RoboTimbo
Hostile Nanobacon
You shouldn't have any problem putting it into your own words then, as you've been asked numerous times.
This is an outright lie.
Proof of Immortality, VII
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This is an outright lie.
Jabba
Philosopher
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- Nowhere do I imply that time travel is possible -- that's where you're making a mistake.
- "Likelihood" can take something that has already happened and ask how it relates to the hypothesis being re-evaluated. If the hypothesis rules out the possibility of what just happened, we know that the hypothesis is wrong. My claim is that my current existence is almost ruled out by OOFLam, and therefore, almost proves that OOFLam is wrong.
RoboTimbo
Hostile Nanobacon
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The Sparrow
Graduate Poster
LOL Almost = virtually. But it is underlined!!!
Belz...
Fiend God
You could not possibly be born before your parents were born, or after they died. That narrows it down somewhat, doesn't it?
That makes no sense. Even if you were right, improbable things happen all the time.
But you're NOT RIGHT. Your existence has a likelihood of 1.
halleyscomet
Penultimate Amazing
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More to the point, can your mathematics explain this guy?
I looked at the pixels. This video is every bit as authentic and as the Shroud of Turin.
godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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You implied that time travel was possible when you said that now isn't necessarily now.
Maybe I misunderstood. Maybe you mean that you had an equal chance of existing 12 billion years ago as you had of existing right now. Is that what you meant?
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
"Now" is implicitly an evenly-distributed random variable in your model. That would only be valid if time travel were possible so that you could go to any time period in history and say "This is now." But you can't. Since you can't do that, "now" is not modeled correctly in your proof.
And you have been told what's wrong with that claim. You admit you can't fix it. You've further admitted that you are not emotionally prepared to see your proof fail. This is what everyone but you can see.
jond
Illuminator
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Once again: why does OOFLam almost rule out your current existence? OOFLam means that your current existence is explained by the existence of your body—your self is not a separate thing, it is merely a process in your brain. However unlikely your body’s existence may be, it is equally unlikely if you also add a soul, which is itself unlikely.
Jabba
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- Mmm. I see your point.
- I certainly don't claim that time travel is impossible...
- Quantum Mechanics and Relativity, both suggest that time is not what we think it is. Anyway, I don't currently have an opinion on whether or not time travel is possible...
- But mostly -- and this is the part that seems so hard to communicate -- in our situation, "likelihood" asks about the odds of an event occurring if a particular hypothesis is true. And, if OOFLam is true, the odds of my current existence is extremely small -- and consequently, my current existence casts doubts upon OOFLam.
godless dave
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That is not hard to communicate. I understand it.
Are you saying that if OOFLam is true, you had an equal chance of existing 12 billion years ago as you had of existing right now?
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
Well no, not really. At what point is your existence as likely in 100,042 BCE to 101,142 BCE? How exactly is that equally likely?
Of course you will ignore this as usual. Because to have no clue.
Thermal
August Member
The odds are 1 of your existence. Small number, granted. The odds of everything's' current existence could be viewed as small if you were trying to forecast it from the beginning of time and space, assuming chaos theory. Or the odds would be 1, given enough information about causes and effects. I can't get past this fundamental point in your claim. You acknowledge that it is the weakest link, but it's a show-stopper.
Belz...
Fiend God
Your use of "current", like your use of "now", is just nonsense. The cause-and-effect conditions required for your existence could only exist right before your conception. They could not exist 7 million years ago.
There is nothing surprising about that.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
No, you don't see the point. The point is not whether time travel is possible. The point is not whether some fringe reading of theoretical physics might suggest it is.
The point is that your question, the way you've formulated it, requires you to be able to time-travel. You've modeled "now" as random variable with uniform density. The only way "now" could be uniformly distributed is if you were somehow able to time-travel to the arrest of Jesus, the Wars of the Roses, or the American civil war and -- along with those now-mentioning authors I cited -- claim those time periods as "now" equally with today. But you cannot. When you say "now" it means a time when you can say now. That's limited to your lifetime, and for any practical purpose is limited to the instant you say it; the "now" you invoked three days ago has already passed into then. "Now" is not the kind of thing you've modeled it as in your math.
Now if you had said, "What is the likelihood, given the century 1942-2042, that some arbitrarily-selected time point would fall into it," you'd have a better-formed question. Or at least a question with a better chance of producing the predetermined teensy number you're trying so hard to backfill against. But you aren't selecting an arbitrary time point. You're choosing a time point that, when you talk about it in your proof, can never be anything other than in your lifetime -- and in fact never anything other that some very brief period of time within your life span that centers around when you utter it; the "now" you were talking about at the beginning of your argument a few days ago has passed into "then." My birthday was Sunday. Today I can't say "Now is my umpteenth birthday" because it isn't. So "now" can't be an arbitrary time point. And so you can't model it as a random variable with uniform distribution, which would be the only way you could talk about probability as 1 divided by the number of time points that exist in all of 14 billion years. Given the criteria that attach to the concept of now, and the cause-and-effect principles that others have pointed out applies to how you're using it, the distribution cannot be uniform.
