alt Hacker News> optimum properties for estimating a posterior distribution
Circular reasoning: that's true only if the posterior is normal, or if your "optimal" is defined by second moments. In infinite variance cases, the best estimator can be median or an alpha moment for alpha < 2, but yikes the math is much more difficult.
-- A mathematician who has indeed fallen into the beauty trap
> Circular reasoning: that's true only if the posterior is normal, or if your "optimal" is defined by second moments.
That doesn't sound right, it is an error minimising technique. Are we not talking about minimising mean square errors? Why would the posterior need to be normal? And why would optimal need to be defined by 2nd moments?