"a student came to a meeting with pretty bad translation results when correctly using Bayes’ rule. But when they used the “wrong” likelihood function, the results improved dramatically. The lesson one of the senior researchers gave: “hacking works”. The whole thing is one big hack; formulating it in terms of likelihoods and Bayes’ rule is really less of a formalism and more of a framework that provides some constraints that are useful for limiting the search space. But those constraints may also cut off useful lines of inquiry, and we only find out when we’re willing to violate them." - Michael Nielsen