Bayes Quotes

“Under Bayes' theorem, no theory is perfect. Rather, it is a work in progress, always subject to further refinement and testing.”
― Nate Silver

“Critical thinking is an active and ongoing process. It requires that we all think like Bayesians, updating our knowledge as new information comes in.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

“In science, progress is possible. In fact, if one believes in Bayes' theorem, scientific progress is inevitable as predictions are made and as beliefs are tested and refined.”
― Nate Silver

“The combination of Bayes and Markov Chain Monte Carlo has been called "arguably the most powerful mechanism ever created for processing data and knowledge."
Almost instantaneously MCMC and Gibbs sampling changed statisticians' entire method of attacking problems. In the words of Thomas Kuhn, it was a paradigm shift. MCMC solved real problems, used computer algorithms instead of theorems, and led statisticians and scientists into a worked where "exact" meant "simulated" and repetitive computer operations replaced mathematical equations. It was a quantum leap in statistics.”
― Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy

“It is not the absolute degree of probability that matters, only its relative probability compared with other possible alternatives.

It is the simple suggestion that the only valid reason for rejecting a statistical hypothesis is that some alternative explains the observed events with a greater degree of probability.”
― Herbert I. Weisberg, Willful Ignorance: The Mismeasure of Uncertainty

“Yet Laplace had built his probability theory on intuition. As far as he was concerned, "essentially, the theory of probability is nothing but good common sense reduced to mathematics. It provides an exact appreciation of what sound minds feel with a kind of instinct, frequently without being able to account for it.”
― Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy

“Although Ramsey's and de Finetti's accounts endowed an agent's probabilities with a purely subjective status they knew that, for from rendering those quantities scientifically valueless, the condition of consistency combined with the rule of conditionalization supports a powerful new epistemology called Bayesian epistemology. Its scientific appeal lies principally in two features: (i) so-called Bayesian networks are not only extremely powerful diagnostic tools but also provide the formal basis of some of the most revolutionary developments in AI; (ii) in fairly general circumstances agents with different initial, or prior, probability functions will, with enough new information, find their updated probabilities converging; in this way, it is claimed, objectivity is realized as an emergent property of consistent subjective assignments.”
― Colin Howson

“All of our scientific reasoning, he said, is based on an assumption that the future will be like the past. But the only reason that we think the future is like the past is because, in the past, it always has been”
― Tom Chivers