Downvoted for baseless and hostile accusation of dishonesty, misreading of the original post, and extremely dubious claims to positive knowledge of Egyptian culture.
Yvain only said that the woman was a creationist Muslim. You misread him as saying that she was culturally traditional. Either that, or you made the baseless inference that all creationist Muslims are culturally traditional.
Sorry, probability and inference don’t work like that. I didn’t “misread him as saying she was culturally traditional”. I correctly read exactly what the post said. It’s just that I made the inference based on the strong cues in the story that she was devout. That’s not the same as misreading a word or two.
I admit—I certainly could have made the basis for that belief more clear, but you also should have applied the principle of charity and thought about the possibility that it wasn’t just a misreading, and that there are reasons to infer someone is a “devout Muslim” other than “oh, someone told me with those exact words.”
In addition to what I mentioned in my response to Zack_M_Davis, there’s the fact that the Muslim woman has actually thought through the implications of her faith enough to actually want to persuade others, and has ranked the different reasons for disagreement for their plausibility. This is the same kind of person who would watch that they’re going above and beyond to adhere to their faith’s requirements.
Furthermore, I need not have “made the baseless inference that all creationist Muslims are culturally traditional.” The world isn’t black and white. If the evidence justifies believing with 95% probability that she’s a devout Muslim, I can tentatively hold that belief with high confidence without believing that all (your term) creationist Muslims are culturally traditional. There were more cues in the passage.
Come on, this is basic Bayesian probability theory here. You should have dropped the rhetoric of “you think X implies a 100% probability of Y” a long time ago.
[T]he Muslim woman has actually thought through the implications of her faith enough to actually want to persuade others, and has ranked the different reasons for disagreement for their plausibility. This is the same kind of person who would watch that they’re going above and beyond to adhere to their faith’s requirements.
On my reading, this implies that, if you think that the woman is devout, you should think it less likely that Yvain lied when he reported his conversation with her.
Here’s why:
Let ARGUES be the proposition that an arbitrary Muslim woman in Cairo is willing to argue for creationism with a stranger.
Let DEVOUT be the probability that an arbitrary Muslim woman in Cairo is devout—that is, that she “would watch that [she’s] going above and beyond to adhere to [her] faith’s requirements.”
You consider p(ARGUES | DEVOUT) to be low enough to justify calling Yvain a liar. Thus, DEVOUT must refer to a devotion strong enough to make p(ARGUES | DEVOUT) this small. But, I claim, you should consider p(ARGUES) to be even smaller.
On my reading, you assert above that, if the woman argues for creationism, she is very likely to be devout. That is,
(1) p(DEVOUT | ARGUES) > 1 - epsilon,
where epsilon is small enough to justify your omission of any phrase like “very likely to be”. On my reading, this makes epsilon small enough so that, in a cosmopolitan city like Cairo,
(2) p(DEVOUT) < 1 - epsilon,
where, again, DEVOUT refers to a devotion strong enough to make p(ARGUES | DEVOUT) small enough to justify calling Yvain a liar.
This is the same kind of person who would watch that they’re going above and beyond to adhere to their faith’s requirements.
You should be aware that when you write
(1) “The kind of person who is an X is also a Y.”,
many careful readers are going to read that as equivalent to
(2) “All people who are Xs are Ys.”
Come on, this is basic Bayesian probability theory here. You should have dropped the rhetoric of “you think X implies a 100% probability of Y” a long time ago.
Indeed. No one here had said anything about 100% probabilities. If you want (1) above to be read as shorthand for
(1′) “The kind of person who is an X is also a Y with probability 1 - epsilon.”,
then you should reciprocate by reading (2) as shorthand for
(2′) “All but a (1 - epsilon)th of people who are Xs are also Ys.”
If you want to dispense with “most likely”, “nearly all”, etc., then you should allow others to do the same.
I certainly could have made the basis for that belief more clear, but you also should have applied the principle of charity and thought about the possibility that it wasn’t just a misreading, and that there are reasons to infer someone is a “devout Muslim” other than “oh, someone told me with those exact words.”
This seems a fair summary of your view: Any Muslim creationist is so likely to be a cultural traditionalist that, when Yvain reports meeting an exception in Egypt, you may confidently accuse him of lying.
