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December 04, 2005
A Very Little Math
There's been some follow-up on a few blogs about my attempt to apply Bayes' method to a thorny historical subject: the history of Israel.
Jim West claimed ignorance and/or incompetence in math and, after directing the math minded to my post, ended with the following statement,
But before I depart, may I say, this combination is sort of the mental equivalent of mixing ice cream, olive oil, castor oil, and cat food and trying to eat it. But then again, I don't do math.... ;-)
Somehow, I think Jim, at a minimum, can balance his checkbook and that he uses informal judgments about probabilities all the time. In fact, my guess is that he used informal Bayesian analysis to compose the list of items that, if taken together, might not make a very good meal.
JPS at Idle Musings of a Bookseller said my post was "fascinating" and noted that the Bayesian algorithm was usually used in spam filters. Perhaps, consciously using a Bayesian thought process in historical studies can work as a way of dealing with historical spam.
When I told my daughter about the post, she said that the first thing she thinks of when she thinks of Bayes' method is how to determine what urn a colored jelly bean came from. She teaches Introduction to Philosophy and Critical Thinking courses once in a while and the jelly bean and urn example is often used to introduce beginning students to thinking in terms of probabilities. She thought my idea was interesting as an exercise in epistemology but worried that making guesses about the probabilities of the truth of various statements was a risky business. She was also concerned with how one should handle the counter probability. I had the same problem and resolved it with a simplification. On the other hand, she agreed that scholars make such estimates all the time and it may be useful to be explicit about them. We digressed into a discussion of induction, abduction and theory building that I will not bore you with here.
My real point in writing the post was to try to reinforce my suggestions of a thought process that might keep scholars from being overly certain or overly pessimistic and just might provide a way to tentatively resolve, pending additional evidence, some of the vexing disagreements.
Posted by DuaneSmith at December 4, 2005 02:39 PM | Read more on Archaeology |
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