{"id":177,"date":"2009-11-09T12:23:40","date_gmt":"2009-11-09T17:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/11\/09\/the-zeal-of-the-convert\/"},"modified":"2009-11-09T12:23:40","modified_gmt":"2009-11-09T17:23:40","slug":"the-zeal-of-the-convert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/11\/09\/the-zeal-of-the-convert\/","title":{"rendered":"The zeal of the convert"},"content":{"rendered":"

My brother Andy pointed me to this climate science blog<\/a>.\u00a0 I don’t know much about climate science, but I do know about probability and data modeling, and I like the way this guy writes about them.\u00a0 For instance, he has a really nice piece<\/a> illustrating how you can model the climate at a variety of levels of complexity from very simple up to\u00a0 massively complex simulations.\u00a0 The point of this post is to debunk the notion, which seems to be widespread, that the only reason scientists believe in climate change is because of complicated black-box simulation codes.\u00a0 He illustrates how\u00a0 you can see the big picture very easily from much simpler models.<\/p>\n

His most recent post is about his born-again Bayesianism<\/a>. \u00a0 It’s generally very sensible and worth reading, although I want to point out one important distinction that I think he blurs a bit.\u00a0 The word Bayesian can describe two different (but overlapping) kinds of people:it can refer to<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. People who use a specific set of statistical techniques, or<\/li>\n
  2. People who have a certain philosophical stance about the meaning of probability.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Personally, I think that you absolutely have to be a Bayesian in the second sense of the term: the frequentist notion of probability strikes me as utterly incoherent<\/a>.\u00a0 But I think you should be completely agnostic as far as the first point is concerned.\u00a0 Bayesian and frequentist statistical techniques are just tools.\u00a0 They’re both perfectly sensible, and you should use whichever tool is more convenient for the problem you’re trying to solve at the moment.<\/p>\n

    I think that some people think that being a Bayesian in sense 2 means that you have to be a strict Bayesian in sense 1 — that is, that you can never calculate a confidence interval again.\u00a0 Fortunately, it just isn’t so. For instance, I cowrote a paper<\/a> quite a while ago in which we analyzed the same data set from both Bayesian and frequentist points of view to illustrate the relation between the two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    My brother Andy pointed me to this climate science blog.\u00a0 I don’t know much about climate science, but I do know about probability and data modeling, and I like the way this guy writes about them.\u00a0 For instance, he has a really nice piece illustrating how you can model the climate at a variety of … Continue reading The zeal of the convert<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}