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baiter comments on Rationality Quotes July 2012 - Less Wrong
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– Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher, 6/8/2012
video article
Strictly speaking, the bible says of Jesus's followers "they will pick up serpents." It doesn't say "they will pick up serpents and not get bitten."
Of course, it does also say they can drink deadly poison without being harmed.
As it happens, I am related to and share my last name with this guy.
Seems like this calls for either preventative antidotes and something to prove or a serious selective breeding program!
It is promised that "these signs will follow those who believe". So if they do bite you, then God is still real, but you didn't have enough faith.
Just doing this.
Sure. But if I handle snakes to prove they won't bite me because God is real, and they don't bite me -- you do the math.
More seriously, though: the sentiment expressed in the quote is flawed, IMHO. Evidence isn't always symmetrical. Any particular transitional fossil is reasonable evidence for evolution; not finding a particular transitional fossil isn't strong evidence against it. A person perjuring themselves once is strong evidence against their honesty; a person once declining to perjure themselves is not strong evidence in favour of their honesty; et cetera.
I think this might have something to do with the prior, actually: The stronger your prior probability, the less evidence it should take to drastically reduce it.
Edit: Nope, that last conclusion is wrong. Never mind.
Right. Sensitivity does not equal specificity. Maher makes the mistake of assuming the rate of false positives and false negatives for the 'snakebite test for god' are equal. The transitional fossil test for evolution and the perjury test for honesty both have high false negative rates and low false positive rates.
Hm, I thought that reasoning argued against your own non-serious first paragraph rather than what Bill said. If the idea is "if God is real (and won't let snakes bite me), then they won't bite me", then being bitten shows that the first part is false, but not being bitten doesn't say anything about the first part being true or false.
Or if you don't want to get hung up on formal logic, then it's valid but very weak evidence, like a hypothesis not being falsified in a test.
What Bill Maher said was that if a person claims that ~Bite is significant evidence for God, they must admit that Bite is significant evidence for ~God. I'm saying I don't think that's accurate.
The sentiment that one should update on the evidence is obviously great, but I think we should keep an eye on the maths.
Fair enough, if the premise is that ¬Bite → God exists.
(An important lesson, but I wonder if it's wise to teach it in the context of politics. Among other things, I worry that the messages "boo religion!", "yay updating on evidence!", "boo religious conservatives!", "yay pointing out my enemies are inferior to me!", "yay rationality!", "yay my side for being comparatively rational!", &c. will become mixed up and seen as constituting a natural category even if they objectively shouldn't be. (Related.))
Why does this have 12 upvotes? The fact that this is slightly funny and for our "side" doesn't make it good logic. We've no reason to think snakebites and deities ought to be correlated at all. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence and all that. This ought to be below the visibility threshold.
But if you do think that snakebites and deities are correlated, then the correlation has to run both ways.
I didn't upvote since it's more politics than rationality, but there is a useful lesson there.
Sure, it has to go both ways. And it is evidence against some sort of snake-handling god. But not against gods in general.
If a snake handler supposes that their ability to safely handle snakes is evidence that they're protected by the Christian god as a disciple of Jesus, then they must suppose in turn that their inability to handle snakes safely is evidence that they aren't protected by the Christian god as a disciple of Jesus. At least some part of the edifice has to take a hit.
I don't know if any non-Christian religion uses snake handling as a religious ritual. In Christianity, it's practiced in some minor denominations as an interpretation of a specific line.
Yes, but it is entirely consistent for a snake handler to think that handled snakes not biting is very strong evidence for the existence of a Christian god while also thinking that handled snakes biting is very weak evidence against the existence of a Christian god, weak enough not to significantly dent their faith. So Maher's argument as stated doesn't work. "Doing the math" here might just mean very very slightly reducing your credence in God's existence.
I don't disagree with this and am not arguing against it. My point is, there's lots of people (including probably a very large majority of christians) who don't conceive of god as caring particularly one way or the other about snake handlers. For these people, Maher's argument doesn't hold at all.
Of course, the snake handlers themselves should update (modulo what pragmatist said).
That seems like a lot of comments you made there. Are you saying that if people consistently held poisonous snakes without getting bitten, and on inspection only their vocal faith distinguished them from other people, you personally would not increase your belief in literal god(s) one whit? If so, how do you justify this seemingly anti-Bayesian position?
All pro-snake-handling gods are gods, but not all gods are pro-snake-handling gods.
Evidence against pro-snake-handling gods is evidence against such a tiny slice of god-space that I'm calling it a rounding error.
Evidence in the other direction would have a drastically different effect, of course. In the hypothetical world where snake handling ability was perfectly correlated with stated beliefe and all confounding factors have been accounted for, I would massively increase the probability mass I give to pro-snake-handling gods (and consequently, gods in general).
Is that still true at the limit of zero gods existing? It certainly precludes a counter-example!
Does it help if I add the qualifier "hypothetical" or "possible"?
I.e., All possible pro-snake-handling gods are gods, but not all possible gods are pro-snake-handling gods.
Otherwise I'm not sure I follow what you're saying...