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Essay on Bayes

 
Paper:ewp-game/9906002
From:    
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 17:28:27 -0500 (CDT)

Abstract:
It has been said, fairly plausibly, that "Bayesian inference is one of the most widely known eponyms in all of science". But unlike common scientific eponyms, it is by no means clear exactly what "Bayesian" means, and what it has to do with Bayes. "Bayesian", and the dozen or so words and phrases which are usually associated with it, seem to be more like unspecific words of the English language, deployed by an author as he wishes, rather than fixed technical terms. The obscurity of the language, relative to the precise meanings associated with, say, Newton's laws or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, is matched by the obscurity of the history - the virtually unknown Bayes, the posthumous paper, the impenetrable and incoherent style, the muddled logic, the virtual silence on his work for 200 years, the sudden emergence in the last several decades, not of new knowledge, but of new Bayesian additions to the vocabulary. This note surveys the notions and the history. It concludes that the Bayesian vocabulary is vague and pretentious, and serves no useful purpose.

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EconWPA began as a conversation between Bob Parks and Larry Blume on January 28, 1993. I located Paul Ginsparg's archive (then xxx.lanl.gov) and he graciously installed his software on a Sun Sparc system which was supporting the department of economics email and computation. EconWPA began accepting papers July 1, 1993 and had ftp, email, gopher and web interfaces. The web interface for submissions was engineered into existence in July 1995. A complete and catastrophic machine failure in 1999 caused the loss of EconWPA's email new paper announcment service at which time there were over 15,000 subscriptions with over 8,000 unique email addresses.

In 2005, Arts and Sciences commandeered the computing services that I had provided to the Department of Economics since 1987. Some might say that the department was sold out, others would (erroneously) claim that centralization is efficient, and still others would claim that I have few marketing skills.

I was told that I could keep operating EconWPA (as well as many other services including rfe.wustl.edu, barnett.wustl.edu, and three RePEc servers) but I would receive no support (hardware, software, or anthing else) and (as had been the case) no compensation. At that point, given the apparent low valuation of my activities by the department, and university, it made no sense for me to continue operating EconWPA or other services.

Thanks to all who have supported EconWPA in the past.

A Chinese curse states May you live in intersting times. I have. Bob Parks - Jan 2006