Yeah. Getting them to admit the complicated bit is still there, and it's called knowing what the hell your prior probability actually is - and it's more complicated than that, because it's a distribution, not just a number - can be like pulling teeth.
(I have a couple of nice texts on the subject here, intended for second-year statistics courses. Really, most people's heads will explode on this stuff. So to explain it to aestheticians, I have to explain it without alluding to calculus. These books explain it as: the hard part in the frequentist approach is picking which cookbook method to use; the hard part in the Bayesian approach, from which the entire frequentist cookbook is mathematically derivable, is knowing what the hell your prior actually is. This is why statisticians get the dumptrucks full of money.)
I like the Bayes stuff because when I started to get the idea about it, I thought "um, wow, this is how me learning new things in my favoured aesthetic fields actually works. I think." I could be wrong, but it seems to.
It helps and hinders that Bayes is one thing but postmodernism just isn't.
I'm reading translations of the Derrida and explanatory guides that aren't much better. I'm trying to remember what I thought I knew before.
(Oh, and I discovered the Freudian thing in postmodern analysis was Guattari's fault. It may just be used as a trope now, but he actually thought it.)
[And goddamn Deleuze and Guattari are a mix of gold and crack.]
I still think I'm hot on the trail of something! Like I said: I've struck gold or I've struck crack. Possibly both. It should keep me nicely out of trouble, in any case.
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Date: 2011-07-31 06:22 pm (UTC)(I have a couple of nice texts on the subject here, intended for second-year statistics courses. Really, most people's heads will explode on this stuff. So to explain it to aestheticians, I have to explain it without alluding to calculus. These books explain it as: the hard part in the frequentist approach is picking which cookbook method to use; the hard part in the Bayesian approach, from which the entire frequentist cookbook is mathematically derivable, is knowing what the hell your prior actually is. This is why statisticians get the dumptrucks full of money.)
I like the Bayes stuff because when I started to get the idea about it, I thought "um, wow, this is how me learning new things in my favoured aesthetic fields actually works. I think." I could be wrong, but it seems to.
It helps and hinders that Bayes is one thing but postmodernism just isn't.
I'm reading translations of the Derrida and explanatory guides that aren't much better. I'm trying to remember what I thought I knew before.
(Oh, and I discovered the Freudian thing in postmodern analysis was Guattari's fault. It may just be used as a trope now, but he actually thought it.)
[And goddamn Deleuze and Guattari are a mix of gold and crack.]
I still think I'm hot on the trail of something! Like I said: I've struck gold or I've struck crack. Possibly both. It should keep me nicely out of trouble, in any case.