Literary Bayesianism
I’m a bit busy today doing job interviews and other things, so I’ve just got time for a quick post to point out that there’s a nice polemical piece by David Papineau in the online version of the Times Literary Supplement recently called Thomas Bayes and the crisis in science. I get the print version of the TLS every week, largely for the crossword, but I think the online version of Papineau’s piece is public (i.e. there’s no paywall).
The piece touches on a number of themes I’ve covered on this blog over the years, in particular the widespread use of dodgy statistical methods in science. Here’s a little taster:
One of the great scandals of modern intellectual life is the way generations of statistics students have been indoctrinated into the farrago of significance testing.
I couldn’t agree more!
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In the Dark 
July 9, 2018 at 3:46 pm
I learnt at MaxEnt 2018 last week of serious doubt that the portrait reproduced above is actually Thomas Bayes. Wikipedia gives this reference for doubting it:
https://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/bayespic.htm
The portrait is not known to have been published before a 1936 book, which gave no source. The portrait looks to be from the right era, but nobody presently knows where the 1936 author got it from or where the original is today.