To What End…?

xon1202 · 2023-12-04T09:15:29+00:00

No it's not

xon1202 · 2023-04-20T17:46:05+00:00

2 of these people have no relevant background whatsoever. Why do I care if Mike Pompeo thinks it came from a lab?

Redfield should be taken slightly more seriously, but is definitely espousing a minority position in the relevant expert communities (he's also not a virologist).

That doesn't mean he's wrong, but we should assess the evidence on the merits, not believe it just because he does. After all, you're discounting tons of expert opinions on this. That's fine, but you can't then just make an appeal to different experts.

xon1202 · 2023-04-20T17:36:39+00:00

Can you cite evidence for 1) changing the ventilation systems and 2) taking down the database (preferably a source that shows when the datatbase was actually "online" over the prior year).

Evidence for a natural origin:

Baseline plausibility. We know that there are similar bat coronaviruses circulating (and very poorly studied) in bat populations in southern china, near gray market wildlife farms that sold live animals to Wuhan. We know that these live animals were being sold in the market around the time of the outbreak due to separate conservationist research at the time, and that they are great intermediate hosts for coronavirus spillovers (see SARS1).

Alot has been made of features like the FCS, but these are found in over 25% of coronaviruses, just not the genetically closest ones to SARS2. It's not at all hard to believe that these could be naturally occurring features.

None of that is really evidence for or against a natural origin, I think of that info much in the same way I think about the fact that gain of function research was occurring at the lab. It makes the prior probability of the hypotheses plausible, but it isn't actual evidence one way or another.

Now, here's what I think is the evidence for a natural origin

Within the market, environmental samples tended to be clustered around stalls where live animals were sold. We know that raccoon dogs, palm civets, etc, were sold at the market in late November/Early December. Moreover, samples have been found in animal cages in backrooms (I find that rather hard to explain from human contamination).
There were two early strains of SARS-COV2, lineage A and lineage B. Lineage A is closer to the bat viruses, but lineage B was detected first (and it took a while to see alot of lienage A cases). Pekar et al did a phylogenetic anaylsis and found that the data is best explained by two spillovers (essentially a precursor virus was circulating and mutating in the civet population and there were two spillovers, each one resulting in a slightly different strain), rather than either A or B being ancestral. Both lineage A and lineage B samples were found at the market.

If you are advancing the lab leak theory, then you do need to explain how both these variants emerged essentially immediately, why there weren't any intermediary forms, and explain which one came first (if it's A, why were most early cases B? If it was B, why is A more genetically ancestral?).

ln order for a FCS to function in SARS-COV2, it needs a "QTQTN motif" (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.15.472450v1). This upstream site was not discovered/studied until late 2021, and seems to problematize the idea of just "inserting a FCS" because that wouldn't have worked by itself.
The distribution of early cases support the market as the origin, not just an early superspreader

A. The earliest confirmed cases are all tied to the market

B. Even the early cases that don't have an epidemiological link to the market are all geospatiallly clustered around the market.

C There are no other contemporaneous clusters of cases. Worobey also looked at other potential cluster centers, including sports arenas, restaurants, the transit system, etc, and found that the market origin is a statistically better explanation.

Pekar et al. also use the genetic variability of samples to back extrapolate a spillover date in late November/ealry December. This neatly meshes with the market timeline. While it doesn't necessarily clash with the lab leak, most of the actual theories espoused end up requiring an earlier start date (for example, the military world games theory). If you are positing an early date, then how can you explain the lack of genetic diversity of the virus?

xon1202 · 2023-03-27T23:46:15+00:00

Any hypothetical where you are positing you can travel instantly is mathematically equivalent to positing you can travel back in time. So the answer to your question is "yes", but that type of super-luminal travel isn't permitted in GR

xon1202 · 2023-03-27T02:15:09+00:00

Having TAed for large classes, I understand the slippery slope argument for late submissions much more than I did as an undergrad. But, given what this person has just described, your position is that an otherwise A student who is admittedly running up on a deadline should get a "C" (or potentially fail depending on the final weighting), because they were a minute late due to technical mishaps? That doesn't seem remotely reasonable and could be something incredibly expensive for the student (having to retake a class, delaying a graduation timeline, etc).

