Quote-unquote

“From the subjective standpoint, no assertion is possible without a priori opinion, but the variety of possible opinions makes problems depending on different opinions interesting.” Bruno de Finetti, 1951

Yesterday, I received this email:

I’m checking the following reference de Finetti, B. (1972) Probability, Induction and Statistics. J. Wiley, New York in your book Bayesian Choice 2nd edition (on the pages 46, 115, 160, as mentioned in author index). But I don’t see this reference is cited on any of the three pages. Would you please check if this de Finetti’s book is cited somewhere in your book or it actually should not appear in the bibliography?

I don’t see any review on amazon about this Finetti’s book. Since this book is cited in your book, I want to see how you describe this book. In any case, if you are familiar with this book, would you please comment a little bit on it? For example, what are important points from this book that are still relevant today?

to which I replied that

…indeed Probability, Induction and Statistics should not appear in the reference list of Bayesian Choice: I have read though parts of Theory of Probability vol. 1 (which is quoted on page 115) but I am not familiar with this other book which dates from 1955 (Italian version). Maybe you could look at Cifarelli & Regazzini’s survey of Bruno de Finetti’s work (Statistical Science, 1996, 11(4), 253-282) for a detailed coverage of the work.

Reading from this survey (and following Dennis Lindley’s advice), this book could be another topic for my advanced lectures at CREST but it will have to wait a few years, until I am satisfied with my coverage of Jaynes’s Probability Theory.