G.A. Barnard: 23 Sept.1915 – 9 Aug.2002
Today is George Barnard’s birthday. I met him in the 1980s and we corresponded off and on until 1999. Here’s a snippet of his discussion with Savage (1962) (link below [i]) that connects to issues often taken up on this blog: stopping rules and the likelihood principle. (It’s a slightly revised reblog of an earlier post.) I’ll post some other items related to Barnard this week, in honor of his birthday.
Happy Birthday George!
Barnard: I have been made to think further about this issue of the stopping rule since I first suggested that the stopping rule was irrelevant (Barnard 1947a,b). This conclusion does not follow only from the subjective theory of probability; it seems to me that the stopping rule is irrelevant in certain circumstances. Since 1947 I have had the great benefit of a long correspondence—not many letters because they were not very frequent, but it went on over a long time—with Professor Bartlett, as a result of which I am considerably clearer than I was before. My feeling is that, as I indicated [on p. 42], we meet with two sorts of situation in applying statistics to data One is where we want to have a single hypothesis with which to confront the data. Do they agree with this hypothesis or do they not? Now in that situation you cannot apply Bayes’s theorem because you have not got any alternatives to think about and specify—not yet. I do not say they are not specifiable—they are not specified yet. And in that situation it seems to me the stopping rule is relevant. Continue reading
Error Statistics Philosophy 