In your model, neither the century nor the time point is chosen arbitrarily. You chose them according to criteria that you enforced upon the selection, like pawing through the raffle barrel and "selecting" the ticket according to whether it had your number on it. In fact, you reveal that you chose them according to the same criterion -- your lifetime. The Texas sharpshooter fallacy illustrates the importance of order of conditioning. If event A is "a successful shot" and event B is "this circle is the target," then the likelihood of a successful shot, given that the circle is the target, is 1 if event B is derived from event A -- that is, if the target is defined as whatever is the outcome of the shot. The same is ostensibly true if A and B are both conditioned on a common variable X. If A follows inevitably from X and B follows inevitably from X, and X is asserted, there's no meaningful independence between A and B. (There may be if X is not asserted.) Your proof requires there to be such independence between A and B if its goal is to arrive at a teensy number. But paradoxically it's required to be tautological in order to have the conceptual A-and-B relationship you require for your proof. Regardless of how you've stated your proof, it boils down to "What is the likelihood, given the period of Jabba's lifetime, that a time point Jabba can call 'now' will fall into that that period." You're trying very hard to equivocate up a disguise for that tautology, but you aren't succeeding. The likelihood, given the century of your life, that some arbitrarily-chosen time point will fall into it is quite small, but also quite irrelevant since an arbitrarily-chosen time point by definition has no conceptual connection to anything. You have to make up your mind between the irrelevant teensy number or the conceptually useful tautology. You can't just pick the best bits of each.
No, Jabba. There is no "communication problem." You keep pretending that your critics don't understand your argument and/or don't understand logic and statistics. Consequently your ability to "win" arguments by making up things and invoking common fallacies that your opponents or an audience won't catch is severely limited here, just as it became equally limited with the statistics form you visited. And it appears you don't know any other methods of debate besides that. Sadly this doesn't stop you from gaslighting in the fading hope that you can bluff your critics into thinking your proof only looks like it fails only because they aren't smart enough or "holistic" enough to get it.
You have been told exhaustively why your proof for the above statement is not valid. You have confessed that you cannot address those reasons. You have further confessed that your reason for believing the conclusion is emotional.
Jabba
Philosopher
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- No.
- I'm saying that if time consists of 14 billion years, and I live to be 100, the likelihood of now corresponding with the time of my existence is 1/140,000,000 -- and that likelihood pretty much assures that OOFLam is wrong.
godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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That would only be true if you had an equal chance of existing at each point in that whole 14 billion year period, which you just told me you weren't saying.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
This is his overall schtick. It's how he keeps the semblance of debate going literally for years as nothing more than a shell game. When Jabba says that the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is the weakest link in his argument, what he wants you to believe by that is that the rest of his argument is otherwise strong. It isn't. The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is only one of about a dozen of specific, largely distinct errors we have identified in his argument. Each one of them is a individual show-stopper. But he will only discuss one at a time, so that at each step in the argument he can say, "Okay, I admit this thing we're talking about now is a weak point, but it's the only one." He couches this limitation as a tenet of his principles of "effective debate," of which he claims to be a guru.
Last summer I tried to bust the shell game. You know how to bust up a shell game. You make the operator turn over all the shells at the same time after picking your shell, to prove there's a pea under one of them even if it wasn't the one you chose. I told Jabba he should sketch out, in one or two sentences, how his argument would handle each of the fatal flaws. And he had to do it all at once, not strung out in his usually evasive way. That's why I limited the responses for that purpose to something he could write briefly without needing to supply a lengthy argument or evidence for any of them. Otherwise experience has shown that he'd just evade differently by saying "I don't have time to do what you ask; it's too big a task."
See, shell-game operators are smart. They know you suspect it's a scam, so they go through a pretense of showing you the pea behaves normally -- but they do so only one shell at a time. "See, here's the pea under this one shell I've turned over." Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. "See, here's the pea again where you thought it should be, under the one shell I've turned over." Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. "Now where's the pea?" Of course the guess will be wrong, because sleight of hand ensures the pea will never be under the selected shell when the selection actually counts. But if the player selects a shell, and then all the shells are turned over to reveal no pea under any of them, the jig is up. (Ideally the operator has to open his hands too, but you see where the analogy is going.)
Jabba promised he would address all the fatal flaws, but only if he could be allowed to address them one at a time, in his longstanding fashion. That is, only if he could be allowed to shuffle the shells between examinations as he's been doing hitherto. When we tried to change the game in a way that required him to ensure fairness, he admitted he couldn't do it. Or wouldn't do it; no real difference. I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that data regarding whether Jabba's approach is an effective means of determining whether his proof is valid.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Neither now nor your lifetime is a uniformly distributed random variable, nor are they independent variables. Your math is wrong.
