On Sep 11, 1:23 am, James Annan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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.
Sometimes these probabilities come from equivalencing the situation to
a model that can be understood via probability theory. No one
actually takes real samples for a real representation of the model,
but one already knows what the frequencies would be if one did.
But maybe there are some examples that can't be interpreted in this
manner?
>
>
>
> > 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
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated
venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of
global environmental change.
Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the
submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not
gratuitously rude.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
