No need. The referees will do it for you.

I thought it was “a self-sealing fallacy”, or the like. Haven’t looked up this person. thanks.

The behavior you describe is a nice example of Surber’s logical rudeness.

Congratulations, you’re an anti-realist.

Could you please tell me the name of that physicist you mention above, who seems to question the role of calculus in physics, I would be very interested to read his arguments.

let me start by saying that I enjoy this discussion a lot.

First posting:
Of course in order to back up the universal claim you’d need to have an argument against the possibility of existence of uses of statistics that do not fall in the subjective Bayes category. Having nice examples that some uses indeed do belong there doesn’t contribute much. However:

> I find myself willing to believe that
> these methods are useful
> and am interested in applying the calculus
> of subjective probability
> and prevision to these statements,
> to understand their consquences.

I think that that’s a fine project (and I’d be happy to read your paper; can you find my email address?). I’d guess that it will lead to positive illustrations of your statement but I don’t see how it could lead to the impossibility argument mentioned above.
Furthermore, in the cases in which you suceed, I may not agree about what this implies regarding the role of subjective Bayes. If something in statistics is done from a different point of view and you are able to reformulate it in suvbjective Bayesian terms, I could argue that a) this is not an achievement of subjective Bayes but of a different interpretation of probability regardless, because although you reformulated it, one may not have found it having only subjective Bayes at disposal, b) by reformulating it in terms of subjective Bayes, you actually change its content.

See this, for example:
> Not much I think, unless we find ourselves willing to assign a
> 0.975 subjective probability that the neural network will classify
> the next case correctly and a 0.958 subjective probability that the
> support vector machine will classify the next case correctly.

The frequentist interpretation would be: “*If* test and training data are iid and the data we see in the future as well, then these numbers are the best estimators we have of the true correct prediction probability.” Note that I don’t have to believe that the iid assumption indeed holds for this to be useful. What I in fact believe is that iid is probably wrong but I have no clue in which way. So my subjective probabilities are definitely *not* 0.975 and 0.958, but in absence of any better estimates I will still use their *ranking* for deciding which classifier to use.
Now you can say that therefore implicitly I have some kind of prior assignment allowing for other structures than iid to hold and again subjective Bayes could be applied (I’m quite sure I’d arrive at lower personal probabilities for both classifiers but I wouldn’t bother to elicit them because that’s probably a mess – and remember from before that I wouldn’t agree to the statement “I have a true subjective probability even without knowing it before I have bothered to construct one explicitly”). Fair enough. But this wouldn’t allow you to reconstruct the specific numbers 0.975 and 0.958 from a subjective Bayes perspective, whereas I can give a perfect frequentist explanation for what they are, despite them not being my subjective probabilities. Or you could reconstruct these numbers, but declaring them “subjective probabilities” means that they differ from those of the frequentist using the numbers with an attitude like mine.

Second posting:
Good point. I don’t have the time right now to discuss alternative devices (I have thought about at least one of them at some point in the past and one can find counterexamples there, too). Anyway, as long as you are operationalist, you have to specify a device that then *defines* what you mean. You can’t say, when confronted with problems with the device, that the device is not perfect in measuring the real thing, because there is no real thing apart from what the device is measuring. You can switch to another device, OK, I grant you that.