David_Gerard comments on Rationality Outreach: A Parable - Less Wrong

24 [deleted] 17 March 2011 01:10PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (122)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: David_Gerard 17 March 2011 08:43:58PM *  0 points [-]

Ah, here we are! And another! Not silly enough to actually use 0.5 as the prior, but then these are the sophisticated versions - or at least lengthy.

Another anecdote of the currency of "Bayes, P(God)=0.5": Armondikov at RationalWiki also ranted recently on his FB (else I'd link it) about theists who've discovered the word "Bayes" and start at 0.5.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 March 2011 08:55:38PM 4 points [-]
Comment author: David_Gerard 17 March 2011 09:04:50PM *  3 points [-]

The important phenomenon to note here is the word "Bayes" achieving currency amongst the not joined-up of thinking, as an excuse for stupidity. Good thing or bad thing?

Comment author: ata 18 March 2011 02:03:37AM *  4 points [-]

Most likely a bad thing, given similar past examples. E.g. I've talked to atheists who won't touch Bostrom/Anthropic Bias because they associate "the anthropic principle" with theological fine-tuning arguments. And the general problem of audiences' first impression of Bayes being that it's just another clever way to argue for whatever you want to believe or want others to believe.

On the other hand, it would be interesting to have more debates between theists and atheists who are both familiar with Bayes and use it explicitly, if the atheist is good enough at noticing and explaining flawed uses of it, so audiences can become familiar with fallacious uses of it and see that it can be used wisely.

Comment author: Cyan 18 March 2011 03:13:29AM *  0 points [-]

Here's some non-LW links: Richard Swinburne, Stephen Unwin.