jsfisher
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Cont: Proof of Immortality VIII
- Thread starter Jabba
- Start date
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Similarly the guy running a crooked shell game is never not conning the player. So he has to stick to a certain set of rules that ensure the player cannot test the integrity of the game. Over time those rules start to smell funny. To be honest, we've noticed the smell of Jabba's "effective debate" method for years. Elsewhere, Jabba's method stinks up the place immediately and people don't stand for it. ISF necessary has a high tolerance for all kinds of arguments, so the stench has to be pretty bad before management shuts it down.
This is the point jsfisher and others are trying to make to Jabba, but he's just not getting it. It's even one of the points in Jabba's wall-o-text presentation, something to the effect that if it's not possible to compute or measure something, it's okay just to make up a value. No, it's not okay. Yes, estimation is a practice, but it's a rational practice based on data. It's not an inuitive practice where you think, "Hm, intuitively that would be a small number. 0.001 is a small number, so I'll use that."
The point we're laying bare is that Jabba doesn't take a rational approach to quantitative reasoning. He can't see beyond, "What should the numbers be, then?" He doesn't grasp that the objection is, "You can't just make number numbers -- any number." He wants to quibble with the outcome, not the approach. And the approach -- the "big picture" -- is where he's wrong.
The Sparrow
Graduate Poster
I'm pretty sure I can cure cancer with this 747 jet engine. I don't understand the "nuances", but I think I am right.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Or more importantly, with no respect for the intent of the request. Jabba's approach so far has been according to the premise that things may seem unclear at the high level, but if we delve into the details and hammer them out to everyone's mutual satisfaction, it will make sense. And let's be honest, in some cases that approach works. But when it does, it relies on there being nothing dodgy with the details. Jabba's details are all dodgy, and he switches rapidly between them to keep his critics off-balance.
So now he's trying to correct the dodginess of the details by saying that while the details may be murky, the general framework of his proof is sound. Well, no it isn't. At the high level his proof commits a number of basic fallacies -- the Texas sharpshooter fallacy (i.e., ad hoc theorization), false dilemma, begging the question, circular reasoning, and so forth. He's taken a similarly fractal approach to those -- "Okay, I may be committing the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, but the rest of my proof must be okay." He can't avoid the shell-game approach even when looking at his conceptual errors.
Hence I intend to corral all Jabba's most outstanding errors, gross and fine, into a single succinct statement that he has to deal with all at at once, without the shell-game dynamic. He's show he has no desire to do that, which is enough for us to conclude rationally that he knows his argument is fundamentally broken. Therefore today's plea to abandon detail and look at the broad-strokes is just more evasion.
halleyscomet
Penultimate Amazing
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Great Scott! I don't know what the post size limit is on the forum, but I'm pretty sure an exhaustive list may very well exceed it by a considerable margin.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Not really; he just keeps making the same mistakes over and over again. That's why I can summarize them -- not exhaustively, but adequately for now -- in a list of about a dozen that we can talk about (again, at a high level) in one sitting. We don't have to talk about every time he begs the question, just that he does, and that doing so dooms his argument. Naturally to be fair we have to give examples of each, and we have. But Jabba's well-worn strategy for dealing with that is to say, "Okay, let's take the examples of the first flaw and discuss them until we reach agreement." We never reach agreement, and that stalemate makes sure we never get to any of the others. And since we never get to any of the others, Jabba can say "But my argument is still sound at the highest level."
Well, no it isn't, and we need a different strategy besides Jabba's version of Effective Devate to test that. It doesn't have to be my version per se, but it can't just be Effective Debate with a new coat of paint. What we've seen is that Jabba doesn't want to talk about his proof unless he has the prerogative to drive it down into the detail as usual. He claims his argument may seem broken in the details, but survives as a Big Picture. Except we don't get to talk in Big Picture terms either, where his critics have also found errors.
Jabba
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js,
- Trying to reincarnate any previous knowledge -- doesn't "that other thing" provide the mean of the probability density function in this case?
jsfisher
ETcorngods survivor
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No, that other thing would be the portable document format.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
No. And what else would you need to know about the PDF besides its mean? What effects would those other things have on your example or your proof?
Belz...
Fiend God
jsfisher
ETcorngods survivor
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The first time I mentioned PDF, I called it by a nonstandard synonym, probability distribution function. Perhaps that is why jabba went off in that strange direction. Still, why he would simply assume it was whatever he assumed escapes me.
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JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
That's not two things, though; it's two names for the same thing. For engineering reliability we still say "distribution function" rather than "density function," but we also know that statistics now prefers "density."
Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
Well, I think the post size limit must be very large; let's estimate it as 10100. I would estimate the probability that an argument of Jabba's is valid as quite small, but not infinitesmal, so I'll assign a probability of 0.0062 to that. I have no idea how many posts Jabba has made, but it should be obvious that any number divided by 0.0062 must still be less than 10100, so I've proved conclusively that there must be plenty of room.
Dave
Jabba
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- I had assumed that "that other thing" was my attempt to explain my calculation of P(E).
- Since, in the case of complementary hypotheses, P(E) would be P(E|H)P(H) + P(E|~H)P(~H), I tried to estimate what-specific-hypotheses ~H would include (in this case) and how-probable-each-would-be multiplied by how-probable-each-would-be-to-result-in-E, and added up the products...
- Can you follow that, and does it make sense?
Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
I can follow it, but it isn't sensible. For your proof to be valid in the real world, ~H must include every possible hypothesis other than H, including the ones you haven't thought of; in effect, it's an infinite set, because it encompasses any potential hypothesis other than materialism, and whatever members of the set you may have listed at any time, it's trivial to construct an additional hypothesis. Your proof therefore requires you to fully enumerate the members of an infinite set, which I think we can chalk up as another fatal flaw.
Dave
jt512
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You've insisted that P(E)=1. Now that you've finally figured out that P(E) = P(E|H)P(H) + P(E|~H)P(~H), calculate P(E) from your "model." Do you finally see that you've contradicted yourself? "Can you follow that?" "Does it make sesne?"
Belz...
Fiend God
Who cares? Answer Jay's list of flaws NOW.
The Sparrow
Graduate Poster
And, because (apparently) we can construct any hypothesis we want with absolutely no evidence for it, that set would be incredibly large.
For example, we could (apparently) offer a hypothesis that garden fairies poop out souls, but if 2 fairies poop out a soul at exactly the same time, the 2 souls will combine and destroy each other like matter/anti-matter. Prove me wrong Jabba, PROVE ME WRONG!!
Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
More rigorously, one could hypothesis that there is a soul, but it can be incarnated no more than 2 times; incarnated no more than 3 times; incarnated no more than 4 times; and so on. Immediately we have an infinite set of hypotheses, and this is only a subset of the complement to materialism.
Dave
Jabba
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jt,
- I need to go back and look up my last attempt to rate OOFLam -- but so far, I still think that what I've done does make sense...