John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
There you go again. Inventing definitions for words that require none such.
Proof of Immortality, VI
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There you go again. Inventing definitions for words that require none such.
Mojo
Mostly harmless
You are once again using a new term with the same meaning in the hope that it will magically fix your argument, just as you did with all those terms you used when you meant "soul". Substituting "pre-specified" for "pre-selected" does not address JesseCuster's point.
Jabba
Philosopher
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TreeBranch2-TexasSharpshooter
- You and I move about 200 yards from a barn in Texas. I take my old M-14 with me, tell you that I'm a sharpshooter, and start firing away at the barn. We walk back to the barn and find a tiny shot group centered around a small hole in the barn wall.
- I didn't need to pre-specify my target...
- And, in this case, we'd have a high degree of targetness.
- If my shot group wasn't all that small, we'd have a lower degree of targetness.
- Try this.
- You and I move about 200 yards from a barn in Texas. I take my old M-14 with me, tell you that I'm a sharpshooter, and start firing away at the barn. We walk back to the barn and find a tiny shot group centered around a small hole in the barn wall.
- I didn't need to pre-specify my target...
- And, in this case, we'd have a high degree of targetness.
- If my shot group wasn't all that small, we'd have a lower degree of targetness.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
We know what's provoking your attempt. You had an epiphany at age 14. You are very emotionally attached to the idea that you have an immortal soul. You're also emotionally attached to the notion that you can prove it to be true via mathematics. You told us all this, remember?
Now in the general case and the abstract sense we must logically disconnect the veracity of a proposition from ineptitude in expressing it. How many innocent people go to jail because their lawyers were ineffective? And it took Einstein two tries to get to a comprehensive theory of relativity. So when I say that's not the problem here, it's not because I disagree with the statement above. Remember, I identified it as a characteristic of your argument that you beg agreement on an abstract question that has an obviously right answer, then beg the question that your situation is identical to the abstract question. The problem with your argument is not that it's merely an ineffective presentation of an otherwise true principle; it's that your argument is deeply wrong at a fundamental level. The difficulty you're having is from your unsuccessful efforts to hide those errors, not from some arduous search for truth.
First, none of your key principles are true. I have outlined a dozen or so things that your argument gets very wrong. Each of these is individually fatal. The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is one of them, but only one of them. In an effort to be friendly, I made a convenient list of them to which you have been several times directed. These are simple and glaring errors, Jabba, not things you can handwave away as elusive nuances that you'll one day get right. They're not something you can gloss over with a gift of gab that you beg your allegedly unimaginative and "unfriendly" opponents to accept uncritically.
Second, your expressions have the effect of obscuring the point over time, not clarifying it. Your critics very quickly come to the nugget of your argument on each point you try to make. After that arrival is when you allege general confusion, upset the apple-cart, and insist on a whole new barrage of newly ambiguous language. Your efforts purported to elucidate almost always aim instead to re-obfuscate. You're just prolonging a debate you've all but admitted was over long ago. After five years of go-nowhere tap-dancing, it's fairly clear in this case that the best explanation is that the underlying hypothesis is wrong -- no mathematical proof exists for the precept of an immortal soul.
You are right on one count, though. Your argument is inappropriate toward the claim. There may indeed be an immortal soul, but a Bayesian inference -- even a properly concocted one -- is not the way to go about looking for it.
Since you have a history of reneging on your concessions, I don't believe this statement you just made. Which is to say, I believe you are admitting error here and now only to defuse your critics in the short term. As you hint, I'm sure we'll be seeing the "special snowflake" argument again as soon as the heat has died down. These tantalizing non-concession concessions are part of what makes this thread so long and repetitive. Will this be the day you admit an error that stays admitted?
No, that doesn't fix the argument. You're just playing the word games that have come to typify this debate. You don't seem to understand why the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is a fallacy. I renew my suggestion that you attempt to describe it here in your own words and explain why it's a fallacy.
It's the concept here that's broken, not what thesaurus entry you use to express it. The wrongness of the concept is that you establish the criteria for data significance only after you have data in hand. That defeats any attempt to reason about the statistical probability of that significance.
