I spent day two of jury duty reading about probability, first this note by Andrew Gelman about prejudices regarding statistical philosophy and then this (long PDF) piece by Radford Neal about anthropic arguments. Gelman's piece emphasizes the oft-ignored point that it is the likelihood not the prior that is usually the most suspect and challenging thing about a statistical analysis. Neal's confirms my view that Susskind-like approaches to anthropic arguments are just plain wrong. I think I have complained about this before.
I thought they'd throw you out of jury duty for reading that kind of material!
ReplyDeleteThe Neal paper is quite a read! It should be required reading for everyone even remotely interested in cosmology, statistics etc. I haven't read it in enough detail to say whether I mostly agree, but even if not, it touches on so many topics that fruitful ideas will come from it.
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