Proof of Immortality, the IV league

[Mojo]

- But first, do you accept that the summaries have included falsifiable claims of events or situations surrounding a resuscitation?
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No, Jabba, anecdotes are by their very nature unfalsifiable. They are just stories about things that have reportedly happened. They can't be re-run. They do not provide repeatable results. And, because of the way anecdotal accounts are collected, they pretty much inevitably represent a highly biased sample.

 

[Jabba]

No, Jabba, anecdotes are by their very nature unfalsifiable. They are just stories about things that have reportedly happened. They can't be re-run. They do not provide repeatable results. And, because of the way anecdotal accounts are collected, they pretty much inevitably represent a highly biased sample.

Mojo,
- What if the report (anecdote) given was that his wife was in the waiting room, wearing red -- but she wasn't?

 

[Jabba]

My Dear Mr. Savage:

It pains me, on this festal day, to have to disagree with you. "We" know what "constitutes evidence". You disagree, because you want your sincerely-held beliefs, your comfort-blankey, and your campfire tales to be granted the status of "evidence".

Refresh my memory, an you would be so kind: what "evidence" of "immateriality" have you presented? For that matter, what "evidence" of the mere existence of a "soul" (to say nothing of it's "immortality") have you presented?

I thank you for responding to my post.

Greet your family and co-celebrants with joy.

I remain about-to-log-off-and-go-brew-beer-ingly yours, &ct.

Slowvehicle,
- I can't remember what I've presented so far, and it would take me awhile to look them (or it?) up, but the book I'm slowly reading (The Self Does Not Die) is only $10 by KIndle, and contains 100 anecdotes that I consider evidence of immateriality...

 

[Jedi]

Of course the polls ask people if they're going to vote. Beginning around September 1, the overwhelming majority of polls are conducted only among voters who indicate they will likely vote. You can verify this in the table here. Look at the "Sample" column. The letters "LV" or "RV" indicate whether the sample comprised likely voters or registered voters.

asking someone if they are likely to vote does not mean they WILL vote. most people will say 'yes' to this question as they don't want to admit they aren't voting or they make think they will but don't go at the last minute. that's why the USC/LA times polls asked about 'enthusiasm' about their candidate. enthusiasm turned out to be a better predictor of whether they actually voted or not.

and this is another reason anecdotes are bad evidence. self-reporting is filled with bias. you have to be very clever in the way you ask questions and the questions you ask. it's a tough field. and designing even simple questionnaires can cost upwards of $200k.

 

[Jabba]

Let's see it, then.

Oh, that's right. You don't have this evidence and have admitted as such. Your feeble attempt at redefining "evidence" to include claims has been one of many, designed to hide the fact that, in the end, there is ZERO evidence in favour of immateriality, and you know it.

Argumemnon,
- I encourage you to purchase The Self doe not Die.

 

[Mojo]

Mojo,
- What if the report (anecdote) given was that his wife was in the waiting room, wearing red -- but she wasn't?

It would mean about as much as one in which she was.

People say all sorts of things when they're coming round from an anaesthetic. If someone says something remarkable that turns out to be true, it gets remembered and possibly included in your collection of anecdotes. If the say something that turns out to be nonsense then nobody bothers. You're choosing a biased sample.

If you want your stories to mean something then you also need to account for all the (thousands of? Millions of?) NDEs that aren't included in you collection of anecdotes. Even if people are effectively guessing about the things they report in NDEs then inevitably a few will get lucky, given the number of opportunities.

 

[Mojo]

Jabba,
- I could post a series of videos of me throwing a die and it coming up as a six. Would you accept that as evidence that I throw a six every time I throw a die?

 

[Belz...]

Argumemnon,
- I encourage you to purchase The Self doe not Die.

I encourage you to purchase some evidence for your claims.

 

[Jabba]

It would mean about as much as one in which she was.

People say all sorts of things when they're coming round from an anaesthetic. If someone says something remarkable that turns out to be true, it gets remembered and possibly included in your collection of anecdotes. If the say something that turns out to be nonsense then nobody bothers. You're choosing a biased sample.

