Hi. My interest in Jaynes started years ago while getting my Ph.D. in electrical engineering. Downloading "Probability Theory: the Logic of Science" cleared up...
My website for errata and commentary of PT:TLOS has been moved to http://leuther-analytics.com/jaynes/. I've also updated it; see "What's New" for details. I...
Jaynes doesn't say much at all about how, in general, to find the parameter values that produce desired expectations in constructing a maximum-entropy prior....
I've just updated my PT:TLOS web site. The new information includes - additional commentary on computing the parameters of a maxent distribution - additional...
Last weekend I read Donald Gillies' "Philosophical Theories of Probability", 2000. While he covered the twentieth century, he unfortunately chose Keynes as the...
A short introduction, and then a problem: I am an electronic engineer and I have been doing years of research and development on the inference problem that is...
Hi, Niko. It's not clear to me what you're trying to get at with your post. Yes, sometimes data makes you less confident in your ability to predict what will...
... Your constraint does not uniquely determine the distribution. Let x = wine/(wine + water); then any distribution for x that is symmetric about x = 1/2...
... What advantage is there to pretending to be more sure of yourself than you actually are or have any right to be? The kind of situation you're talking about...
... Hi Dan and Kevin I was certainly not trying to manufacture a "paradox". I was just trying to get my head around a somewhat surprising fact. (I am in a...
... The source of the problem here is that the term "knowledge" is misleading. Replace "knowledge" with "certainty" -- a more descriptive term -- and the...
... Thanks. This is suggestion certainly helps. ... Sorry. I put this in the wrong way. I was trying to paraphrase the meaning of "expected" and I didn't do it...
Another thought on language usage: When using the term "THE answer" I think this should denote the latter : "the answer of the oracle". The former type of...
Still working with yes/no questions and (Fisher) sufficient statistics and posteriors (PT:TLOS Chapter 8): Fact 1: A statistic S(data) is sufficient for this...
... about ... I grant that I have not demonstrated a transformation group or symmetry property which determines the prior. First, we'd have to decide whether...
... Yes, the Jeffreys prior seems plausible, but so does the uniform distribution over x = wine/(wine + water). No, this is not a show-stopper problem for the...
... I don't think this is a meaningful thing to do. A sufficient statistic is a function of the *data* only, and relates to the sampling distribution /...
I just found this link to the book in PDF form: http://www.stat.washington.edu/hoff/courses/stat564-2001/JaynesBook/ (I have received my physical copy of the...
... Thanks Kevin. Below I'll concede your point but then motivate under what circumstances the posterior IS a statistic: 1. An immediate disqualification for a...
I stumbled on this today: http://francisperey.com/QM/index.shtml, from which I quote: "One of the most interesting application by Jaynes[13] of his group ...
I found a passage in PTTLOS that shed some light on my first issue that I raised in this group. See "13.5 The Honest Weatherman". Here the situation is...
... The last line is incorrect: only events that actually happen are relevant. It should instead read, "If in the extreme he gives p=0 for an event that does...
I read up a bit more about "proper scoring rules". See e.g.: "Inductive Inference and the Maximum Entropy Priciple" by N.C. Dalkey in Maximum Entropy and...
And here is a publication where "proper scoring" is actually applied to weather forecasting: It starts with the following sentence! "Operational weather...
... Bernardo and Smith's book, _Bayesian Theory_, has a nice discussion of this. They also have a nice discussion of de Finetti's Theorem (section 4.3),...
At times Jaynes's Robot vaguely irritated me, but I think I now understand why he used a robot. I have also found a very useful job for this robot. Why a...
... True. But given the vague nature of the question, it shouldn't be surprising that there are different plausible priors. ... More work is needed, but I...
