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Try and keep it on the political/societal/cultural end of the discussion. This deals not only with gay rights but also the larger issue of looking at the interaction of religious groups within secular society, their rights and their influence, in contrast with the privileges of other groups. Which religion, if any, is right is irrelevant and arguments of that nature will be moderated. | ||
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DoubleReed
United States4130 Posts
On January 04 2013 04:50 sam!zdat wrote: Well, strictly speaking, that would be evidence against a God that would answer that prayer from you at that time  No it isn't. It's evidence, not proof. An unanswered prayer would be evidence against the idea of prayer. Trying to be absolute is a cheat, so faithful can ignore all the evidence against. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On January 04 2013 05:12 DoubleReed wrote: No it isn't. It's evidence, not proof. An unanswered prayer would be evidence against the idea of prayer. Only if you consider prayer to be fundamentally petitionary in nature, and only if you believe that God has an obligation to fulfill all requests made in such petitionary prayer. I'll go ahead and be charitable and assume that when you say "evidence against the idea of prayer" you don't really mean that precisely. edit: On January 04 2013 05:12 DoubleReed wrote: Trying to be absolute is a cheat, so faithful can ignore all the evidence against. of course. And trying to theorize credence in terms of probability is also absurd, except as an interesting thought experiment  | ||
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DoubleReed
United States4130 Posts
Sorry, just read a book on the history of Bayesian Reasoning. But if you think it is just a thought experiment then you gravely mistaken. This is a very powerful mathematical tool and philosophy. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On January 04 2013 07:26 DoubleReed wrote: No it isn't. Actuaries have doing it since the early 20th. There is nothing absurd about Bayesian Reasoning. it is when you ascribe any sort of ontological significance to it, or think that it's a good model for beliefs of all types. Certainly it's a useful way to think about particular kinds of things. but that's certainly not how most people go around believing things How do Bayesians deal with the Sleeping Beauty problem? augh, I guess that's a topic for another thread | ||
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DoubleReed
United States4130 Posts
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KwarK
United States44372 Posts
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On January 04 2013 07:36 DoubleReed wrote: But it is a good model for beliefs of all types! lol now we get to play my favorite game again what credence do you ascribe to this belief? edit: On January 04 2013 07:26 DoubleReed wrote: Sorry, just read a book on the history of Bayesian Reasoning. But if you think it is just a thought experiment then you gravely mistaken. This is a very powerful mathematical tool and philosophy. I've taken upper level seminar on information and possibility, so I'm not totally uninformed about these matters, although I haven't thought much about bayesian reasoning recently | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On January 04 2013 07:38 KwarK wrote: Doesn't the statement "assumptions which can be falsified and tested and have been subjected to the tests(scientific method) successfully can be assumed to be true" pass the test of whether the statement itself can be assumed to be true. You would falsify it by finding an assumption which is true but fails to get results in reality or an assumption which is false but reliably gets positive results, you would test it by taking some assumptions which are judged as presumably true by this assumption and seeing if they pan out, for example rolling a fair dice a high number of times or dropping things to see if they fall. The statement passes its own test as true. how would you know the assumption was true, when it fails to get "results in reality"? I don't see how what you describe tests the claim, you're just assuming the claim and then testing gravity...? at any rate that's a weaker claim than what we were discussing before. Your claim here is "a belief is justified if it is justified by science", while the earlier claim was "a belief is justified if and only if it is justified by science." | ||
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DoubleReed
United States4130 Posts
On January 04 2013 07:38 sam!zdat wrote: lol now we get to play my favorite game again what credence do you ascribe to this belief? Well, first of all, it works. Time and time again, Bayesian statistics is better than alternatives. Secondly, it is literally the only model I have heard of that easily answers issues of absolute certainty and inference, without being inconsistent or silly. I'd suggest taking the time to consider the model more thoroughly before discarding it like that. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On January 04 2013 07:46 DoubleReed wrote: Well, first of all, it works. Time and time again, Bayesian statistics is better than alternatives. Secondly, it is literally the only model I have heard of that easily answers issues of absolute certainty and inference, without being inconsistent or silly. I'd suggest taking the time to consider the model more thoroughly before discarding it like that. Maybe I'll make a blog about the sleeping beauty problem and we can take it up there. Bayesianism here is perhaps derailing even by my standards. edit: please understand that I do not wish to deny that it is often useful | ||
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KwarK
United States44372 Posts