If you want your stories to mean something then you also need to account for all the (thousands of? Millions of?) NDEs that aren't included in you collection of anecdotes. Even if people are effectively guessing about the things they report in NDEs then inevitably a few will get lucky, given the number of opportunities.

Mojo,
- But wasn't that a claim that was falsified?

 

[Jabba]

I encourage you to purchase some evidence for your claims.

Argumemnon,
- That's exactly what I did.

 

[Jedi]

to be clear, i wrote:
"It's evidence that can only be used to suggest hypotheses for further studies. it's not evidence that can confirm anything. is that better?"

you go on to disagree with this, so you're claiming that anecdotal evidence can be used to confirm hypotheses.

now to your post...

No. I disagree with you. In fact, if the hypothesis is about an individual, it's the other way around. Controlled studies usually only tell us what the average effect was in a group, not what the effect will be in an individual. They might suggest the hypothesis that a drug will benefit an individual, but the hypothesis is confirmed by the experience of the individual. In fact, controlled studies might suggest that the drug will ineffective for an individual, and the drug, when actually administered to the individual, is beneficial.

statistical models are differentiated from deterministic models in that they have a random component to them. so every individual has a treatment effect and a random effect. no drug is 100% effective on everyone. clinical trials tell us what percentage of people benefit from it. if you find a way to predict, perfectly, that a drug is effective on a particular person, let me know. we'll make a killing at the race track.

a well run controlled clinical trial generally has the following components:
1. Randomization. This helps assure us that we don't have a biased sample of, say, zinc believers only in our sample.
Anecdotes. sample is self-selected (non-random) and is usually comprised of believers. Example: 1000 big foot sightings in the past 100 years. seems like a lot of anecdotal evidence. but this number is never compared to the 100's of millions of visits to forests around the world during the same time who see nothing. anecdotal evidence is self-selected and biased in favor of the claim.

2. Masking. this helps assure that the respondent isn't biased by knowing he took the zinc or a placebo.
Anecdotes. hopelessly biased in this way

3. Placebo controlled. We have a comparison group that we know didn't get the treatment. so if we end up with 90% of the people saying zinc worked we wouldn't get so worked up about it if 90% of the placebo group said the same.
Anecdotes: only looks at zinc group. so if you got 90% of the people in the zinc group saying it worked you would be pretty ecstatic about it. and could be completely wrong. again, anecdotes are hopelessly biased.

4. Safety. controlled trials assess safety. anecdotes don't. does no good to take a drug that's effective if it can kill you.

5. statistically adequate sample size. controlled trials tend to have lot's of people based on the number of people required to confirm the results. Anecdotes are convenience samples with as little as 1 person.

for these reasons, controlled trials can provide evidence that we can generalize to the population. anecdotes can never do this.

this is the 4th time i've brought this up and you've never addressed it. it's a major part of the reason why anecdotal evidence is only good for hypothesis generation. and you disagreeing with this puts you at major odds with the vast majority of the statistics world (i've never seen, nor heard, of a any statistician or stat book saying one can use anecdotal evidence to confirm a claim. it's always to generate hypotheses).

But the division between hypothesis-generating and hypothesis-confirming evidence is artificial.

no, it isn't (see above)

There are good experiments that give us reliable evidence and lousy experiments that are completely worthless, and we'd learn more about the subject from anecdotes.

So? all anecdotal evidence is biased and therefore completely worthless. only 'lousy' experiments do the same. you have to judge the good from the bad experiments but you can dismiss all anecdotes as bad, in the context you're describing as bad here.

There are hypotheses that require carefully controlled studies to confirm, and hypotheses that don't. Aspirin was known to be an effective pain reliever long before randomized controlled trials were invented.

can you imagine how many 'pain relievers' were tried before they stumbled across aspirin?!?! how many people died from taking junk medicine based only on their own judgment and friends' anecdotes? this is not the, ahem, best approach.

Similarly, the hypothesis that beer can get you drunk was settled with finality in the Stone Age.

yeah, and birds learn to not eat monarch butterflies without clinical trials either. but lot's of birds got sick or even died beforehand. we're not in the stone-age anymore.

be interesting to hear how you get around all the bias issues associated with anecdotal evidence that i described above. again, it's the same reason why people are not convicted based on anecdotal evidence alone. there must be corroborating evidence.

