2016-12-14

Top 30 Atheist Blogs And Websites

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Vridar is proudly ranked high among Feedspot‘s “Best Atheist Blogs List

Feedspot explains:

The Best Atheist blogs from thousands of top Atheist blogs in our index using search and social metrics. Data will be refreshed once a week.

These blogs are ranked based on following criteria

  • Google reputation and Google search ranking
  • Influence and popularity on Facebook, twitter and other social media sites
  • Quality and consistency of posts.
  • Feedspot’s editorial team and expert review

Thank you, Feedspot! This is all the more unexpected given that for the past month we have been in a relative hiatus made necessary by everything associated my own major move interstate and miscellaneous special family occasions. Looking forward to returning to “normal” very soon.


2016-12-06

What’s the Difference Between Frequentism and Bayesianism? (Part 2)

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Tim Widowfield

Witch of Endor by Nikolay Ge
Witch of Endor by Nikolay Ge

In the previous post we began to discuss the fundamental difference between the Bayesian and frequentist approaches to probability. A Bayesian defines probability as a subjective belief about the world, often expressed as a wagering proposition. “How much am I willing to bet that the next card will give me a flush?”

To a frequentist, however, probability exists in the physical world. It doesn’t change, and it isn’t subjective. Probability is the hard reality that over the long haul, if you flip a fair coin it will land heads up half the time and tails up the other half. We call them “frequentists,” because they maintain they can prove that the unchanging parameter is fixed and objectively true by measuring the frequency of repeated runs of the same event over and over.

Fairies and witches

But does objective probability really exist? After reading several books focused on subjective probability published in the past few decades, I couldn’t help noticing that Bruno de Finetti‘s Theory of Probability stands as a kind of watershed. In the preface, he says that objective probability, the very foundation of frequentism, is a superstition. If he’s correct, that means it isn’t just bad science; it’s anti-science. He writes: Continue reading “What’s the Difference Between Frequentism and Bayesianism? (Part 2)”