Alia1d
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Sorry to be so long answering this. Not only was work busy but my husband was going through withdrawal again and that is always an all consuming time sink.
On Solomonoff induction: If we take a look at one of the facts this story proposes to explain, - We live in a world of decay, where humans and other animals have death as their destiny and the universe itself tends to disorder and destruction, but that this is bad and wrong and against the harmonies of logic and lawfulness and the timelessness of truth. This story’s proposal that the original and good state of the world was without any need for death,... (read more)
It seems to me that one change at a fundamental level could have less Kolmogorov complexity then several special case exceptions at a surface level. And that is what the bringer change sounds like to me, something at a deep level, connected to death, propagating all through the system.
Since we are already talking about going from a legged animal to a legless one, I don't see that doing it on a more massive animal can make a significant change in the complexity penalty.
Oops, thnks
This is one problems with the absurdity heuristic. Because of deliberately starting at a point with such a long inferential distance, It can be hard to see where the error has taken place.
Fairly typically fundamentalist, I believe in young earth creationism with a roughly estimated confidence level of 70%, a large fraction of the human race destined for eternal torment at about 85% and verbal plenary inspiration at about 90%.
I'm a little more theologically engaged then average but (as is typical in my circles) that mean's I'm more theologically conservative, not less.
It’s been may years since I first saw this question, so my memories may not be accurate, but I think my internal thoughts went something like this: ‘Well 1.10 minus 1 is .10, but wait I know this is a trick question so … Ah! I also need to divide by 2. The answer is .05.’ And then I checked my answer by doing 1.05 + .05 and 1.05 - .05. Introspecting now on why I leaped to the idea of dividing by two, I think what I was seeing was something like: In this context “costs $1.00 more than” means Exactly $1 more than, so it’s saying that... (read more)
I would agree that there are some Christians whose belief set could be vulnerable on the point of talking snakes. I can think of several different arguments depending on what other ideas they were holding in conjunction with their interpretation of Genesis. Using a blanket dismissal would have the advantage that you wouldn’t have to figure out which one would work on your target. But I think we would both agree it could also potentially backfire.
Concerning the issue you presented, that ”natural” snakes just can’t work like that. I think you have considerably underplayed your hand. Consider Gen 1:29-30:
... (read 387 more words →)Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that
I agree that not being a Uniformitarian makes the makes the evidence harder to deal with and is generally a headache for everyone. But it should not be used to let a historical theory get away with anomaly without any hit to its plausibility, it should just reduce the size of the plausibility hit. Also several anomalies that are being explained by the same rule change only make up one plausibility hit rather than being additive.
On Christological interpretations, I agree it can get out of hand, and I'm not sure they are very valid here, But if "and He should crush your head" is going of be a prophesy about Jesus, well there isn't a story of Him dramatically crushing a snake's head, so it's got to a general stamina out His victory of death, sin, and the devil, so I do think people are using that frame to identify Satan and the serpent.
I’ve found the Welcome thread!
Hi, I’m Alia and I live with my husband in San Jose, California. I found this site via SlateStarCodex and having read Rationality:From AI to Zombies I think this is a fascinating and useful set of concepts and that using this type of reasoning more often is something to aspire to. I want to do more Bayesian calculations so I get more of a feel for them.
I’m also a fundamentalist* Christian. I’m perfectly ready to discuss and defend these beliefs, but I wouldn’t always bring up these beliefs in threads. I’m not trying to deceive or trick anyone, I just don’t want to derail a thread that... (read more)
These are more gut feelings, I had already considered a lot of evidence for and against these before I found out about Bayesian updating, so the bottom line was really already written. If I tried to do a numerically rigorous calculation now, I would just end up double counting evidence. This is just a 'if I had to make a hundred statements of this type that I was this confident about, how often would I be right guess.