= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Tyrrell_McAllister comments on Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (226)
Sorry, probability and inference don't work like that. I didn't "misread him as saying she was culturally traditional". I correctly read exactly what the post said. It's just that I made the inference based on the strong cues in the story that she was devout. That's not the same as misreading a word or two.
I admit -- I certainly could have made the basis for that belief more clear, but you also should have applied the principle of charity and thought about the possibility that it wasn't just a misreading, and that there are reasons to infer someone is a "devout Muslim" other than "oh, someone told me with those exact words."
In addition to what I mentioned in my response to Zack_M_Davis, there's the fact that the Muslim woman has actually thought through the implications of her faith enough to actually want to persuade others, and has ranked the different reasons for disagreement for their plausibility. This is the same kind of person who would watch that they're going above and beyond to adhere to their faith's requirements.
Furthermore, I need not have "made the baseless inference that all creationist Muslims are culturally traditional." The world isn't black and white. If the evidence justifies believing with 95% probability that she's a devout Muslim, I can tentatively hold that belief with high confidence without believing that all (your term) creationist Muslims are culturally traditional. There were more cues in the passage.
Come on, this is basic Bayesian probability theory here. You should have dropped the rhetoric of "you think X implies a 100% probability of Y" a long time ago.
You should be aware that when you write
(1) "The kind of person who is an X is also a Y.",
many careful readers are going to read that as equivalent to
(2) "All people who are Xs are Ys."
Indeed. No one here had said anything about 100% probabilities. If you want (1) above to be read as shorthand for
(1') "The kind of person who is an X is also a Y with probability 1 - epsilon.",
then you should reciprocate by reading (2) as shorthand for
(2') "All but a (1 - epsilon)th of people who are Xs are also Ys."
If you want to dispense with "most likely", "nearly all", etc., then you should allow others to do the same.
This seems a fair summary of your view: Any Muslim creationist is so likely to be a cultural traditionalist that, when Yvain reports meeting an exception in Egypt, you may confidently accuse him of lying.
And that, I maintain is a baseless inference, albeit a probabilistic one. One shouldn't throw around accusations of lying without justifying strong confidence in such an inference.
Many careless readers, you mean? This is Less Wrong, Tyrrell. Most everyone understands that "X is certain" doesn't mean P(X) = 100%. One hundred percent probabilities (infinite odds) don't exist and can't be updated; what matters instead is whether something is certain enough, and it needn't be 100% for this to hold.
I do wish it be so read, and this is how people should already be reading such statements, for the reasons given above. Requiring that all "1-epsilon" be always written as "nearly all" instead of "all" is wasteless verbiage. See But there's still a chance, right?.
It doesn't seem like a fair summary of my view, or even one you put much effort into. A fair summary would be "Any Muslim creationist female in a Muslim country, who meets the criteria I specifically identified, is so likely to also adhere to the norm of restricted casual conversation with unrelated males, that, when Yvain reports chatting with one in an Egypt cafe where the impropriety would be noticed, then given his past embellishment of details [see last response to Zack], I may confidently suggest that his story is not entirely accurate and more likely indicates a tale pieced together from other accounts."
Ah, man, not so straw-stuffed when you put it that way...
None of those examples strike me as remotely in the ballpark of the mendacity of which you accused him in this thread.
Precisely my point. Why, then, did you object to my "all" when I glossed your position as "all creationist Muslims are culturally traditional."? [ETA: Object, that is, by accusing me of saying that you were making an absolute 100%-certain claim.]
[This is a separate issue from your objection that I didn't say "All Muslim creationist women in Cairo who meet the criteria that you specifically identified . . .".]
All of my arguments carry over mutatis mutandis to this version of your position.