The problem with all these EU regulations is that they are overly detailed. If you have to mention "Bayesian estimation" in a document called a "directive", then you are doing something wrong. In an ideal world, a directive is a high-level document that outlines what ought to be done in broad strokes. Then, the national regulations answer some additional questions accounting for the local circumstances, but leave the fine-grained details to be filled in by legal scholars and the judicial system. In a properly setup legal system that actually honors the principle of subsidiarity, the question of whether Bayesian estimation falls under the law or not would be left to a judge who would look at it in the context of a specific case. So while the article gets a lot wrong, the author's intuition that it is wrong to mention "Bayesian estimation" in a supposedly high-level regulation is correct.
The methods that in this proposal would be prohibited to use for certain pretty bad purposes reads like this:
"(a) Machine learning approaches, including supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement
learning, using a wide variety of methods including deep learning;
(b) Logic- and knowledge-based approaches, including knowledge representation,
inductive (logic) programming, knowledge bases, inference and deductive engines,
(symbolic) reasoning and expert systems;
(c) Statistical approaches, Bayesian estimation, search and optimization methods."
I find this (machine learning, logic/knowledge, statistics) to be pretty a pretty good definition of what they're after. The fact that very specific things are also mentioned does not seem like a red flag to me - it's the way laws are written, with examples, to give guidance to courts.
No, it’s the way laws are written in a broken legal system. In a well-designed, principles-based legal system, laws are kept short and concise, with guidance and examples being provided through more suitable channels.