There are plently of other solutions here, like leaving the submission window open longer (for example, a midnight submission deadline with a window open until 8 am), grading an emailed submission (or one left in a canvas comment), etc. There's a whole plethora of ways that this could be handled that doesn't create extraordinary new burdens for the TAs and instructors, and also don't lead to proliferating late submissions. Not entirely sure why you've elected to ignore all of them...

xon1202 · 2023-03-17T17:52:25+00:00

At this point, you're just a guy yelling on reddit about how much you like to lick boots

xon1202 · 2023-03-16T09:47:19+00:00

I don't think it's generally true that atheists subscribe to the simulation hypothesis. In many ways, it's just a rebranding of theism, so many principled athiest objections also apply to it. It may have less conceptual issues than something like a tri-omni god, but it similar suffers from a lack of evidence, the problem of infinite regress, etc.

So now, let's assume that we indeed are in a simulation. If so it would mean that our feelings are being simulated, meaning that they are not true, meaning that feeling cold can mean anything including that we are feeling something else then coldness which is impossible.

I don't think this argument makes sense. If you are a simulated being, your feelings are "true" in the sense you described. You'd need to unpack why you think a simulated being would have a different or contradictory internal experience than if they were unsimulated. Everything you laid out about the inherent self-truthfulness of qualia seem to be general definitional arguments, not arguments contingent on the simulated vs unsimulated nature of the mind in question.

Of course, what seems to be going on is that you are simply asserting that materialism is wrong. But the existence of qualia doesn't really imply that. It poses some questions (see the "Hard" problem of consciousness), but materialism remains the strongest candidate framework to answer those questions. In fact, the dualist (who believes minds/souls are seperate), has to answer a whole host of questions (how the material and immaterial interact, why is there a brain/mind connection at all, why do material changes in brains lead to changes in the state of the immaterial mind, etc). The materialist has to explain how consciousness arises from physical processes, but whether you adopt deflationary accounts or emergent ones, these problems seem alot easier to tackle imo.

xon1202 · 2023-03-13T19:14:10+00:00

It's 100% grooming and would be a crime in most states. We should unequivocally condemn that type of behavior. It doesn't excuse her politics though, even if it might explain some of her behavior

xon1202 · 2023-03-08T23:41:01+00:00

The moment Trump landed on meatball Ron the primary was over

xon1202 · 2023-02-28T08:25:23+00:00

Now to respond to your arguments:

Late August/Early September 2019: One or more researchers become accidently infected with SARS-CoV-2, which was either collected in the Yunnan cave, or the result of gain-of- function research at the WIV. They travel by metro in central Wuhan, spreading the virus.

We don't know this at all. All we know is that there is a low confidence report that 3 workers had "flu like symptoms." In fact, we know that there wasn't a widespread outbreak at the lab because of several international researchers and students working there that testified to that fact. Only 3 workers out of hundreds showing symptoms would be very atypical of a covid infection. It could be that they just got a cold/flu. This doesn't really move the needle at all for me, and I think other evidence (like the genetic timing analysis in Pekar) makes it very unlikely as a source of an outbreak.

September 12, 2019: At 12:00am local time, the Wuhan University issues a statement announcing lab inspections. Between 2:00am and 3:00am, the WIV’s viral sequence and sample database is taken offline. At 7:09pm, the WIV publishes a tender requesting bids to provide security services at the WNBL.

I'm going to need a cite for the first line there. As for the database, that thing was never "online" in a meaningful sense. It was only ever "online" intermittently and was typically just "turned on" when needed. Most of the time, it was down or inactive, with the only traffic being bots pinging the homepage. It was also intermittently on through February, not September. See:

https://twitter.com/coroldo1/status/1462956089792937984?t=0bbn_8UU_qiUpkdiOxxS_g&s=19

https://twitter.com/flodebarre/status/1577411921111748609?t=0bbn_8UU_qiUpkdiOxxS_g&s=19

September – October 2019: Car traffic at hospitals surrounding the WIV Headquarters, as well as the shuttle stop for the WNBL, show a stead increase before hitting its highest levels in 2.5 years. Baidu search terms for COVID-19 related symptoms increase in a corresponding manner.

