How so? I would have thought that Bayesian probability is more maths than anything else.

Your video, The Bayesian Trap, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

It's only fallacious if I'm actually making an argument, which I wasn't. Just personal comments on the man's work.

I didn't go into specifics simply because of time, but if you like, I can give you a brief rundown of what I find objectionable about his work.

The KCA: Craig seems to think that the Kalam Cosmological Argument is a very strong argument for theism, but it has numerous weaknesses. Craig argues for the impossibility of an actual infinite, whether in terms of a series in time, or of an infinitude of physical objects. His arguments in this regard are spectacularly weak. He believes, for instance, that the Hilbert's Hotel paradox shows that an actual infinite is absurd. This is not what the paradox shows, however--it only shows that an actual infinite would behave in unintuitive ways, breaking apart properties of numbers that we normally find together. Moreover, Craig provides no good reason to think that the first cause would have to be personal. He assumes that only a person could cause something to come from nothing, but doesn't back this up with any sound arguments.

Religious Epistemology: Craig asserts that philosophical arguments are neither necessary nor sufficient to have justified belief and genuine knowledge of the truth of Christianity--the light of the Holy Spirit is enough. He says this of himself as well, and is thus committed to his belief in Christianity regardless of any arguments that might be presented. He thus declares himself impervious to any argument that might vitiate Christianity--this is a profound philosophical failing. To declare that no conceivable argument can convince you away from your position is to declare the entire philosophical enterprise almost entirely purposeless with regard to that question.

The Resurrection: Craig uses Bayesian probability theory to argue for the likelihood of the resurrection, claiming that when the calculation of prior probability includes a belief in the existence of God, then the resurrection will be probable--and thus, the rejection of the resurrection by atheists just comes down to a dogmatic rejection based on a previously held belief. Craig is not the first to make this argument; Richard Swinburne first advanced it in the 70's. It is, however, a very bad argument. It only works if the "God" in question is in particular a Christian God to begin with. Not just any God will do, or the resurrection of Jesus is hardly more likely than the epiphany of Krishna or the revelations to Mohammad. But the specifically Christian notion of God was developed only out of belief in the resurrection in the first place. Thus, Craig's argument is largely circular.

>> ^AnimalsForCrackers:

Maybe I'm just weird like that for being puzzled here, but if something is "outside of science" or "outside our universe", then by what magical method of knowing do people claim to know or suspect it exists in the first place? Shouldn't the most parsimonious answer be a provisional designation of non-existence until shown otherwise?
Something that can be asserted without evidence can reasonably be dismissed without evidence. It's not up to the unbelievers to prove a negative.
I understand people do not want to appear to be extreme or dogmatic, but an appeal to the middle ground (a 50/50 split probability for or against; a false equivalence) in the name of moderation, is still fallacious.


It's not entirely clear that people mean something that is "outside of science," and I certainly don't see many claiming that their god is "outside the universe." Most claim to have had direct personal experience with a deity. Many of whom are people I trust. Further, they seem to be honestly recounting their experience, and seem to have no motivation to deceive me (unlike claims of spaghetti monsters or martian teapots). While typically I wouldn't consider such reports particularly strong evidence of anything, it is certainly as strong (if not stronger) than the evidence opposing the existence of a deity, which are typically inferred from vague concepts like "parsimony" (aka Bayesian kool-aid). All evidence of existence (e.g. your existence) is tenuous at best, and all of it is inferred from internal mental states. That's why I find that the null model is typically derived from commonsense, not any hard and fast rules about existence or nonexistence. In this particular case, I find that people are relatively split. I have accordingly split my prior.

Here is a great article that points out why the psy research was badly flawed, actually performs the correct statistical tests (finding the results are not in fact significant) and examines the bigger question of why psychologists mis-learn and mis-apply statistics.

http://people.psych.cornell.edu/~jec7/pcd%20pubs/wagenmakersetal.pdf

"...................Do these results mean
that psi can now be considered real, replicable, and reliable?

We think that the answer to this question is negative, and that the take home message
of Bem’s research is in fact of a completely different nature. One of the discussants of the
Utts review paper made the insightful remark that “Parapsychology is worth serious study.
(...) if it is wrong [i.e., psi does not exist], it offers a truly alarming massive case study of
how statistics can mislead and be misused.” (Diaconis, 1991, p. 386). And this, we suggest,
is precisely what Bem’s research really shows. Instead of revising our beliefs regarding psi,
Bem’s research should instead cause us to revise our beliefs on methodology: the field of
psychology currently uses methodological and statistical strategies that are too weak, too
malleable, and offer far too many opportunities for researchers to befuddle themselves and
their peers.