The royal flush is a winning hand in poker only because we have pre-specified it before dealing the cards. That's the only reason being dealt one has such significance in the game, as opposed to any other combination of five cards -- all of which have an equal probability of being dealt.
You consider the seven billion people that currently exist, and somehow you are magically able to say this what was supposed to exist here and now, and therefore that the odds of them doing so are astronomically small because there were infinite possibilities to start with. That is an identical exercise to being dealt five random cards, declaring -- after looking at your random assortment -- that you've been dealt a Jabbanese Sampler, insisting that it's a new winning poker hand, and departing the table with everyone else's chips. Pre-specification of the outcome is the sine qua non of this sort of reasoning, Jabba. You don't get to beg your critics pretty-please to ignore it so that you can brag about winning all their chips.
"longing" instead of proof.
JesseCuster
Master Poster
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Changing the phrase from "pre-selected" to "pre-specified" in no way addresses my point.
What's the difference between a pre-selected target and a pre-specified target?
Hokulele
Deleterious Slab of Damnation
Too bad you only have one hole, your existence. There is no grouping to consider in this case.
Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
Oh, for the love of Anne Hathaway's Oscar ...
The target in this hypothetical was pre-defined. It was "a grouping of shots within a very small distance of each other." The only thing you didn't do was define how close the shots had to be to each other, and it should have been defined for this to be a proper test of marksmanship. But, as we could probably get agreement as to that measurement, we can elide it (so long as the results are way inside or way outside what we might reasonably agree on).
So, you predefined the expected outcome before a single shot was fired. It had to be a "close grouping." Where it was on the side of the barn doesn't matter.
In the same way, your existence is a possible outcome. Since it was in no way defined before you came to exist, then you have committed the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.
Not to mention it would still not be considered good shooting, merely consistent shooting.
Belz...
Fiend God
Yeah, except that this is not what you're doing. You can't dismiss the fact that you're using a fallacy by posting an example that's not analogous to what you're doing.
You have made no effort to answer the fundamental questions about your 'theory', and are instead engaged in subterfuge and diversion. It is not much of an effort to guess why: you know that you have no argument.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
That's not "targetness". That's just you being a sharpshooter:
- you claim to be a sharpshooter
- you fire "at the barn" (your words)
- you hit the barn repeatedly
Congratulations! You're a sharpshooter--you hit the target you specified.
Try the analogy again, without firing at the barn.
The Norseman
Meandering fecklessly
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In this case, the barn itself is the target. That's what you pre-selected to aim at, after all. So you aimed at and shot at the barn. You hit the barn.
You're trying to pretend you were actually aiming at that small grouping of hit shots. But you didn't specify or pre-select that before firing. So there's nothing special about that special grouping.
What I think you're trying to say is that you shot at the barn and, upon looking at where the shots landed, you saw that you hit a knothole in a board in the barn and then excitedly claim that the knothole was a surprise but it was so meaningful! What are the odds of hitting that knothole from way over where you were standing? It's extremely low, I'm sure. But then you continue to say that the knothole must be special; it's special because you're assigning 'specialness' to it after you hit it. Not before you hit it.
THAT'S the difference that everyone and the dog is trying to get you to figure out. You shot wildly, not aiming at anything at all and then express excitement that you hit... something. This something that you hit you then assign great meaning and significance to it and try to apply Bayes and other well mis-understood (by you) ideas of probability to the random shot, further proclaiming how amazing the shot was.
No, no, no. The point everyone is making is that you have to specify the knothole BEFORE shooting at it. Then, if you hit it, you can be justified in concluding that you're a very good shot.
"But, but, I hit the knothole!" you exclaim. "That's gotta mean something!"
No, it doesn't. You see, you'd say the exact same thing no matter what you hit. You will do this because you did NOT state what the target was before you fired.
