Not all priors are equally defensible.
There appears to be a lot of Bayesian thumb sucking going on, maybe the first was Eli’s duo with Socrates , and, of course the bunnies know that James has been going on about uniform priors , and there is always Andrew Gelman . Now some, not Eli to be sure, might think that the recent election also gave a strong push to priors and p values and such. Nate Silver of the NYTimes blog five thirty eight has a book out which is reviewed in Science by Sam Wang and Ben Campbell, who also are in the election prognostication business. Silver, of course, is another guy with a Bayesian hammer looking for statistical nails and finding them all about. Eli thought a couple of paragraphs towards the end capture what the Rabett has been trying to beat into bunnies heads. Our biggest criticism of the book is that although statistics and Bayesian inference are powerful ideas, they are not a cure all. In his enthusiasm for the good Reverend, Silver has stuffed a fair bit into the same Procrustean bed. Silver uses the old fox-hedgehog analogy, saying that foxes (including himself) use many ideas, whereas hedgehogs focus on one subject only. But here he is a hedgehog with one big idea:statistics.