And that, I maintain is a baseless inference, albeit a probabilistic one. One shouldn’t throw around accusations of lying without justifying strong confidence in such an inference.
You should be aware that when you write
(1) “The kind of person who is an X is also a Y.”,
many careful readers are going to read that as equivalent to
(2) “All people who are Xs are Ys
Many careless readers, you mean? This is Less Wrong, Tyrrell. Most everyone understands that “X is certain” doesn’t mean P(X) = 100%. One hundred percent probabilities (infinite odds) don’t exist and can’t be updated; what matters instead is whether something is certain enough, and it needn’t be 100% for this to hold.
Indeed. No one here had said anything about 100% probabilities. If you want (1) above to be read as shorthand for
(1′) “The kind of person who is an X is also a Y with probability 1 - epsilon.”,
I do wish it be so read, and this is how people should already be reading such statements, for the reasons given above. Requiring that all “1-epsilon” be always written as “nearly all” instead of “all” is wasteless verbiage. See But there’s still a chance, right?.
This seems a fair summary of your view: Any Muslim creationist is so likely to be a cultural traditionalist that, when Yvain reports meeting an exception in Egypt, you may confidently accuse him of lying.
It doesn’t seem like a fair summary of my view, or even one you put much effort into. A fair summary would be “Any Muslim creationist female in a Muslim country, who meets the criteria I specifically identified, is so likely to also adhere to the norm of restricted casual conversation with unrelated males, that, when Yvain reports chatting with one in an Egypt cafe where the impropriety would be noticed, then given his past embellishment of details [see last response to Zack], I may confidently suggest that his story is not entirely accurate and more likely indicates a tale pieced together from other accounts.”
Ah, man, not so straw-stuffed when you put it that way...
. . . given his past embellishment of details [see last response to Zack], I may confidently suggest that his story is not entirely accurate and more likely indicates a tale pieced together from other accounts.”
None of those examples strike me as remotely in the ballpark of the mendacity of which you accused him in this thread.
I do wish it be so read, and this is how people should already be reading such statements, for the reasons given above. Requiring that all “1-epsilon” be always written as “nearly all” instead of “all” is wasteless verbiage.
Precisely my point. Why, then, did you object to my “all” when I glossed your position as “all creationist Muslims are culturally traditional.”? [ETA: Object, that is, by accusing me of saying that you were making an absolute 100%-certain claim.]
[This is a separate issue from your objection that I didn’t say “All Muslim creationist women in Cairo who meet the criteria that you specifically identified . . .”.]
Ah, man, not so straw-stuffed when you put it that way...
All of my arguments carry over mutatis mutandis to this version of your position.
You wrote, “Devout Muslim women in Muslim countries don’t {...}” but the woman in the story is not identified as a “devout” Muslim; notice that she is portrayed as merely curious about Yvain’s atheism and only expresses shock at his belief in evolution. (Cf. “Oh, thank goodness it’s {the contradictions in holy texts}. I was afraid you were one of those crazies who believed that monkeys transformed into humans.”) {ETA: Tyrrell McAllister points out what I was trying to get at more precisely than I did.}
I know very little about culture in the Arab world. I’m sure very many Muslim women would never chat with a male tourist in a cafe. But to say that it’s utterly implausible that such an encounter is likely to happen in Cairo is a much stronger claim. Before calling Yvain a liar, you should have considered whether your model of social norms in major Middle-Eastern cities is wrong.
You wrote, “Devout Muslim women in Muslim countries don’t {...}” but the woman in the story is not identified as a “devout” Muslim; notice that she is portrayed as merely curious about Yvain’s atheism and only expresses shock at his belief in evolution.
Even though the passage didn’t have the phrase “devout Muslim”, it can still be a reasonable inference. Someone this familiar with their faith and aware and disdainful of the specific arguments against it, has invested more time than most cereligionists and is more likely to be stringently following the rules.
Before calling Yvain a liar, you should have considered whether your model of social norms in major Middle-Eastern cities is wrong.
I did; it’s just that the consideration didn’t end up favoring Yvain. I also factored in his past tendency to embellish facts.
