Objective Bayes - Day 1
I’m taking a course by Jim Berger on Objective Bayesian Analysis. It begins with the motivation and history behind 250 years of objective Bayesian analysis, and today he shared an interesting tidbit.
It won’t be published publicly on my blog (yet) because Jim mentioned it could be an interesting reveal at Duke Statistical Science’s upcoming conference celebrating the 250 year anniversary of the publishing of Bayes’ Theorem.
Statistician / statistics historian Stephen Stigler was wondering why Bayes was interested in the problem which led to the 1763 paper. Stigler believes that Bayes was building a case against an argument recently made by Hume, who apparently gave a probability-based argument of why God does not exist.
It’s a pretty amazing thought that all of Bayesian statistics - and really most/all of statistics itself, since we’re pre-1900’s here - may have been launched by a mathematical debate about the existence of God!