Living in a Bayesian world: scientific deduction through inductionTI Living in a Bayesian world: scientific deduction through induction

摘要

Every day we wakeup with an existing model of the world in our head, incorporating any new data into the model, with a nip here and a tuck there, permitting us to seamlessly (and subconsciously) estimate likelihood of a variety of events. This system has served us well in understanding the world we live in, but is difficult to apply towards objective, unbiased assessment of scientific problems. Almost by definition, the models we use to understand the world are subjective, emerging inferentially from our cumulative experiences. For example, that the sun rises every day from the east permits us to infer that it should rise every day from the east, and every such observation further strengthens the inference.