Someone this familiar with their faith and aware and disdainful of the specific arguments against it,
This does not seem like an accurate reading of the post. “Aware and disdainful of the specific arguments against it”? The woman in the story is portrayed as unfamiliar with atheism and atheists, not familiar-yet-hostile. She doesn’t even attack the argument from biblical contradictions.
it’s just that the consideration didn’t end up favoring Yvain.
So I take it that you’ve been to Cairo or other modern middle-eastern cities, or read extensively about them? I find it hard to see how you could be so confident in your domain knowledge otherwise.
I also factored in his past tendency to embellish facts.
This does not seem like an accurate reading of the post. “Aware and disdainful of the specific arguments against it”? The woman in the story is portrayed as unfamiliar with atheism and atheists, not familiar-yet-hostile.
First, the term was disdainful, not hostile. And my point only required that she was aware of people seriously believing they found contradictions in holy texts and people holding evolution-related beliefs in contradiction of creationists accounts, both of which she deemed insufficient. That’s familiar enough for the point I made.
So I take it that you’ve been to Cairo or other modern middle-eastern cities, or read extensively about them?
Read.
I also factored in his past tendency to embellish facts.
What past tendency? Do you have links?
Of course. I didn’t list them the first time around because I (and most well-adjusted people) don’t feel the need to list every piece of evidence influencing every belief they express, especially when it would come off as a “let’s list all of __′s past misdeeds!” party.
But since you ask, here you go:
In this article, it’s apparent he’s been made incompletely aware of factoids and takes licence to hype them up to the extreme without checking them, especially the All Sex is Rape line. (Yes, I though the attribution was close enough not to matter, but I would have presented the more nuanced view, which I spelled out in comments.)
Here he took his knowledge of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s and Adam Frank’s views on religion and extrapolated them in ways that neither would approve of. (He originally called the characters Colonels Yudkowsky and Frank, then changed them to Colonels Y and F after this was pointed out.)
Here Yvain sees an ambiguous letter-to-the-editor from a woman with a plausible, non-stupid interpretation and then proceeds to characterize her as the worst possible example of the fallacy he was demonstrating. (Link is to my comment on that article, showing what’s wrong with his interpretation.)
I don’t mean this to be a general indictment of Yvain; he’s contributed excellent material to Less Wrong, has earned a heck of a lot more karma than me, and would truly be irreplaceable if he left. But, like everyone else, he has the occasional bad habit, and lots of red flags went up when I saw the claim I’ve just questioned.
And my point only required that she was aware of people seriously believing they found contradictions in holy texts and people holding evolution-related beliefs in contradiction of creationists accounts, both of which she deemed insufficient. That’s familiar enough for the point I made.
But there are lots of religious people who are aware of the existence of such atheists, yet who do not follow all the most stringent cultural practices of their religion. You know, like self-identified Jews who nevertheless think nothing of flipping a lightswitch on a Saturday.
But there are lots of religious people who are aware of the existence of such atheists, yet who do not follow all the most stringent cultural practices of their religion.
Right, but that predicate wasn’t the only one that applied here. This religionist:
-is adamant about spreader her views to the point she wishes to know what stops people from joining -is aware of the different arguments against and classifies them -most importantly, is in a theocracy of like-believers that gets government enforcement of its tenets
That’s quite different from a random Jew ignoring an orthodox sect’s bizarre prohibitions.
Downvoted for baseless and hostile accusation of dishonesty, misreading of the original post, and extremely dubious claims to positive knowledge of Egyptian culture.
Baseless accusation? No, I provided a sound basis. Misreading of the original post? Show me the misreading.
Yvain only said that the woman was a creationist Muslim. You misread him as saying that she was culturally traditional. Either that, or you made the baseless inference that all creationist Muslims are culturally traditional.
Sorry, probability and inference don’t work like that. I didn’t “misread him as saying she was culturally traditional”. I correctly read exactly what the post said. It’s just that I made the inference based on the strong cues in the story that she was devout. That’s not the same as misreading a word or two.
I admit—I certainly could have made the basis for that belief more clear, but you also should have applied the principle of charity and thought about the possibility that it wasn’t just a misreading, and that there are reasons to infer someone is a “devout Muslim” other than “oh, someone told me with those exact words.”