RoboTimbo
Hostile Nanobacon
"What are the chances of me shooting this very spot in my foot? I've even drawn a circle around it to show how improbable it was!"
Belz...
Fiend God
Why don't you read the responses to this?
You could not have lived before the stars formed, before humans existed, or before your parents met.
halleyscomet
Penultimate Amazing
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What are the odds Jabba plagiarized his thesis from someone else?
Think about it.
Think about it.
Dancing David
Penultimate Amazing
Nope, time is not a random lottery!
jsfisher
ETcorngods survivor
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Jabba,
For your little foray into Bayes inference, you picked Jabba, an existing person. We could have explored questions about Jabba's hair color, his age, his height, his...so many, many things all without committing any sort of sharpshooter fallacy.
However, having picked Jabba, an existing person, the answer to any question of his existence is already known.
P(E) = 1.
Jabba
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- Likelihood of the Bayesian variety has nothing (directly) to do with science. It has only to do with math and the givens.
godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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The science is part of the givens.
Monza
Alta Viro
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No. Something with extremely long odds that occurs does not imply that there is doubt on that thing occurring. Many things happen every day that defy odds. You've been given many examples over the past few years.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Utter hogwash. Any statistical inference must properly model the underlying system in order to produce useful results. And the underlying systems we observe in nature do not invariably line up as discrete, uniform probability distributions the way your thinking seems limited to.
In terms of Bayes (as opposed to frequentist thinking), we may certainly incorporate the effects of informal knowledge. But insofar as that knowledge is not based at least in significant part on observation and empirical analysis, it is not useful for inference. It certainly couldn't be used to prove anything. For example, in constructing a Bayesian search plan, we may consult with the local sheriff's deputies for their opinions about how hard it would be to overlook a missing child in some given part of the search area. Such information would be strictly informal as science reckons rigor, and would be subjective in the way Bayesians use the term. But it would still ostensibly be based on relatively unbiased real-world expertise of those deputies and their familiarity with the land. Those are still factors informed by facts, not flights of fancy.
There is absolutely nothing in Bayesian reasoning that says you get to ignore science when the science rightly applies.
The proper formulation of the math and the givens is dictated by the behavior of the system being modeled, which in turn is dictated by the natural laws that pertain to it. But since you don't understand how probability density can vary, you just want to pretend it doesn't exist or doesn't apply. As I said before, you're trying to make the problem fit your understanding rather than expand your understanding to properly accommodate the problem.
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JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
And it wouldn't matter if it were, since the choice of century was in no way the operation of a random variable. It was expressly chosen according to criteria. That's not rolling the die; that's placing the die on the table with the desired number face up.
Belz...
Fiend God
Amazing. None of that has anything to do with the posts you replied to.
Jabba
Philosopher
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- You're right (in our current case) -- but that is the extent to which science is involved. If a scientific claim is not part of the givens, it has nothing to do with "likelihood" of the Bayesian variety.
- In this case, all the science we're given is that time exists for 14 billion years, and we're asking for the likelihood that now would be within a particular century (100 years).
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Yes, it's valid for the case we're talking about. It's irrelevant whether it might be valid or invalid for some other case. It applies to this case, and here it refutes this case.
It's an extent that pertains to your question and refutes your model of it.
Straw man. We're not talking about "scientific claims." If you're using statistics to model a real-world system, whatever science that applies to that real-world system also applies to your model. A model that does not accurately capture the behavior of the underlying system is not useful. Science is what we use to describe the behavior of all such underlying systems.
But your claim is not limited to the existence of time. Your claim also involves the likelihood of human life arising. It is a scientific fact that human life is not equally viable across all 140 million centuries. Human life is far more likely to arise in the past 200,000 years than in the previous eons. That's an example of a non-uniform probability density.
But all that is largely moot because your "particular century" was not chosen at random from all the possible centuries. It was specifically selected by you because it's the century corresponding to your life. No random variable was involved in that event.
godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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But that's not all the science we're given. Among other things, we know things about the state of the universe over the span of that 14 billion years. We know that the planet we live on has only existed for 4.5 billion years, only supported multi-cellular life for less than a billion, and modern humans have only existed for around 200,000 years. For almost all of that 14 billion years, the existence of you or any other human was impossible.
Science also tells us that your specific existence was the result of two specific people reproducing, which further limits the span of time in which you could exist.
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Jabba
Philosopher
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- "Likelihood" is only part of the Bayesian formula -- science does get involved, but except for the givens, only in the "prior probabilities."
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
No, that doesn't address anything I said. Probability density affects all parts of the Bayesian model. Can you describe probability density in your own words?
Dancing David
Penultimate Amazing
You second statement is silly, there is not a random assignment of time.
Here is always now.
Monza
Alta Viro
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But now has to be some time. And the only time we could ask that question is, by definition, ...now. To put another way: What is the likelihood of now falling within a 100-year time span of the time of asking?
Now is relative. Now will always fall within a time span of the moment you define now.
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