The most important flaws in the Bem experiments, discussed below in detail, are the
following: (1) confusion between exploratory and confirmatory studies; (2) insufficient attention
to the fact that the probability of the data given the hypothesis does not equal the
probability of the hypothesis given the data (i.e., the fallacy of the transposed conditional);
(3) application of a test that overstates the evidence against the null hypothesis, an unfortunate
tendency that is exacerbated as the number of participants grows large. Indeed, when
we apply a Bayesian t-test (G¨onen, Johnson, Lu, & Westfall, 2005; Rouder, Speckman,
Sun, Morey, & Iverson, 2009) to quantify the evidence that Bem presents in favor of psi,
the evidence is sometimes slightly in favor of the null hypothesis, and sometimes slightly in
favor of the alternative hypothesis. In almost all cases, the evidence falls in the category
“anecdotal”, also known as “worth no more than a bare mention”............."

Sorry it took so long to respond, I had a busy weekend.

They are not simple probabilistic events, and they are operating off the same basic principles, that does not mean that systems do not have qualities which their component parts lack.

Does a piston have the capacity to convert petrol into kinetic energy? Does an internal combustion engine have this capacity? Which part of the engine imbues it with this power?

Systems are qualitatively different from their component parts, and some sets of systems, such as systems which decide, are qualitatively different from systems which don't

I'm going to need a definition of "decide" I suppose. It seems like you are dancing around these squishy intuitive concepts instead of having a specific physical distinction to point out. The amoeboid is composed of a lipid bilayer membrane riddled with intricate protein micro-machines that detect changes in the environment, and behaviorally compensate. To discount the intricacy of the mechanisms of genetic expression and chemical signaling that exist even in the simplest of eukaryotic organism is foolish IMHO. Many of the modern models of genetic expression, and compensation for environmental factors look strikingly similar to the connectionist network models of the brain. The computations are similar in the abstract.


You are anthropomorphizing the mold, it does move, this motion increases its chances of finding food, it survives/reproduces. It in no way displays evidence of doing any of this "in order" to accomplish some goal. If you want to suggest that evolution, as a system, displays intelligence, by selecting molds which move in certain ways, I would be willing to acknowledge that intelligence, not a consciousness, but an intelligence.

Well, more likely I'm moldopomorphizing us. What goals do we have that are ultimately distinct from survival, reproduction, and the general continuity of our species? Even something as seemingly unrelated as making music, or art could be cast as some sort of mating ritual. When you somehow separate our behavior from the rest of life on Earth it's as though you want to draw a barrier between us and them. You want to somehow separate us from the natural order. I hate to break it to you, but it just isn't so. We are just demonstrate the spatial heterogeneity of the second law of thermodynamics.


Why is context necessary for experience? What do you experience in infinitesimal time? Why should we posit some sort of experience which is entirely distinct from the type we claim to have?

I experience the moment. In fact, that's all I'm ever experiencing, although my sensation of it may run a little behind. I never experience my memory, I merely compare my experience to memory. Further, what I'm suggesting is not entirely distinct from any experience we claim to have. Some autistic individuals, for instance, report an extremely chaotic existence, in which causal models can't be formed as sensory modalities are not unified in the same way as ours. They are experienced as independent inputs, not reflective of a coherent physical world. Still, they experience it.

Physical laws are not obeyed, they are enforced. electron movements are completely deterministic, like billiard balls, they roll down hill, they don't decide if/when to do so.

Things can not be enforced without an enforcer. Further, as you've conceded the determinism of our brains, again, how are we not passively allowing the laws of nature to push us around? What exactly are we deciding?


I don't believe that you are claiming that electrons have tiny field sensors which feed into a neural network which analyzes them for patterns and then attributes meaning to them by comparing them to earlier similar sensation patterns. Perhaps you can state this more clearly.

No, I believe that by some other physical mechanism, likely involving quarks and particle physics that I admittedly have a poor understanding of, the electron receives information from not immediately proximal locations, and physically displaces itself to a location with more desirable properties given its current energy state. I don't see how that's different than cuddling up to a warm fire.


You seem to be positing that the structure of the universe is not topological, but that it is instead the consequence of 10^80 atoms all working on concert to decide what the laws of the universe are at this moment. If this is your thesis I am inclined to ask on what basis you think it is even vaguely likely that they would came to a consensus, such as they must to allow the functioning of a universe like ours.

Something like that , although I still don't like the word decide. I don't necessarily think they do come to a consensus. It's just that, as with an attractor network, or similar guaranteed convergence dynamical systems, certain macroscopic states are just more likely than others, despite chaos at the subordinate level. The reason I'd rather drop the word decide is because I don't necessarily want to open the door to something like free will. To cast it in a "God" metaphor, I imagine more of an omniscient God, than an omnipotent God.


Please provide some basis to believe that there is a phenomenal experience.