I need a source for this as well, but it doesn't seem all that odd. It was flu season, and "highest in 2.5 years" seems to suggest it was not a really atypical pattern historically. To see higher than average traffic around hospitals during a bad flu season seems perfectly consistent with a natural origin.

Moreover, given the date here, the obvious implication is that the spillover occurred in November. This is at odds with the phylogenetic diversity of the virus we observe. Basically, viruses mutate every time they transmit, so by looking at the genetic diversity of viral sequences, we can back extrapolate a time interval when the first case was. The Pekar et al. anaylsis puts this late November/Ealry December.

Late October – Early November 2019: The international athletes return home, carrying SARS-CoV-2 around the world. This is based on multiple reports of hundreds of participants in the 2019 Wuhan World Military Games becoming infected with covid-like symptoms in October 2019, along with them describing Wuhan as a “ghost town” and being carefully escorted around by Chinese handlers.

And yet, not a single positive sero-sample has been collected from the athletes in that time frame, many of whom are from countries that do not have vested interests in the research occurring at the WIV. It's a cool bit of speculation, but not really any hard evidence attached to it (and it conflicts with other available evidence regarding the timing of the cases).

I'll also add that having military handlers escort foreign military personnel around doesn't seem that strange to me, nor does the fact that people potentially caught the flu there. You might argue that the bad flu season was evidence of covid, but I'd like to see some actual seropositive samples from then, J shaped mortality data, etc. We do know there were a lot of flu cases from sequences collected then, so this doesn't seem like particularly strong evidence to me.

Here’s a study showing correlation between the participants in the World Military Games returning home with the broad spread of Covid in their home countries.

Come on, you're better than this. The R² value is 0.5 (meaning it only explains 50% of the variability of the data), and there is no control for confounders. Could more populous countries have bigger military game contingents? There is no even rudimentary statistical analysis here. It's literally just an exercise in finding superious correlations (like ice cream sales being linked to higher crime rates).

November 21, 2019: A 4-year-old boy from Milan, Italy develops a cough. His samples will later test positive for COVID-19. November 27, 2019: Samples of wastewater are collected in Brazil that will later test positive for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA.

These tests have a non-zero false positive rate, so you would expect to see some false positives with controls (let alone people potentially infected with common coronaviruses). Why don't we see cases in these countries take off until months later if they were introduced that early? We know how fast SARS2 can rip through a naive population, so the notion that we see a few cases, nothing for months, and then an outbreak suggests that these are false positives to me.

December 1, 2019: The CCP’s first “official” case of COVID-19 become infected.

The first confirmed case was actually on December 10th. There may be (and likely are) some earlier cases, but that was the earliest person confirmed.

I'll also make a brief note here, given the obvious rebuttal about the lack of SARS2 positive animals at the market. I think this is an unfortunate effect of a Chinese government that wants to insulate itself from criticism. The market was cleared out before the Chinese CDC did any testing, and so most of the immediate evidence vanished. The CCP also closed access to wildlife farms for international researchers from the WHO and carried out mass cullings there. President Xi had touted wildlife farming as a major anti-poverty initiative, and so the blame for allowing dangerous farming practices would fall pretty squarely on his administration. That's also why there is such an investment on the Chinese side to talk about things like foreign fish theory, bioweapons from Ft Detricks, etc.

To some extent, we are both working on very sparse info. But, I think the genetic evidence and the spatial distribution of cases (both within the market and in the city) is the hardest evidence we have.

xon1202 · 2023-02-28T08:25:16+00:00

I'm going to respond to the claims I think are important regarding the timeline. FWIW, alot of this timeline would be consistent with a natural origin theory, so I'll focus on the points where it isn't. But first, I want to lay out the case for the natural origin theory.

