Cont: Proof of Immortality VIII

JoeMorgue said:
At a certain point you just have to accept that the problem with trying to to teach a cat to scuba dive isn't that your instructions are written clearly enough.
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Well, it's the problem for my cat. She *hates* humansplaining. Which is when a human tries to explain something to a superior being. If she wanted to scuba dive, she'd know how to scuba dive. No explanation needed. Especially not from me. Writing a really clear explanation is just insulting.
 
Jabba said:
That's what I don't understand.
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Then you should try harder. His explanation makes sense, in the way that's appropriate to this debate. If you don't understand your critics' arguments and how they refute yours, even after repeated explanations, then you simply don't have the intellectual chops for that debate. If so, then apologize to your critics for wasting their time, thank them for their efforts, and withdraw. What you don't get to do is assume that because you don't understand what's going on, it must therefore be something you don't need to worry about.
 
This explains so many things. http://smbc-comics.com/comic/robins

1524747417-20180426%20(1).png
 
Jabba said:
js,
- Why does he think that P(~H) is 2-113,000,000,000?
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I've explained that in considerable detail. There's nothing more I can do than simply write out the explanation again, which is redundant given that it's still available upthread. The problem is not, I think, one of transmission but one of reception. In any case, the precise derivation is pointless; the aim was to refute by example your claim that,

Jabba said:
- Under OOFLam, my current existence is incredibly unlikely/improbable; whereas, since ~OOFLam includes multiple possibilities -- one of those being that I always exist -- how can P(E|~H) not be greater than P(E|H)?
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The answer, trivially simply, is that however small P(E|H) may be, it is always possible either that P(E|~H) is orders of magnitude smaller, or that P(~H) is more orders of magnitude smaller than P(H) than the number by which P(E|H) is smaller than P(E|~H). Either of these conditions leads to a result that P(H|E)>P(~H|E). Your claim is therefore refuted.

And so we run, again, into the problem that...

Dave Rogers said:
What is the point of even trying to communicate with you, when it's an absolute certainty that you won't pay any attention?
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Dave
 
Meanwhile a man who ACTUALLY understands statistics did this:

Profile of a man who created a horse-racing algorithm and made close to a billion dollars

The paper argued that a horse’s success or failure was the result of factors that could be quantified probabilistically. Take variables—straight-line speed, size, winning record, the skill of the jockey—weight them, and presto! Out comes a prediction of the horse’s chances. More variables, better variables, and finer weightings improve the predictions. The authors weren’t sure it was possible to make money using the strategy and, being mostly interested in statistical models, didn’t try hard to find out. “There appears to be room for some optimism,” they concluded.

Benter taught himself advanced statistics and learned to write software on an early PC with a green-and-black screen. Meanwhile, in the fall of 1984, Woods flew to Hong Kong and sent back a stack of yearbooks containing the results of thousands of races. Benter hired two women to key the results into a database by hand so he could spend more time studying regressions and developing code. It took nine months. In September 1985 he flew to Hong Kong with three bulky IBM computers in his checked luggage.
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Jabba however continues to try and argue his way out of having to provide a reasonable explanation for where he got his initial values.
 
Dave Rogers said:
The answer, trivially simply, is that however small P(E|H) may be, it is always possible either that P(E|~H) is orders of magnitude smaller, or that P(~H) is more orders of magnitude smaller than P(H) than the number by which P(E|H) is smaller than P(E|~H). Either of these conditions leads to a result that P(H|E)>P(~H|E). Your claim is therefore refuted.
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It could be that Jabba is still thinking simplistically about these various items as necessarily complementary values. That is, if P(A|B) is small then P(A|~B) must necessarily be large.

The error in this thinking is best illustrated by a situation where A and B are thoroughly unrelated events. It is certainly possible to formulate a Bayesian inference for this situation, as a purely academic and thoroughly useless exercise. But how we would say "A is unrelated to B" in probability terms is P(A|B) = P(A|~B). That is, the probability of A does not change depending on whether B happened. The notion that P(A|B) and P(A|~B) must be covariant is almost certainly the errant concept.
 
Dave Rogers said:
I've explained that in considerable detail. There's nothing more I can do than simply write out the explanation again, which is redundant given that it's still available upthread. The problem is not, I think, one of transmission but one of reception. In any case, the precise derivation is pointless; the aim was to refute by example your claim that,



The answer, trivially simply, is that however small P(E|H) may be, it is always possible either that P(E|~H) is orders of magnitude smaller, or that P(~H) is more orders of magnitude smaller than P(H) than the number by which P(E|H) is smaller than P(E|~H). Either of these conditions leads to a result that P(H|E)>P(~H|E). Your claim is therefore refuted.
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Dave, your answer is simple but wrong.
- P(H) is certainly larger than P(~H), but anyone with a breath of open-mindedness would not consider the prior probability of ~H to be less than 10-100.
- Then, the likelihood of your current existence -- given the hypothesis that you can only have one life (at most) -- cannot be greater than the likelihood of your current existence if that hypothesis is wrong.
- I'll try to explain if necessary.
 
