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felipec

unbelief

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joined 2022 November 04 19:55:17 UTC
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User ID: 1796

felipec

unbelief

1 follower   follows 0 users   joined 2022 November 04 19:55:17 UTC

					

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User ID: 1796

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Hello? Can anybody read this?

Thank you. It would be helpful to state that to new users in the welcome message. I was told to "feel free to comment or post".

"Beware, for not all who claim to be skeptics are ones."

Yes. Many people who claim to be skeptics actually are being skeptical in many claims, but the point of calling yourself "skeptic" is that you are being skeptical in all of them (or close to 100%). You can't call yourself a "peaceful" person if there are enough times you've reacted violently.

I would put it as Hume did when discussing miracles: "A wise man proportions his belief to his evidence." Evidence is never conclusive, but it can be stronger or weaker.

Indeed. This is a point I often emphasize in debates. The quote "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is wrong because it is evidence, but people often confuse evidence with proof.

But I don't see evidence as a continuum, I see certainty as a continuum. I would say for example "I believe the coin is biased with 95% certainty". 50% certainty means no belief one way or the other. This is a matter of semantics of course.

In the end what "true skeptics" should agree is that 100% certainty is not characteristic of skepticism.

Yes, but to point out what the true answer depends on, a level-3 skeptic has to first doubt the problem. A level-3 skeptic might not know the answer, but it's better to say "I don't know", than what some confident people would automatically say: 50%.

Yes, and some Bayesians would even distinguish between e.g. 50% certainty in the coin landing heads on the next toss after 50 heads and 50 tails from your rational beliefs before testing the coin at all.

You can use the beta distribution to calculate the probability that the actual probability is between 45% and 55% given 50H/50T, and it's around 70%: graph. So in that case I would say I believe the coin is fair with 70% certainty. With 0H/0T it's around 10%.

The more tosses the more likely the actual probability is between a certain range, so the more "precise" it should be.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/imprecise-probabilities/

Articles from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are very interesting, but way too complicated for me. This article is no exception, very interesting, but my point is much more general.

By using probability I'm not trying to find an accurate value of belief, what I'm trying to do is show is that even in simple questions people have an unwarranted level of certainty, even people who call themselves "skeptics".

The true problem with censorship is when it silences certain ideas. Child porn as he mentioned is not an idea, it's a red herring as nobody is truly arguing in favor of allowing that. The philosophical position that no ideas should be censored has been debated for centuries and it has a name: freedom of speech.

The problem is that today nobody really knows what freedom of speech actually is. The fact that moderation and censorship has been conflated is one problem, but so is the fact that the philosophical position has been conflated with the laws (First Amendment). It shows when people claim that freedom of speech is a right.

Freedom of speech was meant to safeguard heliocentrism, it wasn't meant to be a right of Galileo.

It's reasonable to express uncertainty, but for a case like this with a very limited set of possible outcomes then "I don't know" should still convert to a number.

No, it's a function, not a single number.

In fact, with maximum uncertainty, 50% is correct: If your distribution over the true probabilities is uniform, then integrating over that distribution gives your subjective probability of heads as 1/2.

No, if it's a uniform distribution you can calculate the probability that the actual probability is between 45% and 55%: 10%. For me 10% is very unlikely.

But the probability that the actual probability is between 90% and 100% is equally likely: 10%.

On the other hand, if you've flipped a lot of coins and you know that most coins are fair, then seeing 8 heads shouldn't move the needle much, so the answer might not be exactly 50% but it would be quite close.

You are confusing the most likely probability with "the answer". The most likely probability is close to 50%, yeah, but that's not the answer. The answer is a function. Given that function you can calculate the probability that the actual probability is between 45% and 55%, and given that the most likely probability is in this range, the likelihood is going to be high, but there's a non-zero probability that the true probability lies outside that range.

Probabilities of probabilities should make anyone question their own certainty on "the answer".

If you have a distribution over a probability of an outcome, it's entirely valid to integrate over that density and get a single number for the probability of the outcome.

You get the probability that the actual probability is on that region, but it's never 100%.

In fact, this works for any parameter: If you have a probability distribution Y for the mean of a random variable X with standard deviation 1, for example, then you can compute the average value of X.

But the average value is not necessarily "the answer".

If you have a distribution for the probability of heads, you can calculate the probability of getting heads.

Actually you can't. I don't think you quite understand the point. I can program a f() function that return heads p percent of the time. How many results do you need to accurately "calculate the probability of getting heads"?

Suppose that you have a much simpler distribution over p, the probability of heads, where it's 0.4 with probability 0.3, otherwise 0.7

OK.

You might note this is also the expected value of p

Yes, but the "expected value" is not "the answer".

I programmed your example of 0.3*0.4/0.7*0.7 as g(0.3), let's say that the threshold t in this case is 0.3, but I choose a different threshold for comparison and I run the function 10 times. Can you guess which results are which?

  1. [0.7, 0.4, 0.7, 0.7, 0.7, 0.7, 0.4, 0.7, 0.7, 0.4]

  2. [0.7, 0.7, 0.7, 0.7, 0.4, 0.7, 0.7, 0.4, 0.7, 0.7]

Which is g(0.3), which is g(t), and what do you guess is the value of t I choose?

