The Quest for Truth

Bayes, Reproducibility and the Quest for Truth

We consider the use of default priors in the Bayes methodology for seeking information concerning the true value of a parameter. By default prior, we mean the mathematical prior as initiated by Bayes [Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 53 (1763) 370–418] and pursued by Laplace [Théorie Analytique des Probabilités (1812) Courcier], Jeffreys [Theory of Probability (1961) Clarendon Press], Bernardo [J. ...

The Quest for Ground Truth in Musical Artist Similarity

It would be interesting and valuable to devise an automatic measure of the similarity between two musicians based only on an analysis of their recordings. To develop such a measure, however, presupposes some ‘ground truth’ training data describing the actual similarity between certain pairs of artists that constitute the desired output of the measure. Since artist similarity is wholly subjectiv...

Commentary: forensic education and the quest for truth.

Forensic psychiatry is the subspecialty that applies psychiatric knowledge to answering legal questions. There are ethics dilemmas inherent in its practice and in functioning at the interface of psychiatry and the law. The development of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL) Ethics Guidelines was an effort to assist forensic psychiatrists in dealing with these dilemmas and the m...

Science and Religion in Quest of Truth

Will Truth Out ? — An Advisor ’ s Quest To Appear Competent ∗

This paper deals with the problem of providing adequate incentives to an advisor who might be tempted to conceal his true opinion because of his desire to appear competent. We show that if a competent advisor never makes mistakes, the incentive problem will disappear if the time horizon is long enough. If a competent advisor makes infrequent mistakes, the incentive problem will disappear for in...