Jabba said:
Dave, your answer is simple but wrong.
- P(H) is certainly larger than P(~H), but anyone with a breath of open-mindedness would not consider the prior probability of ~H to be less than 10-100.
- Then, the likelihood of your current existence -- given the hypothesis that you can only have one life (at most) -- cannot be greater than the likelihood of your current existence if that hypothesis is wrong.
- I'll try to explain if necessary.
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Jabba, you need to show your maths for this, with numbers that you can justify rather than numbers you’ve made up to force your desired conclusion. Unless you can do this, you have no response to Dave’s argument.
 
Jabba said:
Dave, your answer is simple but wrong.
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You have no basis for this judgement.

Jabba said:
- P(H) is certainly larger than P(~H), but anyone with a breath of open-mindedness would not consider the prior probability of ~H to be less than 10-100.
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Again, this is clouded by the fraudulent equivocation between ~H and immortality that is another of the fatal flaws of your argument; but, really, why not? We live our lives on the assumption that the laws of physics work, otherwise nobody would dare drive, fly or plug in an electrical appliance. The underlying assumption there is that P(~H) is in fact zero.

And, of course, your value of 10-100 for P(E|H) has no validity; it is a completely made-up number that you know perfectly well you don't have a shred of justification for, to the extent that all you can do when this is pointed out is to demand a better value from your critics.

Jabba said:
- Then, the likelihood of your current existence -- given the hypothesis that you can only have one life (at most) -- cannot be greater than the likelihood of your current existence if that hypothesis is wrong.
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And even that has no validity, given that you have never even attempted to derive a realistic value for P(E|~H).

Jabba said:
- I'll try to explain if necessary.
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The problem is not that you have failed to explain your argument. It is that your argument is wrong. Over the last five years you've explained it well enough that everybody who has been reading your explanations can come up with multiple reasons why it's wrong.

Dave
 
Jabba said:
Dave, your answer is simple but wrong.
- P(H) is certainly larger than P(~H), but anyone with a breath of open-mindedness would not consider the prior probability of ~H to be less than 10-100.
- Then, the likelihood of your current existence -- given the hypothesis that you can only have one life (at most) -- cannot be greater than the likelihood of your current existence if that hypothesis is wrong.
- I'll try to explain if necessary.
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Don't bother; you don't know what you're talking about. As I explained some time ago and again yesterday, your argument presumes a connection between two events such that you can reason about "a hypothesis and its complement." That's not how likelihood works and there's no such connection here.
 
Jabba said:
..... but anyone with a breath of open-mindedness would not consider.....
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Ha! I love this. It's like saying, well anyone who was not stupid would surely agree with this.
It's a ridiculous method to try to embarrass your opponent into agreeing with you.
 
Jabba said:
P(H) is certainly larger than P(~H), but anyone with a breath of open-mindedness would not consider the prior probability of ~H to be less than 10-100.
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Again with the gaslighting. "If you don't blindly accept this number I pulled out of my backside, you're just closed-minded."
 
The Sparrow said:
Ha! I love this. It's like saying, well anyone who was not stupid would surely agree with this.
It's a ridiculous method to try to embarrass your opponent into agreeing with you.
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ferd burfle said:
Again with the gaslighting. "If you don't blindly accept this number I pulled out of my backside, you're just closed-minded."
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Because that's how it works in the stories.

The guy trying to get the "establishment" to understand his new idea is always correct in the stories.

Jabba's whole shtick is as much a performance art piece of self insert fan fiction as it is anything else.

Jabba is demanding a one on one because the story needs a protagonist and an antagonist.

Every fringe reset is Jabba yelling "Cut" and trying to do the scene again.

Every time he puts words in his opponents mouths because he's trying to direct his actors.

Jabba doesn't see us as opponents, he barely sees us as people. We're all characters in his play.
 
I have no problem believing that the probability of reincarnation could be less than 10-100. Open-mindedness doesn't mean accepting the conclusion as offered. It means accepting the argument as offered and applying critical thinking to that argument to see whether it stands on its merits. It may not, but being open-minded means giving it a fair shake even if it would seem prima facie implausible. Since Jabba's provided us no argument, there's nothing to be open- or closed-minded about. It's simply a number thrown out there with nothing behind it, followed by a whole bunch of gaslighting that says we have to believe it in order for Jabba to bless us as open-minded -- and therefore worthy -- opponents.

Jabba's points here are not about immortality or the Shroud of Turin. They're about painting his critics as closed-minded and dishonest. He doesn't like skeptics and he wants to create the impression that skepticism is a lie. That's all there has ever been to it.
 
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