RSS Read Paper

I had not attended a Read Paper session at the Royal Statistical Society in Errol Street for quite a while and hence it was quite a treat to be back there, especially as a seconder of the vote of thanks for the paper of Andrew Gelman and Christian Hennig. (I realised at this occasion that I had always been invited as a seconder, who in the tradition of the Read Papers is expected to be more critical of the paper. When I mentioned that to a friend, he replied they knew me well!) Listening to Andrew (with no slide) and Christian made me think further about the foundations of statistics and the reasons why we proceed as we do. In particular about the meaning and usages of a statistical model. Which is only useful (in the all models are wrong meme) if the purpose of the statistical analysis is completely defined. Searching for the truth does not sound good enough. And this brings us back full circle to decision theory in my opinion, which should be part of the whole picture and the virtues of openness, transparency and communication.

During his talk, Christian mentioned outliers as a delicate issue in modelling and I found this was a great example of a notion with no objective meaning, in that it is only defined in terms of or against a model, in that it addresses the case of observations not fitting a model instead of a model not fitting some observations, hence as much a case of incomplete (lazy?) modelling as an issue of difficult inference. And a discussant (whose Flemish name I alas do not remember) came with the slide below of an etymological reminder that originally (as in Aristotle) the meaning of objectivity and subjectivity were inverted, in that the later meant about the intrinsic nature of the object, while the former was about the perception of this object. It is only in the modern (?) era that Immanuel Kant reverted the meanings…Last thing, I plan to arXiv my discussions, so feel free to send me yours to add to the arXiv document. And make sure to spread the word about this discussion paper to all O-Bayesians as they should feel concerned about this debate!