Filippo Lippi
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Magoo was myopic, not selectively blind.
Proof of Immortality III
- Thread starter Humots
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Magoo was myopic, not selectively blind.
Monza
Alta Viro
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You can click on any random page in this thread and find it. Seriously, there has not been progress since page 1.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
That's good advice. But since you're quite obviously trying to win (or at least claim your opponents cheated), and quite obviously not trying to find the truth, you use this advice as an excuse to run around in circles endlessly under the pretense of seeking clarification. Your "effective debate" is nothing but a fairly common bag of rhetorical tricks fringe theorists use to avoid any sort of intellectual responsibility.
See, no one is actually as stupid as you pretend to be. You have tried several variations on the plea -- "I'm just a befuddled old man," or "You go to fast and say to much; say less." But your befuddlement is far too selective to be real, and your arguments are far too obviously predicated on keeping the wording too fluid to be nailed down.
You are. And what's worse, you seem to think so little of your critics that you honestly seem to believe they can't see what you're doing. Do you really think it's that hard to tell the difference between a legitimate call for clarification and a desperate attempt to shift the argument? Most of your arguments are based on one word game or another. jt512 is right -- until you are willing to stop playing games and face the actual problems with your claims, you're just going to continue to be laughed at.
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
IMO, this needs to be nailed down. There is a world of difference between "what is it that you mean?" and "this is what I claim you really mean." and, even worse, "So you agree with me".
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Yes, and Jabba thinks we can't see what he's trying to do. Further, a person who freely admits he doesn't read his critics' posts has absolutely no justification for running around in circles asking for clarification or repetition. It's the height of rudeness and arrogance to expect someone to indulge his laziness. I have no sympathy whatsoever for his pretended inability to keep up with the discussion or follow his critics' meaning. It's clearly a ploy -- and a very, very childish one at that.
Jabba
Philosopher
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- For me, the one real issue is whether or not the likelihood of my current existence is an appropriate entry for P(E|H).
- I've been claiming that I don't need to be a special case in order for my likelihood to be an appropriate entry --, but that I am a special case anyway. Unfortunately, I currently think that I've been wrong about not needing to be a special case...
- I looked back at one of my questions to you, and tried to insert the lottery issue into it:
- Say that we have two hypotheses: A (the lottery is fair) and ~A (the lottery is rigged). Say, for this particular lottery
- P(A) = .60.
- P(~A) = .40.
- P(E|A) =.0000001
- P(E|~A) = .62.
- Say that E (John Doe wins the lottery) occurs, and you now have to bet the farm on either A or ~A.
- Wouldn’t you have to bet your farm on ~A?
- You would, but I've unwittingly made John Doe a special case...
- Back to the drawing board.
- I've been claiming that I don't need to be a special case in order for my likelihood to be an appropriate entry --, but that I am a special case anyway. Unfortunately, I currently think that I've been wrong about not needing to be a special case...
- I looked back at one of my questions to you, and tried to insert the lottery issue into it:
- Say that we have two hypotheses: A (the lottery is fair) and ~A (the lottery is rigged). Say, for this particular lottery
- P(A) = .60.
- P(~A) = .40.
- P(E|A) =.0000001
- P(E|~A) = .62.
- Say that E (John Doe wins the lottery) occurs, and you now have to bet the farm on either A or ~A.
- Wouldn’t you have to bet your farm on ~A?
- You would, but I've unwittingly made John Doe a special case...
- Back to the drawing board.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
As long as by that you mean you have finally realized that your approach is based on an inescapable fallacy, regardless of all the subsequent errors you have made.
Correct that fallacy. Until you do, nothing else you say matters.
Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
There is nothing whatsoever odd or interesting in one person winning the lottery. Nor is "betting the farm" a level of proof. In fact, knowing more about the lottery than I do of the universe, I would bet the farm that the one winner suggests the lottery is NOT rigged ... because that's exactly how many winners there are supposed to be.
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Filippo Lippi
Philosopher
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Why will you no longer engage with jt512?
Mojo
Mostly harmless
No, you haven't. To make him a special case in this scenario would require an allegation, before the draw, that the lottery was rigged so that John Doe would win. As it is, John Doe is no more special than Richard Roe or Joe Bloggs, or any other person who has bought a ticket.
All you have here is that one of the set of possible results has occurred, and you have then drawn a target around it and claimed that it is special. Your continued failure to grasp this concept leads to your argument being fatally flawed. Well, to one of the fatal flaws; there are others, as you can see by looking back at the thread.
ETA: And to be clear about your example: a lottery being won by one of the people who has bought a ticket is not an event that provides any evidence that the lottery is rigged, let alone one that should lead anyone to 'bet the farm' on it being rigged.
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caveman1917
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Betting the farm is stupid anyway.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
I should probably point out that this is the same sort of false dilemma that plagues every attempt of yours to reason through problems of this sort. It illustrates a chronic misunderstanding of how to formulate categorical questions.
If you have two hypotheses, then they are H1 and H2, and they live together in a set of all the other Hs, some of which you may not consider but all of which contribute to the probability that either H1 or H2 is correct. Again, the hard part of statistics is not the arithmetic; it's understanding what concepts the variables mean.
