andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-114 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Kevin Bryan wrote: I read your new article on deduction/induction under Bayes. There are a couple interesting papers from economic decision theory which are related that you might find interesting. Samuelson et al have a (very) recent paper about what happens when you have some Bayesian and some non-Bayesian hypotheses. (I mentioned this one on my blog earlier this year.) Essentially, the Bayesian hypotheses are forced to “make predictions” in every future period (“if the unemployment rate is x%, the president is reelected with pr=x), whereas other forms of reasoning (say, analogies: “If the unemployment rate is above 10%, the president will not be reelected”). Imagine you have some prior over, say, the economy and elections, with 99.9% of the hypotheses being Bayesian and the rest being analogies as above. Then 100 years from now, because the analogies are so hard to refute, using deduction will push the proportion of Bayesian hypotheses toward zero. There is a
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1 There are a couple interesting papers from economic decision theory which are related that you might find interesting. [sent-2, score-0.255]
2 Samuelson et al have a (very) recent paper about what happens when you have some Bayesian and some non-Bayesian hypotheses. [sent-3, score-0.096]
3 ) Essentially, the Bayesian hypotheses are forced to “make predictions” in every future period (“if the unemployment rate is x%, the president is reelected with pr=x), whereas other forms of reasoning (say, analogies: “If the unemployment rate is above 10%, the president will not be reelected”). [sent-5, score-1.663]
4 Imagine you have some prior over, say, the economy and elections, with 99. [sent-6, score-0.069]
5 9% of the hypotheses being Bayesian and the rest being analogies as above. [sent-7, score-0.648]
6 Then 100 years from now, because the analogies are so hard to refute, using deduction will push the proportion of Bayesian hypotheses toward zero. [sent-8, score-0.903]
7 That is, if scientists are not totally honest (e. [sent-10, score-0.274]
8 , they don’t report negative results), it turns out nonobvious (and in many cases outright false) that deducting on hypotheses leads to increased knowledge about the “true state of the world”. [sent-12, score-0.765]
9 You might find this line of research interesting. [sent-13, score-0.199]
10 These ideas sound appealing but I don’t think they really work. [sent-16, score-0.157]
11 As Cosma and I discuss in our article (and as we further discuss elsewhere, including chapter 6 of BDA), I think that Bayesian inference works within a model, but not so well for comparing models. [sent-17, score-0.21]
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