If you fired randomly and hit the left hand, lower window pane, you'd then dance about joyously proclaiming that the window pane was a hugely unlikely target to hit and it's quite meaningful that you hit it. Or if you fired randomly and hit the pulley at the barn peak (used to haul hay up to the hayloft, whatever it's called), you'd have then tried to calculate what the odds are for a person to aim and hit the pulley, and THAT would have been your unique, special target; you'd claim that it was unlikely but only when compared to someone actually using the pulley as a point of aim.
Is this a little more clear about the mistake you're making?
And this is only ONE of the dozen-ish problems your theory has.
Even if it were granted that we would ignore this problem, you still have a long slog uphill in trying to overcome the rest.
And finally, to address your use of the new term "targetness". It's another essentially meaningless term you're using to continue to obfuscate the points you're trying to make. It's a dishonest, wishy-washy term, just like the term 'god.' It's not only irritating but obvious; just as your switch from "target" to "pre-selection" is obvious and dishonest.
ferd burfle
Graduate Poster
Like hell you didn't. Your tight grouping demonstrates precision but not necessarily accuracy. Because you didn't call your target, for all we know you were actually aiming at that tin can lid two yards to the left of hole.
You claim to be trained in statistcs; if you are, I'd expect you know the difference between accuracy and precision and not make up nonsense terms like "targetness".
Your analogy fails totally.
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
And that analogy is to what? No-one's existence, including yours, is analogous to a pattern of shots, we are all just single, random, shots.
JayUtah guessed right, you are trying the "special snowflake" argument again. But you are not a special snowflake, Jabba. You are just a snowflake like any other.
Mojo
Mostly harmless
He's also conflating accuracy and precision. His arguments are a perfect demonstration that is is possible to be consistently inaccurate.
Jabba
Philosopher
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Jesse,
- Pre-specified means that you have told someone, or have otherwise indicated your selection, prior to shooting. I'm saying that there are ways for others to know what your target was, without be told.
JesseCuster
Master Poster
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There are several things wrong with this analogy.
First of all, even if your shots all ended up close together, we don't know that you actually hit what you were aiming at because you never said where you intended to hit. Because you never specified your target, we can't actually say that you hit your intended target because we have no idea what the intended target was.
There's plenty of situations where you can repeatedly hit the same location without actually being a good shot or without intending to hit that actual location. I could get a piece of artillery, aim it in some random direction and fire a bunch of shells which would all land in the same spot. It would be foolish of me however to then declare that I'm a crack shot with artillery because I can get all my shells to hit the same location. Because I never actually specified where I was aiming for and because I actually had no idea where the shells were going to land, I can't claim after the fact that I successfully repeatedly hit my target because all my shots landed in the same spot. A situation where a bunch of things hit the same location does not mean that it was the result of skill or intention.
The other major problem with your analogy is that you only have one sense of self. This is why the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is the correct description for this aspect of your argument. Only one shot has been fired and it happened to hit you (assuming for the same of argument that there are actually such things as potential selves and one ended up in your body). In order for your analogy to actually hold true, it would imply that there were a whole bunch of potential Jabba selves and that they all happened to land in your body when you were born. Then you might be able to declare that what happened was not random chance, but clearly the result of some sort of guidance or intelligence or whatever it is you wish to argue. But that isn't what happened. You have exactly one sense of self which is the equivalent of taking a single shot at your barn.
The correct analogy is that you have taken one shot at your barn, didn't declare beforehand where you actually intended for your shot to hit, but then declared afterward that because the barn is huge and the bullethole is tiny, the chances of hitting whatever spot on the barn you happened to hit, was so unlikely, that it must be the result of you being a crack shot with a rifle, instead of the more obvious conclusion that anyone can fire a gun at a barn and it will make a tiny bullethole somewhere in the barn.
Mojo
Mostly harmless
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
No. For the purposes of determining how to evaluate the significance of the data in your model, "telling someone else" or "others knowing about it" has nothing to do with it. Please stop just making stuff up.
Belz...
Fiend God
Stop playing with the analogy and address the actual argument you've made that is fallacious, Jabba.
You're calculating odds based on numbers pulled out of thin air. You're assuming that there are potential souls. You have not justified any of these things. In fact you've expended a lot of time and energy at _not_ justifying them.
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