“Bayesian methods,” contrasts it with other methods, and applies it to some interesting and common measurement problems (Chapter 10).

the law of insufficient reason (meaning that without enough data to assign specific probabilities, equal ones would suffice). Despite their venerable history, equal probabilities would become a lightning rod for complaints that Bayes was quantifying ignorance.

‘Necessarily,’ wrote David Howie, a historian of statistics, ‘these inferences were tentative. They were advanced not with certainty but with degrees of confidence that were updated or modified to account for new information.’95 That is: they were done in a Bayesian fashion. Each time Jeffreys got new information, he updated his prior confidence in