you know a great deal about, people, what's right and wrong, what you should do and what you shouldn't you have an amazing storehouse of knowledge and experience accumulated over your whole life, plus the cultural and biological inheritance of the entire human race since we evolved. The on the great moral questions and the big ethical choices in our lives, the 'right' thing to do is follow your gut, ignore your head - you know it makes sense.

#utilitarianism #bayesians #ethics

Statistics! They're every scientist's friend. But they can be easy to misinterpret. Check out this thought exercise with Hank (from SciShow) to understand how some mental kung fu known as Bayesian reasoning can use stats to draw some downright surprising conclusions.

Sources: http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/science.pd... http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008... http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/... http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com... http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/his... http://www.amazon.com/The-Signal-Nois...

#Bayes #Bayesians #Statistics #Reasoning #Probability