"Joseph Blitzstein, a statistician at Harvard, delves into the utility of Bayesian analysis in his popular course “Statistics 110: Probability.” For a primer, in lecture one, he says: “Math is the logic of certainty, and statistics is the logic of uncertainty. Everyone has uncertainty. If you have 100 percent certainty about everything, there is something wrong with you.”"
A decent and brief read about Bayesian analysis. There's a link to a series of lectures about probability and statistics, too.
FistOfStone: interesting ... it has me thinking about randomness, predetermination, chaos ... the classical deterministic model has the universe behaving like clockwork, everything theoretically predictable ... then you have this odd idea of "randomness," which would be what, something happening for no reason? then you have chaos ... you seem to suggest chaos belongs to a deterministic and theoretically predictable universe ... i think polkinghorne disagrees, but i'm not sure ... anyway, we should also have humility in the realm of different ways to think about predictability and causation ... and bayesian analysis would look philosophically different depending on our philosophical and scientifically axiomatic background
FistOfStone: it's also related to process philosophy and process theology ... process philosophers like charles hartshorne make this argument: "cause" is ambiguous, it can mean necessary condition OR sufficient condition ... my parents' existence was a necessary condition for my existence, but it doesn't follow that given their existence, mine was inevitable (it was necessary but not sufficient) ... we can then think microscopically, all the way down i guess, and he claims that necessary conditions are the norm, sufficient conditions are rare ... which makes most events look like they are "open" to some degree, hence they look like the choices of a mind ... i'm not sympathetic to this line of argument but hartshorne is sharp and it's not easy to say where he's wrong
"Joseph Blitzstein, a statistician at Harvard, delves into the utility of Bayesian analysis in his popular course “Statistics 110: Probability.” For a primer, in lecture one, he says: “Math is the logic of certainty, and statistics is the logic of uncertainty. Everyone has uncertainty. If you have 100 percent certainty about everything, there is something wrong with you.”"
A decent and brief read about Bayesian analysis. There's a link to a series of lectures about probability and statistics, too.