Yikes. Certification for probabilists. Certified methods. We’d still be following the frequentist methods of the first half of the 20th century if we had certification back then.
One of the interesting bits of The Theory That Would Not Die is that the actuaries—the people with the existing set of certifications, which you seem to find so repugnant—were some of the only Bayesians in the world, they just didn’t use that term or realize that’s what their methods were based on.
IIRC, the book gives it as a much more direct meaning: the original actuaries were forced by Teddy Roosevelt or someone’s programs to quickly come up with policies for things that had never been covered before and so could not be given clear frequentist justifications, so they used Bayesian methods.
Yikes. Certification for probabilists. Certified methods. We’d still be following the frequentist methods of the first half of the 20th century if we had certification back then.
One of the interesting bits of The Theory That Would Not Die is that the actuaries—the people with the existing set of certifications, which you seem to find so repugnant—were some of the only Bayesians in the world, they just didn’t use that term or realize that’s what their methods were based on.
Yes.
Cf. A History of Bayes’ Theorem.
“Inside every non-Bayesian …”
IIRC, the book gives it as a much more direct meaning: the original actuaries were forced by Teddy Roosevelt or someone’s programs to quickly come up with policies for things that had never been covered before and so could not be given clear frequentist justifications, so they used Bayesian methods.