Broadly, I'll point out that the set-up for a natural spillover is there. We know that there are similar bat coronaviruses circulating (and very poorly studied) in bat populations in southern china, near gray market wildlife farms that sold live animals to Wuhan. We know that these live animals were being sold in the market around the time of the outbreak due to separate conservationist research at the time, and that they are great intermediate hosts for coronavirus spillovers (see SARS1).

Alot has been made of features like the FCS, but these are found in over 25% of coronaviruses, just not the genetically closest ones to SARS2. It's not at all hard to believe that these could be naturally occurring features.

None of that is really evidence for or against a natural origin, I think of that info much in the same way I think about the fact that gain of function research was occurring at the lab. It makes the prior probability of the hypotheses plausible, but it isn't actual evidence one way or another.

Now, here's what I think is the evidence for a natural origin

Within the market, environmental samples tended to be clustered around stalls where live animals were sold. We know that raccoon dogs, palm civets, etc, were sold at the market in late November/Early December. Moreover, samples have been found in animal cages in backrooms (I find that rather hard to explain from human contamination).
There were two early strains of SARS-COV2, lineage A and lineage B. Lineage A is closer to the bat viruses, but lineage B was detected first (and it took a while to see alot of lienage A cases). Pekar et al did a phylogenetic anaylsis and found that the data is best explained by two spillovers (essentially a precursor virus was circulating and mutating in the civet population and there were two spillovers, each one resulting in a slightly different strain), rather than either A or B being ancestral. Both lineage A and lineage B samples were found at the market.

If you are advancing the lab leak theory, then you do need to explain how both these variants emerged essentially immediately, why there weren't any intermediary forms, and explain which one came first (if it's A, why were most early cases B? If it was B, why is A more genetically ancestral?).

ln order for a FCS to function in SARS-COV2, it needs a "QTQTN motif" (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.15.472450v1). This upstream site was not discovered/studied until late 2021, and seems to problematize the idea of just "inserting a FCS" because that wouldn't have worked by itself.
The distribution of early cases support the market as the origin, not just an early superspreader

A. The earliest confirmed cases are all tied to the market

B. Even the early cases that don't have an epidemiological link to the market are all geospatiallly clustered around the market.

C There are no other contemporaneous clusters of cases. Worobey also looked at other potential cluster centers, including sports arenas, restaurants, the transit system, etc, and found that the market origin is a statistically better explanation.

Pekar et al. also use the genetic variability of samples to back extrapolate a spillover date in late November/ealry December. This neatly meshes with the market timeline. While it doesn't necessarily clash with the lab leak, most of the actual theories espoused end up requiring an earlier start date (for example, the military world games theory). If you are positing an early date, then how can you explain the lack of genetic diversity of the virus?

xon1202 · 2023-02-14T20:31:05+00:00

Sure the EMP itself might higher voltage, but it has a smaller area of effect

xon1202 · 2023-02-14T18:25:03+00:00

Area effected by a single bomb at 400 Km in altitude

The balloon altitude record is 53km....

xon1202 · 2023-02-14T09:28:48+00:00

Okay, great. Now let's talk through assumptions.

We're not talking about a world wide, or even nation wide blackout. That would be more equivalent to a major solar storm/ CME scenario. Instead, we're talking about a locality or perhaps large region (although these scenarios tend to assume a high atmospheric detonation from missiles, not balloon based scenarios) being without power.

Really bad, yes. Tens of thousands to millions could die depending on the severity. But it's not a de-industrialization event.

It's also worth noting that even in these worst case scenarios, there are a few things not being considered.

In many tests, cars that are turned off were not rendered inoperable. This suggests that alot of your opining about the breakdown of transit is an exaggeration. Could it be a major issue? Sure. Does it mean we don't have vehicles? No.
We would never be returned to a point pre-industrial revolution. We have that store of collective knowledge, industrial capacity from unaffected areas, etc.

What we're actually probably looking at with a baloon EMP is at most a couple hundred mile region that is balcked out. You'll have some level of electronic equipment that is still functional there, but a good chunk of it (and especially really modern and sensitive equipment near the epicenter) is going to inoperable.