In contrast, if you have a hypothesis A (the lottery is fair), then you don't get to give ~A its own declarative name. ~A is the set of all ways in which the lottery is unfair, which may include the lottery being rigged. ~A is not affirmatively "the lottery is rigged." ~A is simply "the lottery is not fair." Conversely you could say B is "the lottery is rigged" and then ~B would not be "the lottery is fair;" it would be "the lottery is not rigged." It could still be unfair for other reasons. Giving inappropriate names to ~H for some H is the essence of the false dilemma. Until you fix that problem in your reasoning, nothing else you say matters.
This would seem to be an inconsequential nuance if not for your penchant to set up the problem this way and then pretend to prove "not-A" by casting as much doubt as you can on A -- in this case by suggesting that the lottery "must" be rigged by miscomputing the odds of any particular person winning a fair lottery. You get into the same problem as you did in the circumstantial evidence thread when you realized your solution conflated "cat" and "not-dog" and consequently quit responding to your critics on that point.
You know your reasoning is faulty. You just won't own the errors because this is an ego reinforcement exercise for you, not a search for truth.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Yes, it's amazing what you can "conclude" if you stack the deck.
First you set up a lottery that has an astounding chance of being unfair. From a purely arithmetic standpoint that's as valid a set of priors as any other. But in the context of the analogy it's disingenuous. In Bayesian reasoning, priors still have to come from someplace, not just thin air. You've predisposed the conclusion by telling us there's a significant prior suspicion the lottery is unfair, as opposed to other lotteries. A lottery that's suspected of being unfair to the tune of 40 percent would persuade me not to be the farm on it without even having to apply any events. Don't abuse the psychology of analogy to make your point.
As others have said, phrasing your conclusion as "betting the farm" on an outcome encourages risk-aversion thinking, not rational thinking. Keeping the farm but not playing the lottery is the safe course. Losing the farm is presumably an irrecoverable disaster, hence something to be avoided even if the probability of it happening is low. Casting the question in such one-sided terms substitutes emotion for reason, and you've promised us you'd be mathematical. Lest we forget that your goal here is to prove the existence of an immortal soul, I'll remind you that risk-taking is not part of that question no matter how much you want to write it into your analogy.
Now elsewhere, in other problems, we do consider the combination of the gravity of outcomes with the probability that they will happen. But the gravity of the outcome is simply irrelevant here. There is no difference in risk between having an immortal soul and not having one. So there is no motive to reason the way you're asking people to reason. We're not betting farms here, and no amount of alarmist handwaving on your part will transform a probability into proof.
Where did these numbers come from? You don't tell us until later that E is "John Doe wins." You don't tell us what would be the conditions for some other event F (Joe Bloggs wins) so that we can determine whether these numbers you've cast against Mr. Doe encode any hidden presumptions about him.
By telling us Doe has a tiny percentage of winning a fair lottery and a better-than-even chance of winning an unfair lottery, you're essentially encoding into the problem your preconceived notion that the lottery prefers Doe in some inappropriate way and is therefore unfair. Again, in Bayesian reasoning the numbers still have to come from somewhere. If these numbers reflect your beliefs about John Doe's interaction with the lottery, then to omit that rationale from the analogy is very disingenuous.
And yes, just because you waited until the die was cast to identify E as a specific person doesn't resolve your error. Before casting the die you estimated conditions that clearly hide some purported knowledge about John E. Doe and the lottery that you believe would be reflected in the outcome. As usual, you're just begging the question and trying to hide it with pseudo-math. Don't blame your critics just because you're unable to fool them.
jt512
Philosopher
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Jabba,
What is the probability that you would calculate the likelihood of your existence if you didn't exist?
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
Every time someone posts something like this I think to myself "surely this time Jabba will finally grasp the fundamental mistake he is making. It simply could not be made any easier to understand". But he never does.
Jabba
Philosopher
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jt,
- Zero.
Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
So, you have drawn a circle around yourself by only doing calculations after you already know you exist.
That's the sharpshooter's fallacy (and the Prosecutor's and about half a dozen others).
Yahoo! At last, Jabba understands!
You do understand, don't you, Jabba? Say that you do. Hello?
jt512
Philosopher
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And HARKing: Hypothesizing After the Results are Known.
@Jabba:
The calculation you are doing would be valid if, before you existed, you hypothesized that you, specifically, would exist. Then you watched to see if you, specifically, came into existence, and then observed that you did. Then, your coming into existence would have been predicted under one of your hypotheses and extremely surprising under the other.
However, that is not an experiment that can be carried out, even in principle.
Instead, you are hypothesizing your existence, specifically, after you, specifically, already exist. In other words, your observation that you, specifically, exist is contingent on the fact that you exist and hence are able to make the observation. Thus, the probability you are actually calculating is the following:
But the probability that you exist, given that you exist and given any hypothesis, is 1. Therefore,
That is, your observation of yourself existing does not change the prior probabilities of your hypotheses.
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Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
Even then, all he'd have shown was that a positive result was possible. He wouldn't have shown why the result occurred.
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