Comment by teiferer
25 days ago
Baffling to see such a take on HN.
If I give you a die and ask about the probabiliy for a 6, then it's exactly 1/6. Being able to quantify this exactly is the great success story of probability theory. You can have a different "gut feeling", and indeed many people do (lotteries are popular), but you would be wrong. If you run this experiment a large number of times, then about 1/6 of the outcomes will be a 6, proving the 1/6 right and the deviating "gut feeling" wrong. That number is not "pulled out of somebody's ass" or some frequentist approach. It's what probability means.
Yes, that's the frequentist approach. Surely, even on HN, there is an understanding that there are two interpretations of probability?
You don't think that the probability of each side of a die is 1/6 ?
I see, you don't know what I'm talking about. My apologies, I assumed a common background. Here's some introductory materials on Bayesian vs frequentist interpretations of probability:
Bayesian and frequentist reasoning in plain English
https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/22/bayesian-and-fr...
Comparison of frequentist and Bayesian inference
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-05-introduction-to-probabilit...
To Be a Frequentist or Bayesian? Five Positions in a Spectrum
https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/axvcupj4/release/1
Beyond Bayesians and Frequentists - Computer Science
https://cs.stanford.edu/~jsteinhardt/stats-essay.pdf
You'll find that it's a big subject with a long history and many strongly-held opinions that have nevertheless evolved over the years. Happy reading!
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