I can't other than to refer you to what I presume you to have. I could suggest focussing on your breathing, or what have you. I can point you towards literature showing that people that claim to focus on their consciousness can perform physical feats not previous considered possible (for instance monks rewriting the books on the physical tolerance of the human body to cold). Otherwise, I can't. I will say this, however, I take it to be the atomic element of inductive reason. The natural "laws" you are taking as primary are secondary. There is a simple reason for this as Alfred North Whitehead pointed out. If suddenly we were to observe all bits of matter floating away from one another, and were to confirm we were not hallucinating, and perhaps have the experience corroborated by our colleagues, it would not be the experience which was wrong, it would be the laws of nature. Experience has primacy. Matter is merely the logical consequence of applying induction to our particular set of shared experiences.


And that will persist as long as we are not talking about anything. You say "X exists". I say "What is X?". You say "You can't disprove X". And here we are talking about nothing.

I told you, in the best english I can, what X is. It's the qualia of phenomenal experience. Now I can't provide you with direct evidence for it, but I can tell you that nearly everyone I talk to has some sense of what I mean.


You must be using an alternate form of the word "believe". How can someone believe something, and simultaneously be completely unwilling to assert that it is a fact?

I take the Bayesian sense of the word. All probabilities are subjective degrees of belief. I adopt this degree of belief based on anecdotal experience and generalizations therein. None of this would be accepted as evidence by any reviewer, nor should it, and thus I wouldn't want to risk my credibility by asserting it as fact. I can believe some hypotheses to be more likely than others on the basis of no evidence, and in fact do all the time. That's how I, and all other scientists, decide what experiment to run next. I should not, however, expect you to believe me a priori, as you may operate on different axioms, and draw from different anecdotal experience. Thus, I would not feel compelled to assert my beliefs as fact, other than in so far as they are, in fact, my beliefs.

Ok... I still see this line as completely arbitrary. How are our actions not "probabilistic events?" The amoeba is operating off the same basic principals. It's exerting energy to maintain certain ion concentrations. It's moving matter in order to seek out food, and even flexing its pseudopods along the shortest path between food sources in proportion to their delivery frequency. There is even a paper showing that it will respond to periodic stimuli (such as cold shocks at particular intervals) with predictive changes of behavior. How is that any different?

Further, comparison and recall? Why is memory necessary for experience? For the successful completion of certain cognitive tasks, sure, but I keep needing to remind you that isn't what we're talking about here. As for comparison, it's happening everywhere all the time. Electrons are "comparing" electric fields when they settle into a state, otherwise they couldn't obey their physical laws. I think the problem here is that your thinking is boxed into the human sensory modalities. As far as I'm concerned an electron is sensing an electrical field in the same way I am sensing visual band EM. It just can't image it as well, and thus can't respond to complex patterns at much distance. Again, not to diminish that extraordinary decrease in entropy, but I don't know why it should be so fundamental.

Also, to be clear, I've never claimed that what I'm looking for is something immaterial. I just believe that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter. Being matter, and conscious, I have no reason to think otherwise. Again, this consciousness is distinct from "thinking". It's the sheer fact that there is a phenomenal experience, not the particular nature of those phenomena. You've presented me no evidence that I should only expect phenomenal experience in a complex organism, as you have no test for phenomenal experience. This is why Chalmers, and others, have argued that consciousness is not necessarily best studied by traditional english empiricism. It's wholly inadequate to investigate the phenomenon. A better solution might draw on Eastern traditions of meditation, for instance. Many monks, including the Dali Llama have been interested in cooperating.

But you have made a claim, that for some particular X, P(X) > P(!X). On the basis of that statement, and the assumption that you are rational, I draw the conclusion that you have some concept of what X is, or at least what its consequences are, otherwise you are making a non-sequitur claim.

I do have some very general concept of what x is, but not such a certain idea that I would ever make a claim like P(X) > P(!X). That is, unless you toe a hard Bayesian line, and accept that my claim is completely a subjective degree of belief. Otherwise, my claim was something like "I believe that P(X) > P(!X)". Something you shouldn't really care to contest, but I'll defend my priors against your priors till you're blue in the face. I won't be bullied by the tyranny of some arbitrary model selection criteria.

Oh goodie, all sorts of interesting discussions going on here.

Yay, somebody that wants to respectfully debate, rather than call me a pussy. If I were you, I'd ask your camp to show a little more respect. Not that it's always returned by the proselytizers, but I hardly feel I'm being disrespectful to your beliefs. I wish your comrades would show the same courtesy.

Agnostics make no claims to know anything, they say "I do not/cannot know X". The celestial teapot is the oldie counter for that - in principle we have to be agnostic about it, but in actuality we're not. We are all a-teapotists. Atheism is the same way. You can say that you believe in the celestial teapot, but with no evidence, you're not going to convince anyone.

