BFF⁷ postponed

the “myth of the miracle machine”

In what appears to be a regular contribution of his to Nature, Daniel Sarewitz recently wrote a “personal take on events” that I find quite reactionary, the more because it comes from an academic. And I wonder why Nature chose to publish his opinion piece. Every other month! The arguments of the author is that basic science should be defunded in favour of “use-inspired” research, “mission oriented” programmes, “societal needs and socially valuable knowledge”… The reason being that it is a better use of public money and that scientists are just another interest group that should not be left to its own device. This is not a new tune, calls to cut down funding fundamental research emerge regularly as an easily found culprit for saving “taxpayer money”, and it is the simplest mean of rejecting a research proposal by blaming its lack of clear applicability. Of course, when looking a bit wider, one can check this piece bemoaning the Democrat inclinations of most scientists. Or that one that science should sometimes give way to religion. With the definitive argument that, for most people, the maths behind scientific models are so complex that they must turn to an act of faith… Yes, I do wonder at Nature providing Sarewitz with such a wide-ranging tribune.

fiducial on a string

A very short note in arXiv today by Gunnar Taraldsen and Bo Henry Lindqvist (NTU, Norway). With the above title. I find the note close to unreadable, I must say, as the notations are not all or well- defined. The problem starts from Teddy Seidenfeld [whom I met in Harvard around Dutch book arguments] arguing about the lack of unicity of fiducial distributions in a relatively simple setting. Actually the note is also inspired from Bayes, Fiducial and Frequentist, and comments from Teddy, a talk I apparently missed by taking a flight back home too early!

What I find surprising in this note is that the “fiducial on a string” is a conditional distribution on the parameter space restricted to a  curve, derived from the original fiducial distribution by a conditioning argument. Except that since the conditioning is on a set of measure zero, this conditional is not only not-unique, but it is completely undefined and arbitrary, since changing it does not modify the properties of the joint distribution.

objective and subjective RSS Read Paper next week

Andrew Gelman and Christian Hennig will give a Read Paper presentation next Wednesday, April 12, 5pm, at the Royal Statistical Society, London, on their paper “Beyond subjective and objective in statistics“. Which I hope to attend and else to write a discussion. Since the discussion (to published in Series A) is open to everyone, I strongly encourage ‘Og’s readers to take a look at the paper and the “radical” views therein to hopefully contribute to this discussion. Either as a written discussion or as comments on this very post.

Fourth Bayesian, Fiducial, and Frequentist Conference

Next May 1-3, I will attend the 4th Bayesian, Fiducial and Frequentist Conference at Harvard University (hopefully not under snow at that time of year), which is a meeting between philosophers and statisticians about foundational thinking in statistics and inference under uncertainty. This should be fun! (Registration is now open.)