On January 04 2013 07:41 sam!zdat wrote: how would you know the assumption was true, when it fails to get "results in reality"? The issue there is that it is a paradox because anything you would seriously try and test is a belief already founded on observation because the assumption that that which you observe to be true is true is already made by most humans. You are right that it is a nonsense but so is the idea of a current scientific theory which, when tested, doesn't work. But if there was a hypothetical truth that existed outside of the scientific method then you could test reality's ability to live up to that and falsify the assumption that results obtained in reality must in some way equate with truth. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
 @DoubleReed: you still need to tell me what percentage you believe "Bayesianism is a good model for all beliefs" edit: taken to pm | ||
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DoubleReed
United States4130 Posts
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DoubleReed
United States4130 Posts
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KwarK
United States44372 Posts
On January 04 2013 07:55 sam!zdat wrote: Sorry Kwark, I really don't follow @DoubleReed: you still need to tell me what percentage you believe "Bayesianism is a good model for all beliefs" People already assume that all truth is based on observation, whatever they like to believe about religion they dismiss actual tests of faith against reality. Therefore any knowledge which the scientific method might be tested against is already a product of the scientific method (or at least in part of it) and therefore will pass. Therefore falsifying the assumption that "things which can be falsified but, when tested, are not are true" would require a truth which, when tested, did not pan out but was still true. We do not have access to any such truths because people, when it gets right down to it, rely upon observation of results, whatever their claims to higher knowledge. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
sure, it's as much a category error to use religious justification to make a scientific claim as it is the other way around edit: I'm pretty happy to say: "any belief which can be tested with science is legitimate if and only if it is legitimized by science" | ||
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Reason
United Kingdom2770 Posts
+ Show Spoiler + On January 04 2013 04:46 DoubleReed wrote: When did I say all evidence is the same importance? Where did you even come up with that? I suggested no such thing. What do you mean by "tested"? If I pray to God and nothing happens, do you consider that evidence against God? Certainly it is evidence against a God that answers prayers. Why would we be unable to get away from 50/50 for God? Are you really saying that we have absolutely zero information about the world that we live in? This is not at all accurate. You might want to actually look up Bayes Theorem. I'd like you to answer the questions I've posed You came in here saying this... On January 03 2013 13:13 DoubleReed wrote: I tried to follow the conversation, but as a Bayesian I'm totally confused. Beliefs should be expressed as probabilities of certainty. There aren't "beliefs that can be tested" and "beliefs that cannot be tested." There are just beliefs. And we have evidence, whether anecdotal, logical, scientific, authority-based or whatever that influences how much we believe something. Which has led me to ask you these questions for clarification : On January 04 2013 03:25 Reason wrote: So with the example of rolling the die, are you saying that the belief that the die is not weighted can't be tested? The evidence is rolling it a few million times and being 99.99% certain it's not weighted. What about belief in God? Can you ever remove that from square on 50% certain vs 50% uncertain? I think the former is a belief that can be "tested" and the second cannot. This would seem to contradict what you're saying.. What if I have anecdotal evidence that the die isn't weighted, because I'm never used a weighted die before, and I have authority-based evidence because my parents who never learned to count to three promised me that the die isn't weighted, but I've rolled the die a few billion times and that "evidence" shows there's a 99.9999% chance that it is weighted... You are saying all types of evidence hold the same level of importance? Is this two against one and I should ignore the mathematical data and instead trust my gut instinct and my parents? I apologise if my questions strike you as foolish, perhaps I misunderstood. If that is the case, please answer my questions specifically and as effortlessly as you seem capable. | ||
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Reason
United Kingdom2770 Posts
On January 04 2013 08:13 sam!zdat wrote: edit: I'm pretty happy to say: "any belief which can be tested with science is legitimate if and only if it is legitimized by science" Can we go further yet? If there are two types of beliefs, beliefs which can be tested by science and those which can not, how do we judge or test the latter? You can't deem any of them more or less meaningful/valuable/important/true than each other because you have no basis upon which to judge them... If we can't come up with a methodology for judging them, why is it wrong to say "until we know by what criteria these beliefs are too be judged, we must judge them all equally" Would that be an acceptable way of phrasing what I said earlier  lol ? | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
it's only wrong to say that because it would be better to say "let's have a serious discussion about how we're going to judge those other things". Your thing is ok, I guess, but a bit lazy, uninteresting, and useless the point is to try to find a basis. yes it's hard. | ||
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Reason
United Kingdom2770 Posts
On January 04 2013 10:55 sam!zdat wrote: well I would argue that there are five types of beliefs but let's not go there. Lets  | ||
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