The numbers game...

In the film ‘Contact’ the character Palmer Joss says I couldn’t with good conscience vote for someone who believes the other 95% of us are deluding themselvesDo numbers of adherents for any one concept prove its truth or validity? If you have 51 one people believing concept X is true and 50 believing it’s wrong does that make X true? And if one person changes their mind so that 51 now believe X is not true does that change the truthfulness of X?What if 100 believe X to be true and 1 that it is not, what then?--Not sure of the best froum for this--This message has been edited by ohnhai, 08 March 2005 12:02 AM

nope

Nope it's Marvin the paranoid android from the new film version of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy... I thought him cute enough to be avatar worthy.

that link was down here is another one

The many times, not necessarily here, that I’ve had the 95-98% statistic thrown in my face by believers as a reason why they are right and those who don’t believe are wrong. The good old 95% of the world believes in God, so why don’t you?I wanted to know who here thought this a valid argument.

Yup. I know. There ARE people who hear 95% believe in a god [closer to 86% these days I think] and use it to mean their God and not belief in god/gods of any description

In the movie the voting is to choose the one representative of earth to ride in this machine that earth is building from a set of plans ‘faxed’ down to us from some unknown aliens. The machine only contains the space for one occupant (thought the book had five representatives make the trip). Palmer Joss is an adviser to the Whitehouse on religious matters and also on the panel choosing the candidates. He scuppers the main characters chances of going because she is an atheist (later turns out this was just the excuse ‘cause he loves her and didn’t want to run the risk of losing her)I used it as an example of someone justifying a position/decision based on a greater number of adherents to proposition X that they also happen to hold.

Just done a spot of reading on the Delphi method, and to me it seems, upon a quick scan, that it is more for correlating predictions of specific occurrences garnered from a large body (about 50 or so) of responders with experience in that field, but done in such a way that the usual pecking order is side stepped (though how you avoid people recognising the ideas and individual styles of their contemporaries is another matter)The key thing does seem to be a stressing of knowledge of the responders and iteration of questionnaires to shake-out a consensus of opinion on what might happen, not what is.Sure, the responders don’t know the answer, because they are being asked to speculate on future events based upon their own knowledge of the subject. Where as you can’t speculate on the date of the Norman invasion, that is an established ‘fact’ you either you know it or you don’t. Any clumping in the data in regard to the Norman Conquest survey is probably due more to people guessing against their partially remembered knowledge of history lessons. Also the feedback in the second, third, fourth questionnaires, as the date of the Norman Conquest isn’t a matter of speculation, should nudge the memories those who are un-clear at to their knowledge and convince those who had no clue as to the correct date, there should be very little spread as the correlation should almost be absolute. [if they had no knowledge of this subject, why are they responders in the first place seeing that the knowledge of the responders is paramount to the Delphi Method?]So I don’t see how Delphi adds validity to the idea that if more people believe a concept to be true that somehow makes the concept to be true.You could use Delphi to quiz experts on religion to garner some kind of predictions on whether secularism will grow yet further or whether there will be a strong theist back lash, but not whether the concepts of theism are true based on responders or clumped response.Though I did say I only glanced at info on this so I could be arguing from limited evidence.

So you are saying if you randomly select a number between 1-1,000,000 and place a card marked with that number in sealed box then run a series of Delphi surveys (with say one million respondents) to determine a prediction of the number on the card, when none of the respondents could possibly know what the number on the card is, you are saying that the survey is likely to demonstrate a statistically significant correlation between the results and the number on the card?Either such a large respondent group will produce, by the nature of the task, a good number of clumps which will in turn be enhanced by the iteration, and as there are likely to be a few well defined clumps one is likely to seemingly correlate to the hidden answer. That or a significant number of those responders actually know what the number in the box is, and if that is the case this does seem to be condoning ESP. And If it’s ESP then isn’t there a large prize for proving such?

A really good a question suited for Delphi analysis, no question there. But is Delphi analysis really suited for confirming the truth of a concept held by the majority?This message has been edited by ohnhai, 09 March 2005 22:51 AM

Ok so we have decided to send a religious person to represent us to aliens, as they represent the majority of the population. So In this regard, which religious belief, do you choose to represent everyone else? Remember there is only one seat.As they are the biggest group do you send a Christian? If so which Christian faith do you choose to be representative of, not only Christianity as a whole but, all religious views on the planet, and on top of that to represent the entire human race including the Atheists?If you take Christianity and cut it into its representative slices (of which there are apparently over 9,000 Christian denominations) does Islam then become the biggest single religious group and thus becomes worthy of representing the entirety of human kind? If you were a Catholic would you be willing to let a JW or LDS represent you and all other faiths. Or would you be happier with a Muslim, Jew, Buddhist or Scientologist? Would you trust any of them to fairly represent you? Would you trust an Atheist more or less? What about an Agnostic? What about Jedi?

Because there is one seat. So yes anyone you choose will represent the theists out there, but which one will represent the whole world the best?If you make the distinction between Theist and Atheist claiming the theist is more proportionally representative then surely you must carry that thinking on into the religions themselves. Sending a Jew would not be any good as they only represent a small percentage of the world’s population, Though as they don’t believe that Jesus is the son of god they do represent the majority in that respect.What about YEC’s ? they don’t represent the majority of the human population as their beliefs fly in the face of science and it’s evidence and as science is such an important part of human existence you would have to choose some one who follows not only a religion whose beliefs tie most strongly with the majority but also who accept the findings of mainstream science.If you make the distinction between Theist and Atheist then you have to apply that rational through all aspects of selection.If you are going to play the numbers game then play it fairly.This message has been edited by ohnhai, 10 March 2005 08:54 AM

Judaism is hardly a big religion in terms of numbers. At only around 15million adherents as of 2005 (World Christian Database) where as Christianity can boast 2.135 billion Muslims 1.31 billion and non religious (including atheists) can muster 920 million, even atheists alone can muster 151.5 million.Added by edit---Heck it looks like non-belief has overtaken Hinduism (there only being 870million Hindus compared to the 920 non-religious) Neat!This message has been edited by ohnhai, 11 March 2005 01:38 AM

so why not send an ahteist?

So is religion self-referential? If so does it carry the same weight empirically as reversed baseball caps?