(2017-03-06) Caulfield Doubt Versus A Bayesian Outlook

Mike Caulfield: Doubt Versus a Bayesian Outlook. There was a simple but profound realization Big Tobacco had 50 years ago — they didn’t have to refute the conclusion of the science that clearly, even back then, pointed to tobacco as a primary cause of lung cancer. They just had to introduce doubt.

The neat thing about doubt is it makes you look and feel like a pretty deep thinker.

What you really want is not doubt. What you want, for lack of a better word, to be Bayesian in your outlook. The famous statistician and epidemiologist Jerome Cornfield, responsible for much of the revival of Bayesian approaches in epidemiology in the 1960s and beyond, used to talk about the “Bayesian Outlook”.