I have written many many words about “Bayesianism” in this space over the years, but the closest thing to a comprehensive “my position on Bayes” post to date is this one from three years ago, which I wrote when I was much newer to this stuff. People sometimes link that post or ask me about it, which almost never happens with my other Bayes posts. So I figure I should write a more up-to-date “position post.”
I will try to make this at least kind of comprehensive, but I will omit many details and sometimes state conclusions without the corresponding arguments. Feel free to ask me if you want to hear more about something.
I ended up including a whole lot of preparatory exposition here – the main critiques start in section 6, although there are various critical remarks earlier.
[Edit 5/30/22: I later wrote twoposts critiquing Bayesianism from a totally different – and more original? – angle than any of the ones covered here. Check them out too, if this subject interests you.]
The hope may be that other scientists, and the rest of us who don’t care about 248-dimensional objects, may profit from this math, but there’s no guarantee.
E8?
Sounds like someone cares about 248-dimensional objects ;)
The hope may be that other scientists, and the rest of us who don’t care about 248-dimensional objects, may profit from this math, but there’s no guarantee.
His notions of sexual satisfaction centred around masturbation, voyeurism and fondling. He liked girls to sit on his knee, and he also got sexual satisfaction from reciting poetry at them. The comic aspect of this was apparent to him, and it bothered him not at all. There is a grandeur in his indifference to the norm. His appetite for food was as unusual as his appetite for sex: he became, nominally, a vegetarian, but eschewed most vegetables, surviving for years, he claimed, on a diet of eggs, bread and milk, with occasional treats of guava jelly. This gave him severe gastric trouble, and he had to endure a painful form of surgery that he labels “gasterenterostomy”. In his later years, he depended for bowel function entirely on enemas, a procedure of which he highly approved, as it facilitated meditation.
Most of his shorter novels are too bizarre to do him justice, although they have paragraphs of dazzling originality – his science-fiction anti-vivisection novel Morwyn (1937), which contains much abstract debate about the nature of sadism, also provides arresting descriptions of the behaviour of his dog that justify the whole crazy enterprise.
