Bayesian Methods in Nuclear Physics

A workshop on Bayesian Methods in Nuclar Physics was held at the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Washington in Seattle from June 13 to July 8, 2016. These pages continue the discussion initiated at this program. The workshop was the number 4 of the ISNET (Information and Statistics in Nuclear Experiments and Theory) family of meetings. Talks given at ISNET-3 and ISNET-5 are also listed here.

Goal: For statisticians and nuclear practitioners to jointly explore how Bayesian inference can enable progress on the frontiers of nuclear physics and open up new directions for the field.


Statistics (Bayesian and other) Humor


Web Comics


Quotes (mostly Bayesian, mostly humorous)

Pierre Simon de Laplace, in "Theorie Analytique des Probabilites"

"The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability."

Ronald Fisher (1938)

"To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of."

Louis Lyons

"Bayesians address the question everyone is interested in by using assumptions no-one believes, while frequentists use impeccable logic to deal with an issue of no interest to anyone."

I.J. Good

"The subjectivist (i.e. Bayesian) states his judgements, whereas the objectivist sweeps them under the carpet by calling assumptions knowledge, and he basks in the glorious objectivity of science."

I.J. Good quoting Herman Rubin

"I agree with Herman Rubin's remark, at the Waterloo conference on scientific inference in 1970, that a 'good Bayesian does better than a non-Bayesian but a bad Bayesian gets clobbered.' "

???

"A Bayesian is one who, vaguely expecting a horse, and catching a glimpse of a donkey, strongly believes he has seen a mule."

Brad Efron (appropriate for physicists)

"Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it."

Donald A. Berry

"Bayesian statistics is difficult in the sense that thinking is difficult."

G. E. P. Box & G. C. Tiao

"In the first place, the best way to convey to the experimenter what the data tell him about θ is to show him a picture of the posterior distribution."

Maurice G. Kendal (referring to Bayesians)

"If they would only do as he [Bayes] did and publish posthumously we should all be saved a lot of trouble."

Nate Silver, from "The Signal and the Noise"
"Prediction is difficult for us for the same reason that it is so important: it is where objective and subjective reality intersect. Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the differenceā€¯

Selected quotes from Andrew Gelman's statistics course:

"This guy comes to me and says 'I have prior information and data, and I'd like to combine them, and I heard Bayes is a good way to do that.' Well, that's as good as it gets! Normally you want to do Bayes but they won't let you because they're like [in stupid voice] 'ugh, it's subjective, I'm not allowed to, it's subjective.' But here this guy is saying 'I have prior information and data and I want to combine them'! I'm like, 'I can do that! I was trained to do that!'"
"As you know from teaching introductory statistics, 30 is infinity."
"Suppose there's someone you want to get to know better, but you have to talk to all her friends too. They're like the nuisance parameters."

Jokes involving physicists and statisticians

Attributed to Gary C. Ramseyer's First Internet Gallery of Statistics Jokes.

One day there was a fire in a wastebasket in the office of the Dean of Sciences. In rushed a physicist, a chemist, and a statistician. The physicist immediately starts to work on how much energy would have to be removed from the fire to stop the combustion. The chemist works on which reagent would have to be added to the fire to prevent oxidation. While they are doing this, the statistician is setting fires to all the other wastebaskets in the office. "What are you doing?" the others demand. The statistician replies, "Well, to solve the problem, you obviously need a larger sample size."

An old one . . .

A mathematician, a physicist and a statistician went hunting for deer. When they chanced upon one buck lounging about, the mathematician fired first, missing the buck's nose by a few inches. The physicist then tried his hand, and missed the tail by a wee bit. The statistician started jumping up and down saying "We got him! We got him!"