Michael Tobis 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.
Well getting back to the origins of this sub-thread there would be no
problem in saying that for their particular experiment, 90% of the large
impacts originated from the event they simulated (with the rest coming
from the natural background). That's a perfectly ordinary frequentist
approach, and in fact this is precisely what they calculated.
> I was amazed to see that this is a real controversy in some circles.
Well, a lot of scientists (myself included) were brought up on a diet of
purely frequentist probability, and many of them also seem to be
uncomfortable with the idea of subjectivity in scientific judgements.
Hence uniform priors being defined as "ignorance" (where "ignorance" is
circularly defined as the state of mind described by a uniform
distribution...) and other such drivel.
But I hope this particular horse can be considered well thrashed now.
I'm going to a workshop on probability in climate science in a couple of
weeks, which several other climate scientists are slated to attend, so
it will be interesting to see if and how their thinking has progressed
in the 2 years(!) since I started talking about this sort of thing.
James
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