Friday, Session 1, 1:00 to 2:30 p

Readers of The American Statistician may recognize in my title a salute to David Moore’s (1997) “Bayes for Beginners? Some Reasons to Hesitate.” In his paper Moore detailed four main reasons why he judged it at best premature to teach Bayesian methods in a first statistics course. Since the publication of Moore’s paper, more than ten years have passed, during which time our profession has been changing rapidly. In my talk, I’ll revisit Moore’s four concerns, with an emphasis on whether Bayesian inference can be made accessible to beginning students. In the context of that question, I’ll sketch a simulation-based approach that allows us to teach Bayes without his Theorem.