I had a conversation with Vedant Chandra (Harvard) today about how catalogs are used, and how that relates to how they are built. We started off by arguing about how principled one should be about doing a populations inference. Too abstract! So Chandra moved us in the pragmatic direction: Let's look at a very specific inference and see what matters about it. We decided to look at the distances to distant clusters in the ESA Gaia data: How do your inferences depend on the number of stars you use, the signal-to-noise ratios of those stars, and whether your individual-star measurements are maximum-likelihood or obtained by consideration of a posterior pdf? That should answer questions, and set up some concrete points of discussion.
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