I've a hard time imagining a person who could finish it and not shed at least a solitary tear.

I did not shed a tear because the ending is reminiscent of a famous anime which I'm not going to spoil. But the whole thing isn't bad.

Yes. I didn't consider it a critique. I think we are talking about the same thing except at different levels, like those Wired videos of explaining one concept "in 5 levels of difficulty".

I'm a freedom of speech maximalist and I'm having a ton of fun watching the pro-censorship established media melting down about Elon Musk buying Twitter. I joined Twitter in 2007 and it's finally fun again. Trolling, memes, comebacks, I love it.

I'm glad people are questioning what "freedom of speech" actually means in this new computational era.

The method I described will give the correct probability given all of the information available.

It won't.

In this case, it is.

It's not.

is more likely to be 0.3

Yes, but it is not. You got it wrong.

so the estimate for t is 0.2

But it is not 0.2.


This is the whole point of the article: to raise doubt. But you are not even considering the possibility that you might be wrong, I bet even when I'm telling you the values of t in those examples are not the ones you guessed, you will still not consider the possibility that you are wrong, even when the answers are objectively incorrect.

My post has absolutely nothing to do with bases. Did you read it?

  • -14

Except arithmetic isn't a semantic trick, and modern algebra is an important field of mathematics, not something I invented.

  • -12

Most people consider the notation of integer arithmetic to be unambiguous in a general context

But that is the point: most people make assumptions. In this particular case it's easy to see what assumption is made for people who do understand modular arithmetic, but that excludes the vast majority of people who don't.

The whole point of the article is to raise doubt about more complicated subjects which are not so easy to mathematically prove.

For the author himself it's an interesting discovery.

It's not about what I think, from what I've seen very few people know about abstract algebra, many don't know what modulo is, and the vast majority of those who do, consider it an operation, not a completely new kind of arithmetic (as mathematicians do).

If this was general knowledge people wouldn't keep saying 2+2=4 as if it was an unequivocal fact, and at least someone would would say "well, only under normal arithmetic". I've never heard somebody say that.

Can you find an article or someone seriously saying that 2+2 isn't necessarily 4? (other than woke activists decrying Western mathematics)

That's not how modular arithmetic works: 2+2=4 is still true

There is no 4 in modulo 4, you are confusing the modulo operation with modular arithmetic, they are two different concepts that lead to the same result.

I don't need to be thinking about modular arithmetic to doubt 2+2=4, I could do it without having a good reason to doubt.

And I explained in the article Bertrand Russell doubted something much more fundamental 1+1=2, wrote extensively about it, and it's considered serious and important work on the foundations of mathematics.

Do you think Bertrand Russell was "dishonest" for asking people to suspend their belief?

In the real world people do misinterpret, and they rarely (if ever) follow Grice's razor. They argue about what Trump said, rather than what Trump meant.

Semantics is in my opinion a huge problem in modern discourse. Russia claims what they did in Ukraine was a "special military operation", but other people claim it's a "war". Which is it? Meaning does matter.

Even in deep philosophical debates meaning is everything. A debate about "free will" entirely depends on what opposing sides mean by "free will", and there's at least three different definitions.

You say the meaning of meaning is "not extremely deep", but does it have to be? People fail extremely basic problems of logic (90% fail the Wason selection task), basic problems of probability (like the Monty Hall problem), I've also setup my own problems of probability of probability, and guess what?: most people get it wrong.

Maybe some ideas are too simple for you, but what about other people perhaps not so intellectually gifted? My objective is to arrive to a concept that even people with an IQ of 80 would be able to understand, and I'm not sure they would understand what modular arithmetic even means (not the modulo operator), so perhaps even though it's "not extremely deep" for you, it's a challenge for them.

If it was three hours, then I wouldn't answer 1:00 like you're suggesting either. I'd say "01:00 the next day" because time isn't truly modular

But your clock would read 01:00.

We use this concept in programming all the time. If the week ends in Sunday we don't say that the day after that is Monday the next week, it's Monday (this doesn't change if the week ends in Saturday). In fact, many people consider Friday 23:00+02:00 to still be Friday night.

I'm not sure about more esoteric ones, but in spherical and hyperbolic geometries pairs of lines with constant distance simply don't exist.

Yes, I meant "two straight lines that indefinitely extended in a two-dimensional plane that are both perpendicular to a third line", like in this picture, which are kind of parallel. The point is the standard concept of "parallel" more or less only exists in Euclidean geometries.

Literally everyone makes assumptions whenever they have literally any thought or take literally any action.

Yes, but not everyone realizes they are making an assumption. Just like virtually nobody realizes they are making an assumption when answering the 2+2 question.

Except my post proves that's not the case. Again: I did not change any the base in my post.

Based on his reputation and without reading what he wrote, no I don’t think he was being dishonest.

That's literally an argument from authority fallacy.

Plenty of philosophers have doubted even the most fundamental concepts of everything, including reality itself. Solipsism is a serious philosophical concept, which includes doubting that 1+1 is necessarily 2, and Bertrand Russell entertained that possibility.