Yes, but we are not all a-consciousness. Nor are we all a-string theorists. This comes down to basic inference. One adopts an arbitrary prior probability over the space of alternatives. This is the rational Bayesian thing to do. Putting any sort of constraints on that process is completely a subjective process. For instance, people typically cite 'simplicity', or 'elegance', as properties that should be more highly weighted. There is no more evidence for that then there is for God, at least as far as the 'truthfulness' of the claims is concerned. Now, I remain agnostic as I'd rather not make the claim, because as you've correctly pointed out I shouldn't expect to be able to convince anybody else. That doesn't mean that I consider the lack of existence of a deity as more likely than the existence.

As for determinism, what about quantum mechanics? When I look at that evidence I see randomness, not determinism. Some people, such as Roger Penrose, have thought that the key to the hard problem might dwell at the quantum level. I'm not prepared to jump into the "micro-tubule" camp, but the existence of quantum mechanics does leave the door open for a less deterministic reality.

[edit] If you are interested in this idea of consciousness as an illusion, you should read "The User Illusion" by Tor Norretranders.

Very interesting read. Thanks for the link. I'll definitely have to take some time when I can to try and digest all that.

In reply to this comment by arvana:
Hey Lucky, I just came across this article on Bayesian popularity algorithms, and thought you might be interested: http://blog.linkibol.com/post/How-to-Build-a-Popularity-Algorithm-You-can-be-Proud-of.aspx

Hey Lucky, I just came across this article on Bayesian popularity algorithms, and thought you might be interested: http://blog.linkibol.com/post/How-to-Build-a-Popularity-Algorithm-You-can-be-Proud-of.aspx

This is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.

All he's saying is;
1. the bible says the world was created with order and uniformity, which means to him that past events allow prediction of future events...
2. non-Genisis believers don't have a book that makes this statement, and therefor can't assume that any past event can be relied on to predict any future event. SO...
3. he justifies that random nonsense doesn't happen because of a blessing of uniformity and order, while non-theists have no justification for why they don't "turn into in a grasshopper" at any moment.

The encyclopedia he refers to addresses this subject at 7.4.2
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/#WhyTruIndQueRev

Hilarious that he directs edits to the encyclopedia to the webmaster... what a douche.

One last point is that this post contrasts interestingly with the current top sift, about probabilities and bayesian statistics; http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Monty-Hall-Problem

Yeah, i could barely follow hueco_tanks' example using my crappy grasp of bayesian stats (its also 5am...)

... girl-boy, boy-girl, and boy-boy would be the choices adding to 100% that include at least one boy, because having two girls is not possible. Because you can't have girl-girl, , the probability that you will have girl-boy is 33%, added to that the probability that you'll have boy-girl being 33% and I get a 66% chance the unknown is a girl, while there remains only a paltry 33% for the boy-boy scenerio (and, no chance for girl-girl action).

Thinking of it as two cards face-down; you're told the pool the two cards were drawn from consisted of two aces and two kings. You're shown that one card is a king, so now you know that the chance that you'll have two aces is 0%, while the chance that you'll have ace-king/king-ace is 66%, and getting king-king is 33%.

Wait, maybe I'm wrong here... I'm going to bed.

No, Payback, this is a common mistake when performing an analysis of this problem. There can be no independent probabilities, because there is information conveyed that changes one probability set to another, it doesn't just create a new set, through the opening of the non-car door. The fact that the host must intentionally pick a door that does not have a car behind it means that the door elimination is NOT random. Once he alters the terms of choices, the probability set changes to reflect the situation, it doesn't create a new one. If he were to randomly pick a door to open, then a third possibility (the host opens the door with the car behind it before the player even chooses a door) would occur 1/3 of the time. But since we know the host will never do that, we must eliminate that possibility in the second round of choosing, thus leaving us with a 1 out of 2 chance on the new set, and a 1 out of 3 chance on the old set.

Honestly, every single link that's been posted here is great. Check them all out, especially the formal Bayesian analysis. It's really highly informative and insightful.

This is indeed quite interesting, though I honestly don't see any practical applications for it beyond being a contextually superior "Google Images" service.

@haggis: I would be very surprised if the algorithm for discovering points of similarity between images was anything but fussy. It follows intuitively that the greater the resolution of an image, the more bits of information are available from which a more comprehensive pattern -- the sequence of "key points" as described by the engineer duder -- can be abstracted by "filters".

The stitching feature no doubt utilizes something like a Bayesian curve algorithm when comparing patterns of two different images. This is akin to finding a needle in a hay stack, except that the hay stack is made of needles and you only want to find needles possessing particular attributes which match a pattern within some arbitrary threshold. I can only imagine how easily this breaks down with the slightest gap between images.