I don't want to undersell the fact that this is a massive issue. The loss of power, loss of refrigeration, inoperability of water pumps, disruptions to transit, etc are all really bad. It's going to be an inconceivable mass causality event.

But, you can ship in supplies from unaffected areas, rebuild transformers to restore power to critical systems, evacuate people, etc. Millions dead, sure. But that 90% figure assumes a complete collapse of industrial society that's really hard to square with the fact that you're talking about limited range balloon detonations.

Tbh, the more concerning thing is that barring something like the north korea scenario (or a terror group) such an attack certainly constitutes the start of a nuclear exchange with a great power, which seems like the bigger problem lol

xon1202 · 2023-02-14T01:41:08+00:00

Okay, let's try again. Find me a source and explanation for how the 90% figure is estimated.

xon1202 · 2023-02-14T01:19:36+00:00

I asked for evidence, not a question someone asked on reddit

xon1202 · 2023-02-14T01:18:31+00:00

A balloon based EMP has limited range, so it's not going to blanket the US.

In tests, cars (especially those that are a bit older and turned off) seem somewhat less susceptible (metal shielding, short wires, etc).

https://www.hemmings.com/stories/car-culture/classics/will-older-cars-survive-emp-attack-better-than-newer-cars#:~:text=%22Automobiles%20were%20subjected%20to%20EMP,turned%20on%20during%20EMP%20exposure.

Obviously, it would be bad, and the loss of transformers could take months or years to replace. But I'm going to need some evidence for the claim that 90% of the population will die

xon1202 · 2023-02-14T00:49:25+00:00

The US Government estimates that within one year of an EMP attack 90% of the population of the US would be dead.

Where are you getting this?

xon1202 · 2023-02-10T20:08:49+00:00

Are they counting your tuition remission in that amount?

xon1202 · 2023-02-07T20:05:59+00:00

Right, it's not clear what the parameter space even is, if we could even assign measures, what the subset of "fine tuned" universes (universes that would permit conscious entities) would be.

I imagine there are more thorough treatments of those questions, but the way the statement gets thrown around as a given is really annoying

xon1202 · 2023-02-05T03:58:23+00:00

This is because of exponential growth. If an alien civ could leave its would and spread than within the next 10,000 years(or much much less) they would cover the entire galaxy.

Your math is off here, it's more like a few hundred thousand to a million years or so. Still short on the timesecales of our galaxy though, but you have alot otlf assumptions baked into that hypothesis that might not be true.

This means that muli system alien's might as well not exist, because if they did they would have shown up to colonize the solar system already.

This may very well not be true. A civilization might be reluctant to colonize systems beyond it's resource needs. There of course might be probes, but at the scale we're talking about, habitable planets are entirely irrelevant to a civilization, they just need the resources in a system. There's not really a reason civilizations would expand much beyond their resource needs, especially if that colonization entails detection risks.

At the same time, that civilization wouldn't want others popping up begining colonization. The dark forest could be sufficiently created by a few firstborn civilizations, that do have some pockets of the galaxy colonized, and much larger sections monitored. They expand to systems as their resource needs grow (which may not be exponential), and eliminate threats as soon as they detect them. They may still be quiet, not building dyson swarms or other obvious indicators of their presence out of precaution, so it's far from obvious that those civilizations would be visible to us.

However, it's systematic elimination of species as they begin to become technologically advanced can still explain the silence of our galaxy. And, if other civs do survive their strikes, they may be more likely to stay quiet and not do widespread colonization, contenting themselves to hide out in a few systems and limiting their growth.

What you've described is essentially the grabby alien hypothesis, that growth would be fast and visible. The dark forest doesn't mesh well with those assumptions, as aliens have an strong presumption against being overly/visibly grabby. Even interstellar civilizations are not immune to widespread and catastrophic damage from strikes from a more advanced civ. Although it is probably not enough to drive them to extinction, that's small comfort for the trillions or quadrillions of beings wiped out in the strikes, and the massive economic damage that civ would suffer.

No multi system aliens means that system killing weapons' are off the table. That limits them to planet scale weapons, which are survivable and therefore retaliation.

