Bayesians and frequentists


Yesterday I had a training session on Bayesian vs frequentist models of probability, and one of the analogies they gave was that everyone thinks they’re a frequentist but behaves like a Bayesian. One example is that when you look for your keys in your apartment, you look in the places you expect them to be first.

Except I don’t. I look everywhere, without any hope or expectation that they’ll be where a reasonable person might put them, because as I have very little faith in the persistence of identity over time, I’m highly mistrustful that prior versions of me would put the keys anywhere I’d be reasonable to expect them.

Truly, philosophy has screwed me up.

My other method for finding things I’ve lost is to take all my clothes off, which a priori doesn’t sound like a sensible tactic, but has a high correlation with me finding what I was looking for.

Or the neighbours calling the police.

Not that I thought it sensible to mention this tactic to my coworkers, especially when this morning I’d had a terrible dream about expense reports, salad and accidentally drinking deodorant. You can reveal too much of your true self.

Then again, you can assume if somebody is telling you those kind of things, there’s a high probability that they’re a Bayesian.


Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.