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by datastoat 1257 days ago
In my example, of predicting a coin toss, the naive output is a probability distribution: it's "Prob(heads)=0.5, Prob(tails)=0.5". This is the distribution that will be produced both by the person who sees 2 heads and 2 tails, and by the person who sees 2000 heads and 2000 tails.

Bayesians use the terms 'aleatoric' and 'epistemic' uncertainty. Aleatoric uncertainty is the part of uncertainty that says "I don't know the outcome, and I wouldn't know it even if I knew the exact model parameters", and epistemic uncertainty says "I don't even know the model".

Your example (outputting a mean and variance) is reporting a probability distribution, and it captures aleatoric uncertainty. When Bayesians talk about uncertainty or confidence, they're referring to model uncertainty -- how confident are you about the mean and the variance that you're reporting?