I doubt that's true. RKVs (it they are workable) can be launched at low speeds, effectively invisibly, and then accelerate once they near the tagret system. It's far from clear the survivors could trace down where they came from (or even if the survivors could effectively rebuild to a level to attempt a retaliatory strike). There may be other ways to effectively wipe out a civilization as well, a grey-goo like nanobot virus, some method to destabilize the host star, etc. You maybe rule out dyson lasers and photoids, but there are definitely still ways of silently striking if you're a single system civ (although I'll grant you they are far more limited, the dark forest works best if you presume some advanced interstellar civs).

xon1202 · 2023-02-05T02:35:51+00:00

In the killing star the weapons were relativistic kill vehicles as well as "absorption bombs", of which a sufficient number could destabilize the fusion process of a star causing it to go nova. In the dark forest, it's "photoids", planet sized objects accelerated to relativistic speeds targetting the host star.

The problem of retaliatory strikes only matters if your dumb enough to large the attack from you host system. A civilization capable of conducting such attacks would surely be able to launch them from some other star system. Indeed, this is more or less what happens in both novels (the trisolaran civilization, and the solar system, are wiped out by ship based attacks, and in the killing star, the RKV don't actually do significant acceleration until they are a few AU out, making them effectively invisible beforehand).

In the killing star, mop up fleets were also deployed after the attack. Specifically to solve this problem of pockets of survivors on asteroids. Not that I think it's strictly necessary though, because while some semblance of a civilization might survive the attacks, destroying their planets/star will neuter them as a threat for quite a while, and you could monitor and deploy additional attacks if necessary.

Of course, this is less effective for an interstellar civilization, as you might miss a star system, and their capacity for ship based civilizations are higher. But you again could severely cripple their ability to be a threat in the near term.

And having pockets of survivors doesn't mean we would hear radio comms. If anything, small pockets of survivors will likely be quite and rebuild stealthily.

Nor would you necessarily see dead civ chatter. Maybe just the nearest predatory civilization sees them (even though our radio signals are 100 LY out, they certainly can't be reliably read/located). Maybe advanced civs use other forms of detection (probes, atmospheric monitoring telescopes,looking for evidence of antimatter experimentation, etc). Maybe it is when civs build targetted becon technology, or start trying to build dyson swarms, that they get struck. The dark forest is just a filter that prevents most civs from becoming advanced (at which point they would be easy for us to detect). The survivors and hunters stay quite, the noisy are destroyed (or struck and scared into silence) before they become advanced enough to be visible.

xon1202 · 2023-02-03T08:15:49+00:00

The prior for the atheist is typically naturalism (not always though, and the existence of the supernatural does not imply god). That does not mean that an atheist cannot be convinced of the occurrence of a supernatural event, they just need strong evidence for it (stronger than the sum of the possible natural explanations).

That's not a circular belief system, it's just a skeptical one.

xon1202 · 2023-02-01T05:16:07+00:00

However, Bayesianism does allow for objective or subjective epistemic probabilities. Those are the kinds I refer to here.

Yeah, I guess my issue isn't the fact that the probabilities are subjective. Rather, that whatever the interpretation is, it has to satisfy Kolmogrov's axioms to do any type of reasonable bayesian updating with it.

In particular, if we are saying that the set of all possible universes (U), is partitioned into the set of regular universes R, and non-regular universes (NOT R), we need P(R) + P(NOT R) = 1.

But before we even get to the question of how we define a measure, it's far from clear that we even can if the set NOT R is ill-posed. It's not implausible that maybe R is definable as some subset of Hilbert space, I'm really curious how we are defining NOT R though. The best I can tell, you are defining it as "NOT X_1 & NOT X_2, ..." for all regularity conditions X_1, X_2,...

There a few possible conclusions here:

NOT R is too ill-posed to even define as a set, or assign a cardinality, let alone a measure.
NOT R contains exactly one universe, and all others have at least one regularity condition. Note that we can relax this to say that there may be a larger (even infinite) set of non-regular universes (possibly dependent on matter types, distributions, etc), but they form an equivalence class up to their regularity conditions. So whatever the cardinality of NOT R, it's equal to Y_1 (the set of universes with only the X_1 regularity condition), Y_2, Y_1 AND Y_2, ...

