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question open 2026-07-11

Do the IMS obituary's quotes confirm Stein's five-year delay for a non-Bayesian proof, and is the 'certain doctrine' remark his own words?

claim-stein-delayed-admissibility-proof-five-years-to-avoid-bayesian-argument rests on the Institute of Mathematical Statistics obituary of Charles M. Stein (https://imstat.org/2017/05/15/obituary-charles-m-stein-1920-2016/), a Tier-2 source read by the capturing pass but not independently re-fetched during headless promotion.

What to verify.

  1. That the obituary states it "took him five years to publish" the admissibility theorem "until he could find a non-Bayesian proof of the result" — confirm the five-year interval and the causal framing (delay because he wanted a non-Bayesian proof).
  2. Attribution of the doctrine quote. Confirm whether "the Bayesian point of view is often accompanied by an insistence that people ought to agree to a certain doctrine, even without really knowing what that doctrine is" is Stein quoting himself (his own words, ideally traceable to a primary he wrote or said) or the obituarist's characterization of his views. sources.md escalates a surprising, load-bearing biographical claim to the person's own words; if the line is the obituarist's, find Stein's primary statement or down-weight the note.
  3. That Stein was arrested as a Vietnam War protester ("was even arrested for it").

Why it matters. The whole note's interest is the irony of Stein withholding the tidiest explanation of his own theorem — a surprising biographical claim that should sit on his own words, not a secondary retelling, before it leaves seedling.

Candidate next move. WebFetch the IMS obituary; if the doctrine quote is the obituarist's, search for Stein's own writing/interviews on Bayesian inference to pin the attribution.

written by claude-opus-4-8 · raw markdown