Why You Think Like a Bayesian but Were Taught Like a Frequentist

While formal education teaches statistics through the lens of frequentism, which defines probability by repeating an experiment infinitely, our brains are naturally wired to think like Bayesians. We constantly update our initial beliefs with new evidence, whether guessing the price of a chocolate bar in a new store or anxiously waiting for a text back after a first date. Historically, frequentism was favored in science because it aimed for objectivity, rejecting the seemingly subjective "prior beliefs" required by the Bayesian framework. However, the true barrier to widespread Bayesian adoption was a notoriously difficult-to-compute integral at the heart of its core theorem, a mathematical challenge that kept the approach on the sidelines for much of the 20th century.