In addition to what I mentioned in my response to Zack_M_Davis, there’s the fact that the Muslim woman has actually thought through the implications of her faith enough to actually want to persuade others, and has ranked the different reasons for disagreement for their plausibility. This is the same kind of person who would watch that they’re going above and beyond to adhere to their faith’s requirements.
Furthermore, I need not have “made the baseless inference that all creationist Muslims are culturally traditional.” The world isn’t black and white. If the evidence justifies believing with 95% probability that she’s a devout Muslim, I can tentatively hold that belief with high confidence without believing that all (your term) creationist Muslims are culturally traditional. There were more cues in the passage.
Come on, this is basic Bayesian probability theory here. You should have dropped the rhetoric of “you think X implies a 100% probability of Y” a long time ago.
On my reading, this implies that, if you think that the woman is devout, you should think it less likely that Yvain lied when he reported his conversation with her.
Here’s why:
Let ARGUES be the proposition that an arbitrary Muslim woman in Cairo is willing to argue for creationism with a stranger.
Let DEVOUT be the probability that an arbitrary Muslim woman in Cairo is devout—that is, that she “would watch that [she’s] going above and beyond to adhere to [her] faith’s requirements.”
You consider p(ARGUES | DEVOUT) to be low enough to justify calling Yvain a liar. Thus, DEVOUT must refer to a devotion strong enough to make p(ARGUES | DEVOUT) this small. But, I claim, you should consider p(ARGUES) to be even smaller.
On my reading, you assert above that, if the woman argues for creationism, she is very likely to be devout. That is,
where epsilon is small enough to justify your omission of any phrase like “very likely to be”. On my reading, this makes epsilon small enough so that, in a cosmopolitan city like Cairo,
where, again, DEVOUT refers to a devotion strong enough to make p(ARGUES | DEVOUT) small enough to justify calling Yvain a liar.
Putting (1) and (2) together gives
Therefore,
so that p(ARGUES) < p(ARGUES | DEVOUT), as claimed.
ETA: Edited to correct typo in derivation.
ETA2: Sorry, more corrections to the argument . . .
You should be aware that when you write
(1) “The kind of person who is an X is also a Y.”,
many careful readers are going to read that as equivalent to
(2) “All people who are Xs are Ys.”
Indeed. No one here had said anything about 100% probabilities. If you want (1) above to be read as shorthand for
(1′) “The kind of person who is an X is also a Y with probability 1 - epsilon.”,
then you should reciprocate by reading (2) as shorthand for
(2′) “All but a (1 - epsilon)th of people who are Xs are also Ys.”
If you want to dispense with “most likely”, “nearly all”, etc., then you should allow others to do the same.
This seems a fair summary of your view: Any Muslim creationist is so likely to be a cultural traditionalist that, when Yvain reports meeting an exception in Egypt, you may confidently accuse him of lying.
And that, I maintain is a baseless inference, albeit a probabilistic one. One shouldn’t throw around accusations of lying without justifying strong confidence in such an inference.
Many careless readers, you mean? This is Less Wrong, Tyrrell. Most everyone understands that “X is certain” doesn’t mean P(X) = 100%. One hundred percent probabilities (infinite odds) don’t exist and can’t be updated; what matters instead is whether something is certain enough, and it needn’t be 100% for this to hold.
I do wish it be so read, and this is how people should already be reading such statements, for the reasons given above. Requiring that all “1-epsilon” be always written as “nearly all” instead of “all” is wasteless verbiage. See But there’s still a chance, right?.
It doesn’t seem like a fair summary of my view, or even one you put much effort into. A fair summary would be “Any Muslim creationist female in a Muslim country, who meets the criteria I specifically identified, is so likely to also adhere to the norm of restricted casual conversation with unrelated males, that, when Yvain reports chatting with one in an Egypt cafe where the impropriety would be noticed, then given his past embellishment of details [see last response to Zack], I may confidently suggest that his story is not entirely accurate and more likely indicates a tale pieced together from other accounts.”
Ah, man, not so straw-stuffed when you put it that way...
