Do you think Jaynes was subconsciously motivated to become a leading advocate of Bayesian statistics because of the typographical similarity between his name and the Reverend’s? Was Richard Dawkins motivated to become an evolutionary psychologist because of the similarity between his name and Charles Darwin’s?
People have considered stronger versions of this, but it’s not clear to me how large the effect size is. (One would expect that the data collection would suffer from selection and confirmation bias.) With most subtle effects, it seems much easier to comment on the population-level effects than individual-level effects: perhaps Jaynes was nudged, but who can say whether the nudge would have made a difference or not?
Do you think Jaynes was subconsciously motivated to become a leading advocate of Bayesian statistics because of the typographical similarity between his name and the Reverend’s? Was Richard Dawkins motivated to become an evolutionary psychologist because of the similarity between his name and Charles Darwin’s?
People have considered stronger versions of this, but it’s not clear to me how large the effect size is. (One would expect that the data collection would suffer from selection and confirmation bias.) With most subtle effects, it seems much easier to comment on the population-level effects than individual-level effects: perhaps Jaynes was nudged, but who can say whether the nudge would have made a difference or not?