Nope. Jay focuses on the arguments at hand.
I try very hard to, but we've all learned from long experience that we sometimes have to either follow the discussion where it meanders or remain silent. It is distasteful to indulge a particular claimant in his personal grudges against his critics, skeptics in general, or the world. And when the discussion devolves -- as has this one -- to personal contests, it becomes less informative and enjoyable.
Earlier Buddha wrote that I shouldn't have to resort to attacking his claims to expertise because I could show my own expertise by defending Palmer on the merits. Well, that's what I did in the lengthy posts he dismissed as "irrelevant." He wants to continue to script my side of the debate, ostensibly to require me to do things he suspects I can't or won't do so that he can accuse me of dereliction. But the premise to his argument is not cured by his request. If he says, "I'm an expert, and in my expert opinion these other people have erred," then my expertise or yours is not part of that equation. The question in that line of reasoning is always whether
he is the expert, regardless of who else might or might not be. His claim fails because his claim to expertise is false. This is the same pitfall everyone falls into when their presence at the forum is probably more about narcissism than about the question at hand.
Frankly, you do not lodge a formal complaint because you know full well that any such complaint would be without merit.
Correct. This is a well-worn tactic. Claimants backed into a corner inevitably try to shame their opponents away from making the most effective criticism by suggesting it's inappropriately
ad hominem, but never want that suggestion adjudicated by a third party. It's pure rhetoric. Buddha is the one who decided to base his argument on his own claims to expertise. If those claims fail to be supported by the facts, then that's all there is. Saying, "No, you're ignorant of statistics," is not a value judgment on him as a person. It's a statement regarding the validity of his argument -- nothing more.
I think you will find that you made that exact accusation.
I have made only roundabout claims to expertise. I generally prefer to demonstrate expertise and let others judge for themselves the degree to which they want to accept it as such or factor it into their evaluation of my line of reasoning. As others have said, they go back and look things up if they are suspicious of anything I've said.
But in contrast, you are correct. The cornerstone of Buddha's argument is that his critics -- you and I included -- are not competent in statistics, that we are insinuating expertise he says we do not have, and that on the basis of that purported deficiency our comments on his claims can be disregarded as uninformed. And additionally we should apparently be ashamed of ourselves for questioning his competence. He has made similar claims regarding Palmer, Jeffers, and Alcock. He has specifically said that because they and we lack the appropriate credentials (or so he believes), we cannot possibly be correct in our criticism.
Pure gaslighting. He seems to think we cannot read the thread for ourselves and see the arguments he has made. He lately needs to distance himself from discussing correct statistics, so he needs to rescind all the accusations he made previously on the position he's trying now to surreptitiously abandon. You'll recall yesterday or the day before when he tried to negotiate a settlement. He tried to shift his position from one of him being the expert and all his critics being pretentious novices to a softer one of all this disagreement over statistics being no more than a reasonable difference opinion.
If he wants to withdraw his accusations and apologize for them, that would be acceptable. But pretending never to have made them is dishonest. It doesn't take responsibility. He's frankly admitted that he's making some arguments that are just poking fun "at [his] opponents' expense." When one states that as a motive, one doesn't generally get to sneak away when the fun-poking backfires. Comeuppance isn't strictly a part of the argument on its merits, but it should be allowed to happen naturally when someone chooses a kind of approach that risks it. It's the incentive not to make such puerile arguments in future.
Nobody in this thread requires external citations. Most here are sufficiently educated so that we need no external reference to identify that your idea is flat out wrong.
First, it's a straw man. "You must make only the kind of argument I tell you to make." We reject that on principle.
Second, it's a ruse. Buddha has a long history of ignoring cited references, even his own. He seems to regard them not as documentation of authority or as invocations of formally codified information, but as no more than some kind of artillery in a battle. In his mind he's firing more rounds, so in accordance with the first rule of artillery, he must be winning. His only reason to ask for them is so that he can read nefarious intent or illusions of victory into their absence.
Third, sometimes in this thread, and many threads, it's important to document fact from external sources. The facts that the t-test for significance uses the t-distribution as its basis and that the basis is not normally distributed are certainly well known among statisticians, but a reference even to something as simplistic as Wikipedia is the proper rebuttal when someone denies those facts.
On those specific points I specifically avoided references to the literature because I was hoping Buddha would go do his own research from his own previously cited sources (e.g., the Navy statistics manual) and arrive on his own at the same conclusions I drew. That source, for example, explicitly refuted Buddha's claim that you can't take baseline data at the same time you take experimental data. And I used that particular oversight to flush out the fact that Buddha doesn't read his own sources. That leads to yesterday's incredibly embarrassing gaffe where Buddha announces triumphantly that, according to his sources, the t-distribution isn't at all the same thing as the normal distribution. Well, yes,
and that's been my point all along, against his objections. Buddha seems to think he won the day when all he did was finally confirm my statements from his own sources. Think how much less entertaining that would have been had I spoon-fed him his errors at every turn.
But as you note, the other side of that issue is that the correcting of errors is often made according to a gestalt understanding of the field, not by any concise sound bite from it. There's no quote from Sternstsein that says, "You're not using the right quantity here as your dependent variable." That's something you know, regarding some specific model or problem, because you studied and practiced how to derive appropriate variables and distributions from whatever the data looks like natively. And that encompasses a variety of experiences, printed sources, and conversations. And you then apply that knowledge to the specific problem. One can Google for facts, but one cannot Google for knowledge and understanding.
Consequently (fourth), the premise behind Buddha's demand poorly expects that the literature will be or contain specific proscriptions. That is, if someone proposes a specific thing, you can't expect the relevant literature to supply a specific admonition for or against it. There is no passage in any textbook that says, "You can use a double-slit apparatus as a random process." Asking for one -- and claiming you're right to reject the proposal for lack of it -- is a straw man. The number of ways someone can wrongly answer 2+2=? is functionally infinite. It's ridiculous to expect arithmetic textbooks to specifically preclude "sausage" as an answer. But sausage
is the wrong answer, and we
can know this confidently. We teach people sciences as abstractions and principles so that they can correctly reason through whatever
ad hoc problems arise. We don't teach them sciences as a rote list of dos and don'ts.
