Bayesian moons made of green cheese

12 Feb, 2019 at 17:58 | Posted in Statistics & Econometrics | Comments Off on Bayesian moons made of green cheese

In other words, if a decision-maker thinks something cannot be true and interprets this to mean it has zero probability, he will never be influenced by any data, which is surely absurd. So leave a little probability for the moon being made of green cheese; it can be as small as 1 in a million, but have it there since otherwise an army of astronauts returning with samples of the said cheese will leave you unmoved.

To get the Bayesian probability calculus going you sometimes have to assume strange things — so strange that you actually should rather start wondering if maybe there is something wrong with your theory …