 

[Belz...]

Argumemnon,
- That's exactly what I did.

Then why haven't you EVER presented ANY evidence for ANY of your arguments and even admitted to not only not having any but also being biased towards your conclusion?

Stop trying to just respond to posts and post thoughtful answers, please.

 

[Jabba]

Mojo,
- What if the report (anecdote) given was that his wife was in the waiting room, wearing red -- but she wasn't?

Jabba,
- I could post a series of videos of me throwing a die and it coming up as a six. Would you accept that as evidence that I throw a six every time I throw a die?

Mojo,
- I don't see how that shows that the claim about the wife would not be falsifiable.

 

[Jedi]

I overlooked this earlier, and it's important, and goes, I suspect, to the heart of your confusion. You wrote:

All new evidence is used to update your prior. That's what new evidence is. It's newer than the last time you calculated your prior. Your updated prior, then becomes your prior for the next new bit of evidence. There is no such thing as "validating" a hypothesis—at least it's not something that I've ever done. In Bayesian inference, we just keep updating the probability of the hypothesis as new evidence arrives. Maybe the probability goes up, maybe it goes down, maybe it goes nowhere. But that's all we're doing.

To put it another way, there is no point in a Bayesian analysis when a hypothesis is generated. The hypothesis always has to have a prior probability. Even when you first think of the hypothesis, Bayes assumes that the hypothesis has always existed, and before you proceed, you have to assign it a prior probability.

and this is the rhetorical trick you're using with Bayes. All new evidence is NOT used to update your prior. for example, crap evidence like anecdotes are not used.

my congenital lying neighbors anecdotes are not used. my alzheimer's ridden great uncles anecdotes are not use. if you use biased data, like anecdotes, you will always bias your results in favor of the crazy claim being made. and using fancy techniques like Bayes won't help you.
Garbage in, garbage out.

 

[Mojo]

Mojo,
- But wasn't that a claim that was falsified?

Jabba,
- The anecdotes are not being used to support the claim that someone's wife is wearing red. They are being used to support a claim that people experiencing NDEs gain information via some paranormal means. And as such they are not falsifiable for the reasons I have already given.

 

[Jedi]

Great sideshow you got going here, Jabba. Fine distraction from the utter failure of your Bayesian proof attempt.

the Bayes proof doesn't work cause they're using data that's biased in favor of their claim to prove their claim.

 

[Jedi]

It would mean about as much as one in which she was.

People say all sorts of things when they're coming round from an anaesthetic. If someone says something remarkable that turns out to be true, it gets remembered and possibly included in your collection of anecdotes. If the say something that turns out to be nonsense then nobody bothers. You're choosing a biased sample.

If you want your stories to mean something then you also need to account for all the (thousands of? Millions of?) NDEs that aren't included in you collection of anecdotes. Even if people are effectively guessing about the things they report in NDEs then inevitably a few will get lucky, given the number of opportunities.

jt512-- Take note of Mojo's posts

 

[Jabba]

Mojo,
- What if the report (anecdote) given was that his wife was in the waiting room, wearing red -- but she wasn't?

Jabba,
- The anecdotes are not being used to support the claim that someone's wife is wearing red. They are being used to support a claim that people experiencing NDEs gain information via some paranormal means. And as such they are not falsifiable for the reasons I have already given.

Mojo,
- But the evidence (the claim that she was there in a red dress) was falsifiable.

 

[Mojo]

Mojo,
- But wasn't that a claim that was falsified?

Yes, but it is, as you note, a claim rather than a piece of anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence comes into the picture when you try to invoke a causal relationship between, for example, the wife wearing red and the claim.

 

[Mojo]

Mojo,
- What if the report (anecdote) given was that his wife was in the waiting room, wearing red -- but she wasn't?

Jabba,
- I could post a series of videos of me throwing a die and it coming up as a six. Would you accept that as evidence that I throw a six every time I throw a die?

Mojo,
- I don't see how that shows that the claim about the wife would not be falsifiable.

1. See above.

2. Note that, despite the misleading way in which you have quoted it, I did not reply to the first post you quoted with the second post you quoted.

3. Answer the question.