Maths & Probabilities

Opinionated, yes, but jar was pretty level headed. I miss him.

Where would He fall on the chart above? Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

I take exception with calling < 5% and > 1 % "extremely" unlikely.This is a problem with news casters when they announce the results of polls. blah, blah blah, + or 1 3 % 19 times out of twenty they say.2 days later a poll shows a change of +15 % points for the underdog and there are big headlines and astonishment.But in a series of polls you can expect an outlier 1 in 20 times.If something is done every day then more than once a month you'll get something "extremely unlikely".I'd call anything from 33 to 1 % as unlikely and not play silly bugger by pretending to be more precise than that with your names.As for god and leprechauns there is nothing to calculate the statistics on so there is no where to put them on a chart that involves numbers.

As I have said before, I try to use the word "likely" when I have no way of calculating the mathematical probability. And words are not as precise as numbers, so I don't think it's wise to put too fine a distinction on qualifiers.I would say that your God is pretty unlikely, especially since you're still in the process of making Him up. "A" god is more likely.

King Brian? I'd say more likely than YHWH, since many people have claimed to have seen leprechans in real life, whereas YHWH is almost invariably a no-show.BTW, did you come up with that chart? Reminds me of what I had come up with around mid-elementary school assigning more definite numbers to indefinite quantity terms; eg, "a" is one, "couple" is 2, "a few" is 3 or 4, "some" is about 5, "several" about 7 (I guess since they both start with the same four letters), "many" would be 9 or more. Even now, for "two or three" I'll say "a couple/few", since three would be too many for a couple and two would be too few for a few.There are a couple (ie, just two) you could add to your chart. I came across a creationist probability argument (the one about a modern protein just fall together from pure chance, which is so wrong on so many different levels) which defined "virtually impossible" as a probability less than 10^-128 (though that was decades ago, so I could be off a bit), which actually sounds reasonable. On the other end, you would have "virtually inevitable" as 99.9999999999% (though with nines extending even further to the right of the decimal point). Though 95% was considered pretty much a done deal when we covered confidence intervals in my probability and statistics class.A problem with assigning specific quantities to unspecific terminology is that not everybody would agree on those specific quantities, which would lead to even more disagreement in a discussion (in addition to leading that discussion down a rabbit hole -- one local creationist's favorite tactic for avoiding a question is creating "rabbit trails" to lead his opponent away from the topic).

Pascal's Wager misleads us to similar problems.On the surface, the proposed dichotomy of "God either exists or He does not exist" appears to give each proposal equal probability, 50%. But it ignores the fact that "God" is only one of literally thousands of gods whom Man has created -- assuming an extremely conservative estimate of 10,000 gods, that would make the probability within the Wager for the existence of God to be 0.01%, which Phat defines as "Exceptionally unlikely". While it is exceptionally unlikely that any one specific god exists, this dichotomy is skewed in favor of at least one god existing, even though the existence of Phat's god is still "exceptionally unlikely".In addition, "Either you believe in God or you don't" also appears to give equal weight, 50%, which it is actually similarly skewed. Unfortunately for proponents of the Wager, almost all the gods have one or more theologies attached to them which you must choose from when you choose to believe in a particular god. In the case of the many forms of YHWH (which is what the Wager is talking about), there is a mind-boggling multitude of different theologies out of which there is one-and-only-one true theology which you must choose correctly -- choosing the wrong theology is the same as not believing in God. Let's make another conservative estimate of 1,000 theologies to choose from, which would make the probability of you choosing correctly 0.1%, which Phat defines as "exceptionally unlikely".Even if you take Pascal's Wager seriously and wish to choose "believing in God", the odds are so "exceptionally" against you being able to do so that you cannot help but lose no matter how you choose. Any way you look at it you lose.

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"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"
(W.O.P.R., AKA "Joshua", in WarGames)

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One day a few decades ago at a creationist fossil shop at the mall (yes, that did indeed exist), I got into a discussion with a creationist which we moved outside the shop at the owner's request.We had been discussing the fossils mainly led by me, so he asked to have his say, which I agreed to. Instead of any discussion of the evidence, he hit me with a car insurance analogy, which I have since called After-Life Insurance, which was a re-wording of Pascal's Wager. Since I had recently read about Pascal's Wager, I was able to respond immediately by pointing out that you're having to pay exorbitant premiums for coverage that would only pay under the most restrictive of circumstances:

quote:

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So I told my after-life insurance salesman that his after-life insurance was a rotten deal (unfortunately, I didn't think of that name for it until the next day, but that poor guy was already hurting too much). We had to pay an exorbitant price for a policy that would only pay in the most restricted and oddest of circumstances. By the car insurance analogy, it would only pay if you were hit by a green Edsel -- on the northbound side of the Santa Ana Freeway -- while it was exceeding the speed limit -- backing up -- at night -- with its lights off -- being driven by a one-armed Lithuanian midget.

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There also used to be a "Religion Detox" site which included a Pascal's Wager analogy that was a newspaper article about the Nevada Gaming Commission having raided Pascal's Casino for having promised all its customers a sure bet while it instead took them all to the cleaners.

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Post-Script:This is a follow-up to the WarGames reference above, just for fun.There's a Netflix sci-fi series, Travelers, in which people are sent back from the future to prevent the 21st Century catastrophes that doomed that future. Basically, they had a good record of who died and when and how that, combined with the tech to replace one mind with another, the mind of the traveler from the future would replace the mind of the nearly-departed, usually in time to prevent the death, whereupon they would replace that person in 21st Century society. Good show, three seasons.The third season introduces a powerful AI, Ilsa, who serves as a communication conduit with the Director, the AI in the future running the Traveler Program. She is always attended to by her creator, computer scientist Ivon Teslia. When he would bring in a new human to meet Ilsa, she would ask them, "How about a nice game of chess?" Teslia would always look closely at the new human to see whether they recognized the movie reference. To his disappointment, nobody ever did.Nerd is as nerd does.Edited by dwise1, : AKA & Wikipedia linkEdited by dwise1, : Added paragraph starting with "Even if you take Pascal's Wager seriously ... "
Also a missing period in W.O.P.R.'s acronym
Also the new section at the end referring to my "Afterlife Insurance" web page about Pascal's WagerEdited by dwise1, : TravelersEdited by dwise1, : "for having to promised" to " for having promised"