Hi Ed,
I had always assumed that experimental sigmas were somehow lumped into the alpha and beta parameters (esp. given your discussion in section 2.3). In principle they could be, right?
Yes, they could be. I would like clarification on this. (...)
Alpha/beta are calculated in individual resolution shells. How can you "lump" experimental variance that varies by two orders of magnitude for individual reflections into a single parameter?
I'm sorry for being unclear (often email happens to be a poor way to express what you actually mean, unless you have heaps of time to write it lawyer style. There is always a room for reader to imagine unsaid. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.). Anyways, extending my phrase above to better reflect what I actually meant: "Yes, they could be, to some extent (approximation). Surely, a proper way is to have sigmas in the formula explicitly, as I stated in previous email of that thread. Whether that makes any practically useful difference is debatable, and yet to answer."
I also wonder if introducing experimental uncertainty into Lunin's ML target is even possible without fundamentally altering it.
It is possible, and depends how fundamentally you want to alter it. All the best, Pavel