Priors as beliefs: a wrong turning?
“Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture & Value (1980) It is often said that priors in Bayesian statistics are ‘beliefs’. I maintain this analogy is misguided and unhelpful. The nature of ‘belief’ remains controversial but can be said “to refer to the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true....