Episode 78 - Bayesian Thinking: Flat Earth Priors, The Mises Brothers, and Curb Your Analogy

As Max returns from Lviv Ukraine where he offered a course on Bayesian thinking, he shares his knowledge and insights.
- What are the drawbacks and limitations to Bayes rule vs other approaches?
- Is probability objective or subjective?
- How did Larry David illustrates argument by analogy?
- The von Mises brothers include one free market economist (Ludwig) and one statistician (Richard) - what did they have to say on this topic?
- What’s the problem with a Flat Earth Prior?

Links

Max’s Slides from the Bayesian Thinking Course (these are not meant to learn from on their own, but part of my materials)

Books
Pedro Domingo’s Master Algorithm
Theory that would not Die on Bayes Rule
Bayesian Analysis with Python
Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949)
- Also found this 1975 article by Murray Rothbard claiming that the Mises Brothers were pure frequentists (and this doesn’t appear to be strictly true) and arguing that subjective probability is illegitimate. Maybe I’ll have to counter this at some point!
Harold Jeffrey’s Theory of Probability (1939) includes a lot on priors
The Bayesian Choice (a mathematical text by Christian Roberts)

Concepts on Wikipedia:
Bernstein von Mises theorem
Cromwell’s Rule
Von Mises Distribution

Larry David’s Argument by Analogy:

Related Episodes

Episode 71 with Tassos Noulas on Urban Data Science
Episode 57 on Analogies and Nearest Neighbors
Episode 27 on Fat Tails and Converging Priors
Episode 22 on Bayesian History
Episode 21 on Probability and Belief
Episode 1 on a Bayesian treatment of the Hawaii Missile Scare (which I went through in the class)
Episode 0 on How to Update Your beliefs (an intro to Bayes rule)