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Bayes jumps the shark

- October 10, 2010

John Goldin sends in this, from an interview with Alan Dershowitz:

Q: The lawyerly obligation to not change your mind, to defend a position right or wrong–do you find that it seeps over into the rest of your life?

A: No, it doesn’t because I’m a professor first, and as a professor I’m always changing my mind. I mean, my students go crazy in my class because I’m the most orthodox Bayesian in the world. [Bayesian probability theory is a way of modeling how the human mind reasons about the world. It assumes that people have prior beliefs about the probability of a given hypothesis and also beliefs about the probability that the hypothesis, if true, would generate the evidence they see. Taken together, these beliefs determine how people update their faith in a hypothesis in light of new evidence.] I do everything based on Bayes analysis, and Bayes analysis is always based on shifting probabilities and constantly changing and being adaptive and fluid.

Although, who am I to argue with a guy who got Jeremy Irons off on a murder charge?

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