Michael Tobis wrote:
> Yes, that's the one, thanks.
>
> Since this isn't a public talk I won't identify the frequentist in
> question, but he was uncomfortable with the very idea of assigning a
> probability to an event that "either happened or didn't". Something
> about babies and bathwater comes to mind.
I would be interested to know if he listens to (and acts upon) the
weather forecast :-) Tomorrow's weather is not a random repeatable
sample, merely an unknown deterministic event. Of course people
(including me) do talk about frequentist notions such as reliable
probabilities ("reliable" meaning that eg an event has historically
happened on p% of the occasions that it was forecast to happen with p%
probability), but I would hope that most if not all researchers would
agree if they thought about it carefully that in fact the probabilities
can only be Bayesian in nature.
>
> That said, he also described a very long and involved set of
> calculations that went into the figure, and pointed out that no effort
> was made to assign confidence bounds to any of it.
>
> I don't know of any claims about this paper in the press.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070906135629.htm
"the team found a 90 percent probability that the object that formed the
Chicxulub crater was a refugee from the Baptistina family" is a rather
typical example. But it was unfair of me to criticise the press as the
claim appears in the paper itself. Of course my comments don't mean that
the 90% figure is unreasonable, only that it is not directly supported
by the research.
James
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