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Well, you have to make some prior assumption, and the uniform seems intuitively reasonable. But I don't think there's a theoretical justification that says the
by rcthompson 9y ago
Well, you have to make some prior assumption, and the uniform seems intuitively reasonable. But I don't think there's a theoretical justification that says the uniform is an inherently better choice than anything else. It's still an arbitrary choice.
- newen 9y agoI am sure there has been lots of theoretical justification in favor of the uniform prior in Bayesian statistics, especially for bounded intervals. I am not a stats guy though, so I can't show you the justifications in detail. The whole argument though was that you are not using prior information. And so you cannot assign prior probabilities in a more intelligent manner than uniform. If you do use prior information like say, that lots of people have tried to solve for P=NP and have not succeeded, you can assign a higher probability to P/=NP. But that's only if you assume that people trying to solve for P=NP and not succeeding makes it more likely that P/=NP is true. It is an assumption that you have to make explicit and this is the assumption that is being argued for in the OP article. The thing is that without having priors, you can't do better than uniform.