Comment by skybrian
15 hours ago
You can do that but you're laundering ignorance into precise-seeming mathematics. Better to just say "we're probably somewhere in the middle, not at the beginning or end" and leave it at that. Calling a peak is hard.
15 hours ago
You can do that but you're laundering ignorance into precise-seeming mathematics. Better to just say "we're probably somewhere in the middle, not at the beginning or end" and leave it at that. Calling a peak is hard.
You speak about laundering ignorance into precise-seeming mathematics as if it was a bad thing.
But that's the entire idea of Bayesian reasoning. Which has proven to be surprisingly effective in a wide range of domains.
I'm all for quantifying my ignorance, and using it as an outside view to help guide my expectations. Read the book Superforecasting to understand how effective forecasters use an outside view to adjust their inside view, to allow them to forecast things more precisely.