JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Well yeah, that whole proposal stinks to high heaven.
First, Jabba already claims to be a "certified statistician." Dollars for donuts, if his certificate exists at all it's one he printed out himself at home from some web site after a handful of questions. The only "certifications" in statistics I'm aware of that matter (albeit only slightly) are the ASA's two levels, each of which requires a college degree in statistics. There is no way in Hades Jabba has a degree in statistics. His math is just too poor. Hence methinks his "certified statistician" claim is bunk.
But the real question is why the two-faced approach? Why claim to be an expert in statistics himself and then announce that he's going to statistics professors for help and commentary? Maybe his certification isn't all it's cracked up to be? Maybe there's a motive we aren't immediately seeing?
Second, if you want to get the attention of and comment from the academic community regarding some idea, there's a process in academia for doing so. You write letters or publish papers in the journals all those people read. I don't know of many academics who are interested in extra unpaid work helping individual crackpots who aren't their students or colleagues.
Yes, I said crackpot. "I can prove immortality via statistics," is exactly the sort of thing that raises red flags among academics who are, as a group, generally wary of things that look like attempts to draw them into woo-woo debates. I have lots of stories of fringe claimants pestering bona fide experts. Often they present a sanitized version of their question in order to dupe the poor professor into rendering an opinion without knowing fully how it will be used. Remember how Jabba took the question of circumstantial evidence, and then the question of anecdotal evidence, and posed those questions elsewhere on the forum to try to get a different answer, while hiding all the baggage he still attached to them? I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Jabba stripped out all the religious nonsense from his claim and presented an "equivalent" sanitized question to whatever experts he may know.
Third, as we've seen, Jabba has received the benefit of thousands of written objections, including a comprehensive list of them he has yet to address. At least one contributer here is a statistician. And regardless of low opinion Jabba has of his critics here, their written objections are generally based in sound statistics. It is unlikely Jabba will get a different set of objections from anyone else, so long as those objections are based on noting errors in reasoning. And it is commensurately unlikely that Jabba will actually respond to them or pay any close attention to them.
And he has also received written objections from an online forum of statisticians, as well as oral objections from the professors of statistics he has already consulted. These are people he specifically sought out as experts in statistics, and they all told him he was wrong. It's irrational to suppose he will get a different list of objections just by asking again.
Fourth, and most interesting, what do ISF and skeptics have to do with any of this? While he says he working on a "closing statement," it's not as if he's changed his tune at all while he's been here. It's not as if he's using ISF as a resource of knowledgeable people to correct and refine an idea. He's made absolutely no effort to disguise his disdain and disapproval of his critics here. He obviously doesn't consider them to have helpful knowledge. If his goal is to take his well-honed idea to the academic community for final work, why mess around here? Why, if he's a "certified statistician" on his own, does he need the feedback of people he clearly despises and whose refutations he declares to be unworthy of comment?
Again we return to the notion that the idea of proving immortality is not the center of Jabba's performance, just as the Shroud of Turin wasn't, and just as circumstantial evidence wasn't. What's at the center of Jabba's argument is, as always, his ego. He is building a fantasy world around a "murder board" of material cherry-picked from elsewhere, aimed squarely at showing what an awesome person Jabba is. In that world he's got a PhD. He's a "certified statistician." He's a straight-A student. And he's solved one of the most vexing problems in philosophy all by his lonesome. Oh sure, the skeptics tried to poke holes in it, but all one has to do is go visit Jabba's "murder board" to see how he bested them all in the end. Oh, and look! Here's some (cherry-picked and carefully edited) statements from noted statisticians also testifying to Jabba's greatness and (purportedly) also showing how those ISF skeptics were wrong all along.
That's the only plot I can see revolving around the characters Jabba has already written, and the scenes we've already seen performed.
