Why should people in heaven be prevented from talking to the living? Certainly your living grandmother telling you to accept Jesus because you’ll get to heaven is no more coercive than your dead grandmother telling you to accept Jesus because you’ll get to heaven, but very likely more effective. Mothers could tell their daughters to stay on the straight and narrow. You could hear the screams of those enduring hellfire. This seems like an arbitrary rule that goes against God’s interests. Whereas atheism gets a complete answer for free. They have the dead.

It’s a free online text aimed at statistics students, math students, and/or computer science students, and so I would probably put it at intermediate level (don’t think it would fit under advanced), but it involves a bit of Python code, so it might be a bit out of reach for the lay person or historian. Also, it largely focuses on the distribution-style Bayesian analysis rather than the simpler discrete-hypothesis-style.

However, despite these complications — and despite being a work in progress — it is nevertheless one of the easiest books on *actual* Bayesian investigation I’ve read. Lots of concrete examples and worked-out problems. The Python code is quite easy to follow, too, for anyone with a dabbling of programming or who can work with logic/math at a reasonable level. Took me only a couple of days to breeze through it, and it inspired a bunch of ideas I’m going to be playing around with for the next while.

I would highly recommend it for anyone who’s at the point: “Okay, I understand the basic examples, e.g. the disease screening test, etc., and can do the basic math, but where does it go from here? What’s the next level?”