As long as you remember to update your priors.
"I give the lab-leak hypothesis a 60% chance of being correct."
"But what if it turns out that the chief proponent wrote a monstrously racist book about evolutionary biology, [roundly condemned by experts in the field](https://cehg.stanford.edu/letter-from-population-geneticists)?"
"Fine, 75%."
And like, if you actually tried to bayes it out, you can see how ridiculous it is to arive at an estimate like "50%"
For example, to date there have been zero pandemics caused by lab accidents, but hundreds caused by natural occurrences. How on earth would you estimate the relative odds for an event that has never occurred before? What do you use as your reference class? Every single update is going to have orders of magnitude of uncertainty associated with it.
To be accurate, he should put his odds at 50% plus or minus 50%.
And if they're going to say it's Bayesian, you'd think they would spend more time responding to the fact that whatever the conditional probability of a lab worker being accidentally infected by a virus they're studying, there's vastly more people in China who don't work at the lab than do.
Silver used to constantly harp on people who don't build models for quantitative analyses and just do punditry. He's stopped that complaint now for some reason.
I would very much like to know why and what is happening here. It reminds me of Glenn Greenwald in some sense, although I don't want to make any direct comparisons yet because that would probably be a little unfair to Silver at this point.
Isn't the point of [subjective Bayesianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability#Objective_and_subjective_Bayesian_probabilities) that there's no such thing as "actual chances," only chances given a certain set of prior beliefs?
Honestly, his book is actually pretty good. Mostly because he talks to actual domain specific experts in different fields about the predictions they make about the things they actually know about. Apparently that's become less important as pundit brain set in.
Somewhere, the ghost of Frank Ramsey is looking down from the great
open marriage of pragmatic socialist intellectuals in the sky and
saying, “Yes, but eventually, you have to do the work.”
He certainly [thinks of himself as some kind of Bayesian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Signal_and_the_Noise).
> Silver rejects much ideology taught with statistical method in colleges and universities today, specifically the "frequentist" approach of Ronald Fisher, originator of many classical statistical tests and methods. [...] In contrast, the practical statistician first needs a sound understanding of how baseball, poker, elections or other uncertain processes work, what measures are reliable and which not, what scales of aggregation are useful, and then to utilize the statistical tool kit as well as possible. Silver believes in the need for extensive data sets, preferably collected over long periods of time, from which one can then use statistical techniques to incrementally change probabilities up or down relative to prior data. This "Bayesian" approach is named for the 18th century minister Thomas Bayes who discovered a simple formula for updating probabilities using new data.
Edit to add: I missed the opportunity to link to I. J. Good's ["46656 Varieties of Bayesians"](http://fitelson.org/probability/good_bayes.pdf).
This probably isn't front page sneerworthy, but I did get a chuckle out of [nudgelords](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/02/07/nudgelords/) from a statistician who does Bayesian analysis seriously.
Remember, if you pull three numbers out of your ass instead of just one, you become far more accurate!
tbf all he’s saying is that he’s allowed to make up probabilities about things
like, sure Nate, you’re allowed to believe that there’s a 60% or whatever chance of the lab leak hypothesis being correct
that just doesn’t have anything to do with the actual chances of the lab leak hypothesis being correct
Not robust, whole basis of Bayes. snicker
Bayesian parlor games (see tweet by Jody) is a great fucking term tho!
Somewhere, the ghost of Frank Ramsey is looking down from the great open marriage of pragmatic socialist intellectuals in the sky and saying, “Yes, but eventually, you have to do the work.”
Nate Bronze is at it again
My priors ARE my feelings damn it and if you have a problem with that I’m just going to invoke Bayes harder!!
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