None of those examples strike me as remotely in the ballpark of the mendacity of which you accused him in this thread.
Precisely my point. Why, then, did you object to my “all” when I glossed your position as “all creationist Muslims are culturally traditional.”? [ETA: Object, that is, by accusing me of saying that you were making an absolute 100%-certain claim.]
[This is a separate issue from your objection that I didn’t say “All Muslim creationist women in Cairo who meet the criteria that you specifically identified . . .”.]
All of my arguments carry over mutatis mutandis to this version of your position.
You wrote, “Devout Muslim women in Muslim countries don’t {...}” but the woman in the story is not identified as a “devout” Muslim; notice that she is portrayed as merely curious about Yvain’s atheism and only expresses shock at his belief in evolution. (Cf. “Oh, thank goodness it’s {the contradictions in holy texts}. I was afraid you were one of those crazies who believed that monkeys transformed into humans.”) {ETA: Tyrrell McAllister points out what I was trying to get at more precisely than I did.}
I know very little about culture in the Arab world. I’m sure very many Muslim women would never chat with a male tourist in a cafe. But to say that it’s utterly implausible that such an encounter is likely to happen in Cairo is a much stronger claim. Before calling Yvain a liar, you should have considered whether your model of social norms in major Middle-Eastern cities is wrong.
Even though the passage didn’t have the phrase “devout Muslim”, it can still be a reasonable inference. Someone this familiar with their faith and aware and disdainful of the specific arguments against it, has invested more time than most cereligionists and is more likely to be stringently following the rules.
I did; it’s just that the consideration didn’t end up favoring Yvain. I also factored in his past tendency to embellish facts.
This does not seem like an accurate reading of the post. “Aware and disdainful of the specific arguments against it”? The woman in the story is portrayed as unfamiliar with atheism and atheists, not familiar-yet-hostile. She doesn’t even attack the argument from biblical contradictions.
So I take it that you’ve been to Cairo or other modern middle-eastern cities, or read extensively about them? I find it hard to see how you could be so confident in your domain knowledge otherwise.
What past tendency? Do you have links?
First, the term was disdainful, not hostile. And my point only required that she was aware of people seriously believing they found contradictions in holy texts and people holding evolution-related beliefs in contradiction of creationists accounts, both of which she deemed insufficient. That’s familiar enough for the point I made.
Read.
Of course. I didn’t list them the first time around because I (and most well-adjusted people) don’t feel the need to list every piece of evidence influencing every belief they express, especially when it would come off as a “let’s list all of __′s past misdeeds!” party.
But since you ask, here you go:
In this article, it’s apparent he’s been made incompletely aware of factoids and takes licence to hype them up to the extreme without checking them, especially the All Sex is Rape line. (Yes, I though the attribution was close enough not to matter, but I would have presented the more nuanced view, which I spelled out in comments.)
Here he took his knowledge of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s and Adam Frank’s views on religion and extrapolated them in ways that neither would approve of. (He originally called the characters Colonels Yudkowsky and Frank, then changed them to Colonels Y and F after this was pointed out.)
Here Yvain sees an ambiguous letter-to-the-editor from a woman with a plausible, non-stupid interpretation and then proceeds to characterize her as the worst possible example of the fallacy he was demonstrating. (Link is to my comment on that article, showing what’s wrong with his interpretation.)
I don’t mean this to be a general indictment of Yvain; he’s contributed excellent material to Less Wrong, has earned a heck of a lot more karma than me, and would truly be irreplaceable if he left. But, like everyone else, he has the occasional bad habit, and lots of red flags went up when I saw the claim I’ve just questioned.
But there are lots of religious people who are aware of the existence of such atheists, yet who do not follow all the most stringent cultural practices of their religion. You know, like self-identified Jews who nevertheless think nothing of flipping a lightswitch on a Saturday.
Right, but that predicate wasn’t the only one that applied here. This religionist:
-is adamant about spreader her views to the point she wishes to know what stops people from joining
-is aware of the different arguments against and classifies them
-most importantly, is in a theocracy of like-believers that gets government enforcement of its tenets
That’s quite different from a random Jew ignoring an orthodox sect’s bizarre prohibitions.