In an effort to get myself more philosophically informed with regards to probability and statistics, I’ve been reading about various notions and their discontents, such as symmetry, or Bayesianism, or p-values. I was delighted to find this recent pair of papers (part I,part II) by fellow Berkeley-ite and occasional puzzle-partner Kenny Easwaran (now a prof at USC) on Bayesianism in Philosophy Compass. In the first paper he goes through basic tenets of Bayesian approaches to probability in terms of subjective belief, and their philosophical justification via rational actions or “Dutch book” arguments and representation theorems. What’s also interesting from a scientific view (somewhat off-topic from the article) is the angle being advanced (some might say “pushed”) by some cognitive scientists that people are actually doing some kind of Bayesian conditionalization in certain tasks (here’s a plug for my buddy Pradeep‘s work). The second article talks about the difficulties in developing a consistent and quantitative “confirmation theory” in Bayesianism. In different fields there are different questions how how to do this, and as Kenny points out, the anti-Bayesians in different fields are different — the null-position is not necessarily frequentism.

They’re a relatively quick read, and I think provide some different perspectives for those of us who usually see these concepts in our little fiefdoms.