I realized that I owe you something. In a prior post, I invoked some Bayesian ideas to contrast with boostrapping analysis of high-variance data. (More precisely, it was high log-variance data for which there was a problem, as described in our preprint.) But the Bayesian discussion in my earlier post was pretty quick. Although there are a number of good, brief introductions to Bayesian statistics, many get quite technical.
Here, I’d like to introduce Bayesian thinking in absolutely the simplest way possible. We want to understand the point of it, and get a better grip on those mysterious priors.