> A sincere thank you for the gentle corrections; I’ve taken them to heart, and you can be confident I will avoid such mischaracterizations in the future!<p>Why Randall should almost apologize for a comic is a mystery to me.
Oh! I didn't realize this was Gelman's blog. He is, at least, a dude who seriously knows what he's talking about. <a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Gelman" rel="nofollow">http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Gelman</a>
His name is spelled "Munroe", not "Monroe". Interestingly, the correct spelling of his name is literally the first thing you see when you click that link.
LW discussion of the comic: <a href="http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/fe5/xkcd_frequentist_vs_bayesians/" rel="nofollow">http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/fe5/xkcd_frequentist_vs...</a>
Wait, hold on. Isn't the joke that the Bayesian statistician knows that paying back 50 dollars is meaningless if the sun exploded and we're all going to die? If we live, he gets 50 dollars. That's what I got out of it.
<i>>More importantly, now that both you and perhaps Scott Adams have commented on my blog, I am very happy. If only I could think of some way of getting Berke Breathed to comment here, I think I could just retire!</i><p>Could someone point me to the "perhaps Scott Adams" comment? (is it in response to another blog entry?)
AFAIK, the breakdown is this:<p>Frequentist is a special case of Bayesian. The Frequentists have much more mature tools, because they've been working on them since Gauss's day. Bayesians (especially less experienced ones) may claim that that Frequentists are old school, outdated, and don't teach undergrads the new Bayesian way of doing things.<p>Bayesian methods are more flexible and general, but are often slow (computationally), and can be too flexible. A Bayesian can prove anything. Frequentists have trouble eliminating some biases (because their tools aren't as flexible), but also have trouble purposely (or subconsciously) biasing their results.<p>I'm not going into the specifics of the methods here, just the source of their disagreements.
I love this line.<p><i>The truth is, I genuinely didn’t realize Frequentists and Bayesians were actual camps of people—all of whom are now emailing me.</i>