5 ms·
I noticed a shift in my attitude in strong priors when I switched from academia to industry and have only recently realized why. When doing an analysis in an a
by parpfish 3y ago
I noticed a shift in my attitude in strong priors when I switched from academia to industry and have only recently realized why.
When doing an analysis in an academic setting, the goal is to get a paper past reviewers to be published. And the reviewers were adversaries that were trying to disprove your work (at best these were helpful critique; at worst they were bad-faith nit-pickers that were looking for any excuse to reject). If you did a Bayesian analysis in this setting, the mean reviewers would just just point to the priors and say "you can't justify that choice, REJECT".
But in industry, there are no reviewers serving as adversarial gatekeepers. You may present analyses to a skeptical audience, but if they disagreed with your model priors you would work with them to come up with a mutually agreeable model because you're all on the same team.
- silent_cal 3y agoIt's funny because there's really no difference between arbitrarily setting priors and arbitrarily selecting a p-value. Both are basically just a line you draw beforehand to see if it gets crossed.
- BugsJustFindMe 3y ago> But in industry, there are no reviewers serving as adversarial gatekeepers. You may present analyses to a skeptical audience, but if they disagreed with your model priors you would work with them to come up with a mutually agreeable model because you're all on the same team. This experience may not be representative. The web is absolutely filled with anecdotes of gatekeeping and obstructionism within engineering orgs. The phrase "internal politics" comes immediately to mind.
- whatshisface 3y agoInternal politics have nothing to do with the content, so I think their point stands. There's no reason not to do a Bayesian analysis, if your proposal fails it will certainly be for another reason.
- vundercind 3y agoMost folks’ experience of primary and secondary education, and maybe also undergrad, is similar, with the instructor as the adversary. How much more collaborative and forgiving the “scary” “real world” is, was a real surprise after so many years of school.
- whatshisface 3y agoIt can easily go too far though, especial when somebody doesn't want to accept criticism. Then you're not a team player if you check the arithmetic.
- williamdclt 3y agoIt’s definitely a learned soft skill to direct interactions to be collaborative rather than adversarial. It’s too easy to fall into an adversarial discussion because of differing opinions (eg about code architecture) when really you’re on the same team. I try to keep in mind (and convey) the image of “you and me side to side against the problem on the whiteboard” rather than “you and me against each other”
- 3abiton 3y agoReally interesting insight, yo add, in academia you are trying to prove yourself to the reviewers, wheras in business settings, you are offering services. Different goals.