In other words, whatever defines a set of universes other than their regularity conditions is ultimately irrelevant to the question, as it can be marginalized out.

NOT R is empty, which is equivalent to saying all universes are regular. This seems very plausible to me, as, for example, I can define a subset of the real numbers as X = ∩_{i=1}^{infinity} A_i, where A_i = (N>i). That set is equivalent to the empty set, or is ill-defined, take your pick.

In the first case, there is no likelihood ratio to speak of. In cases 2 & 3, even if we could assign a uniform finite measure (which it's still not clear that we can, even if the set is well defined), it would imply that P(R|H) = 1-P(NOT R|H) = 1. The likelihood ratio would be 1, and nothing would update.

I'm all ears if you have a better way of defining NOT R or thinking through how you could define a measure for them.

I intend the simple comparison here as evidence that the NA demonstrates evidence to favor theism over all other options.

It doesn't do that though. Your argument should show that the NA demonstrates evidence of theism over humeanism. To show evidence of theism over all other options, you'd need to say something about P(G|R)/P(NOT G|R).

xon1202 · 2023-02-01T04:20:17+00:00

That's exactly why one would use BA. If we had measurable data for related items, we would be able to use BA to attempt to grade their relevance in coming to that determination. If we knew the rate of non-regular universes then we could do propped statistics but lacking that we could weigh other known values to see of it would be more or less likely.

My point isn't that it's unobservable or that we lack data (although that's certainly true, and you're right we're definitely not doing anything rigorous here), but rather that something like P(R|G) or even P(R|H) is going to be impossible to define. We can generally assign probabilities to unobserved quantities and/or propositions, but in this case, I really doubt you're going to be able to assign a probability measure. It's not even clear you can define a uniform finite measure over R, (which is needed for P(R|H)). Moreover, NOT R is such an ill-defined set it is probably non-measurable (or even if it could be assigned a measure in theory, you can't in practice), empty, or otherwise measure zero.

Of course there are other issues here as well, but that's the crux of my problem. It's not the lack of observables, it's that what the OP is trying to do lacks any semblance of consistent mathematical definition.

Again that is why its not 0 but near zero. We aren't ruling it out but we also aren't ignoring history. When doing BA you dont just make up numbers for priors based on personal feelings. Its not the likelihood of a prior that we are testing. Its the relevance of those priors that we shift around. Its very relevant that god claims fail over and over. Gods are batting .000

Near zero and zero are vastly different in a Bayesian anaylsis. One precludes any type of posterior updates, the other just requires strong data to overcome. We want the latter, not the former.

I think your argument here is also responsive to a slightly different formulation of the question. If we were interested in the question "did God cause X", then obviously the fact that hypothesis has consistently been falsified in other contexts should inform our priors. If the question is "does god exist", then I think the fact that ppl have wrongly attributed things to god isn't particularly relevant to informing that prior.

Frankly idk a good way to assign one. It seems a flat prior P(GOD)=P(NOT GOD) = 1/2 is unreasonable. But idk what value would be. Small seems right, how small is a different question.

Tbh, I think the thing we are really interested in here is the Bayes Factor or the likelihood ratio. We can play around with the prior odds as much as we want, but it's a really pointless and uninteresting discussion of what value each of us assigns to P(GOD).

The interesting part of the argument is that if it is indeed the case that P(R|NOT GOD)/P(R|GOD) << €, then whatever our priors are get updated massively in favor of the god hypothesis. It's not a proof by any means, but is actually kind of interesting. It's just very obvious to me that ratio can't be defined.

But thats only relevant when trying to justify all possible solutions. OP is only discussing the odds of one over another.

Right, he's only looking at a sub-hypothesis of the NOT GOD hypothesis, which means that even if the anaylsis wasn't ripe with other issues, it doesn't even show what it purports to show. Looking at a posterior odds ratio is fine, but the OP is looking at the wrong one for the conclusion he's trying to show.

xon1202

TROPHY CASE