On Sep 12, 8:58 am, "Michael Tobis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hey, I'm just reporting.
>
> The guy was obviously mathematically sphisticated and a professional
> statistician, but I couldn't really see how he could get any results
> that don't violate his philosophy.
>
> I was amazed to see that this is a real controversy in some circles.
>
> What probability actually means (outside the purely mathematical
> measure theory ideas without any connection to realisty) may be a bit
> hard to pin down but it's obviously useful in cases other than picking
> marbles out of an urn, if even that's permissble.
We build abstract models and we can prove everything about the models
using formal logic and mathematics. But do the models correspond to
reality? Answering this question is harder, can't be solved with just
logic and math.
This is a general problem, I am not sure why probability gets singled
out so often for special mention.
>
> mt
>
> On 9/12/07, Tom Adams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Sep 11, 8:52 pm, James Annan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > Tom Adams wrote:
> > > > On Sep 11, 12:46 am, "Michael Tobis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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".
>
> > > > (Opps!) Unconfortable with the very idea of assigning a 5/6
> > > > probability to your survival while playing Russian Roulette once with
> > > > a six-shooter, are you?
>
> > > Of course a frequentist would be uncomfortable with that idea: their
> > > interpretation of probability does not apply to single events, only as
> > > the limiting frequency of an infinite number of "identical" experiments.
>
> > So, a frequentist would be be just as bothered by a billion events as
> > by a single event. An infinite number of identical experiments is
> > always impossible.
>
> > Seems to me that it is a conceptual blunder to get hung up on this.
>
> > *All* applications of the frequentist interpretation involves
> > conterfactual conditions as does Newton's first law of motion and many
> > other useful concepts.
>
> > > Even this concept is rather hard to define, since in a deterministic
> > > world identical experiments should give identical results.
>
> > > (note that Michael was reporting someone else's views, not his own).
>
> > > James- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
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