Earlier quoted context omitted.
"giving a point estimate and an associated quantification of its uncertainty is one of the most basic statistical tasks". My argument is that this is only true in a frequentist framing. A bayesian framing would ask, "why do you need a point estimate when you have the posterior?" In the cookie-jar case, what do you actually need to do in the real world that a confidence interval of jars helps you with? Do you win a pr…
Well, I am not really interested in cookie jars. But I am interested in, for example, particle physics. There we need need simple ways to communicate point estimates and the associated uncertainties for various parameters of nature. Intervals are a convenient way to do this. Frequentist confidence intervals have the virtue that they will cover the true parameter at the nominal rate. Bayesian credible intervals in gen…
Okay, but what do you _do_ with a confidence interval once you have it? It's just an abstract object that can't be used to take your knowledge and make better predictions about the future. If I tell you "This new particle decays with a half life of 28 years with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 5 years", can you take that information and use it to estimate the age of an object that started with 236 particles and now has 182 particles?
> this is not a question about estimating an unknown parameter of a distribution, so it's not statistical in the sense Wasserman is talking about
And a frequentist confidence interval doesn't answer a question about how you should update your knowledge so you can make better predictions in the future, so it's not statistical in the sense bayesians talk about.