The idea of the story is that there are no evidence. Because I think, in real life, sometimes, there are important and relevant things with no evidence. In this case, Adam’s innocence is important and relevant to Eve (for emotional and social reasons I presume), but there is no, and there will never be, evidence. Given that, saying: “If there is evidence, then the belief could be falsified.” is a kind of cheating because producing new evidence is not possible anymore.
because producing new evidence is not possible anymore.
Okay...
So, say it turns out that, well, Eve is irrational. Somehow.
Now what? Do we go “neener-neener” at her? What’s the point? What’s the use that you could get out of labeling this behavior irrational?
Suppose Adam dies and is cryo-frozen. During Eve’s life, there will be no resuscitation of Adam. Sometime afterward, however, Omega will arrive, deem the problem interesting and simulate Adam via really really really advanced technology.
Turns out he didn’t do it.
Is she now rational because, well, turns out she was right after all? Well, no, because getting the right answer for the wrong reasons is not the rational way to go about things (in general, it might help in specific cases if you need to get the answer right but don’t care how).
....
Actually, let me just skip over a few paragraphs I was going to write and skip to the end.
You cannot have 100% confidence interval. Because then your belief is set in stone and it cannot change. You can have a googleplex nines if you want, but not 100% confidence.
Fallacy of argument from probability (if it can happen then it must happen) aside; How is it rational to discard a belief you are holding on shaky evidence if you think with near absolute certainty that no more evidence will arrive, ever? What will you do when there is more evidence? (Hint: Meeting Adam’s mother at the funeral and hearing childhood stories about what a nice kid he was is more evidence for his character, albeit very weak evidence—and so are studies that show that certain demographics of the timeperiod that Adam lived in had certain characteristics) You gotta update! (I don’t think that fallacy I mentioned applies; if it does, we can fix it with big numbers; if you are to hold this belief everywhere, then… the probabilities go up as it turns from “in this situation” to “in at least one of all these situations”)
So to toss a belief aside because you think there will be no more evidence is the wrong action to me. You can park a belief. That is to take no action. Maintain status quo. No change in input is no change in output. But you do NOT clear the belief.
Let me put up a strawman—I’ll leave it up to others to see if there’s something harder underneath—if you hold this action—“I think there will be no more evidence, and I am not very confident either way, so I will discard the output” to be the rightful action to take, how do you prevent yourself from getting boiled like a frog in a pan (yes, that’s a false story—still, I intend the metaphorical meaning: how do you stop yourself from discarding every bit of evidence that comes your way, because you “know” there to be no more evidence?)
In my opinion, to do as you say weakens or even destroys the gradual “update” mechanism. This leads to less effective beliefs, and thus is irrational.
Were we to now look at the 3 questions, I’d answer..
Again, Eve is irrational because she says it cannot be falsified. If we let Eve say “I still think he didn’t do it because of his character, and I will keep believing this until I see evidence to the contrary—and if such evidence doesn’t exist, I will keep believing this forever”—then yes, Eve is rational.
The second question, yes via this specific example. Here it can, thus it can.
Yes, it can be extended to belief in God. Provided we restrict “God” to a REALLY TINY thing. As in, gee, a couple thousand years ago, something truly fantastic happened—it was God! I saw it with my own eyes! You can keep believing there was, at that point in time, an entity causing this fantastic thing. Until you get other evidence, which may never happen. What you CANNOT do is say, “hey, maybe this ‘God’ that caused this one fantastic thing is also responsible for creating the universe and making my neighbor win the lottery and my aunt get cancer and …” That’s unloading a huge complexity on an earlier belief without paying appropriate penalties.
You don’t only need evidence that the fantastical events were caused, you also need evidence they were caused by the same thing if you wish to attribute them to that same thing.
You don’t only need evidence that the fantastical events were caused, you also need evidence they were caused by the same thing if you wish to attribute them to that same thing.
Assume I observe X, Y, Z and form three hypotheses
A: All of X, Y, Z had causes
B: All of X, Y, Z had different causes
C: All of X, Y, Z had the same cause
A obviously has highest probability since it includes B and C as special cases. However, which one of B and C do you think should get complexity penalty over the others?
In you story:
Yes, it can be extended to belief in God. Provided we restrict “God” to a REALLY TINY thing. As in, gee, a couple thousand years ago, something truly fantastic happened—it was God! I saw it with my own eyes! You can keep believing there was, at that point in time, an entity causing this fantastic thing. Until you get other evidence, which may never happen. What you CANNOT do is say, “hey, maybe this ‘God’ that caused this one fantastic thing is also responsible for creating the universe and making my neighbor win the lottery and my aunt get cancer and …” That’s unloading a huge complexity on an earlier belief without paying appropriate penalties.
The relevant comparison is: Given that God did X, what is the probability that God also did Y and Z, verses God did not do those things.
P(God did Y, Z | God did X) = P(God did X,Y, Z) / P(God did X)
v.s.
P(God did not do Y, Z | God did X) = P(God did X, and something other than God did Y, Z) / P(God did X)
I am uncertain about how to correctly apply complexity penalty, but I do believe that the multi explanation model “God did X, and something other than God did Y, Z” should get complexity penalty over the sing explanation model “God did X, Y, Z”.
The belief “God caused some tiny thing, a couple thousand years ago”, should correlated with the belief “God did this big thing right now”. This is why I firmly believe that God did not cause some tiny thing, a couple of thousand years ago.
Phrased like this, I see what you’re getting at; but in my mind, I was describing extraordinary, but different events. Say, miracle cures and miracle plagues or whatever. A whole bunch of locusts and your aunt being cured of cancer most likely have different causes. In that case, you first have to postulate an entity which can summon a bunch of locusts. The actual summoning need not be magical or spontaneous in nature, only their appearance. So keeping a bunch of locusts hidden away whilst feeding them (somehow), before releasing them like a plague, would do.
This SAME entity then also needs the ability to cure cancer. To me, adding abilities like this incurs complexity penalties on a pretty big scale. Especially when you start adding other stuff and start scaling this influence over time (same entity responsible for actions many thousands of years ago and events now)
This SAME entity then also needs the ability to cure cancer. To me, adding abilities like this incurs complexity penalties on a pretty big scale.
This says that if you are, say, an Inca ruler and you hear about Spanish conquistadors, the fact that they can ride weird beasts AND shoot fire out of metal sticks AND do a lot of other supernatural-looking stuff implies that you should disbelieve their existence—probably not a good idea.
In general terms, the complexity penalties you’re are talking about are justified only if these different abilities are unrelated. But if, instead, all of them have a common cause (e.g. massive technological superiority), the penalties no longer apply.
My personal answer to the 3 questions is 3 yes. But I am not confident of my own reasoning, that’s why I’m here, looking for confirmation. So, thank you for the confirmation.
If we let Eve say “I still think he didn’t do it because of his character, and I will keep believing this until I see evidence to the contrary—and if such evidence doesn’t exist, I will keep believing this forever”—then yes, Eve is rational
That is exactly what I meant her to say. I just thought I could simplify it, but apparently I lose important points along the way.
Yes, it can be extended to belief in God. Provided we restrict “God” to a REALLY TINY thing.
I am a theist, but I am appalled by the lack of rational apologetic, the abundance of poor ones, and the disinterest to develop a good one. So here I am, making baby steps.
The point is that these days… and I think in the days before that, AND the days before that… … Okay, so basically since forever, “God” has been such a loaded concept...
If you ask people where God is, some of them will tell you that “God is in everything and anything” (or something to that tune). Now, these people don’t have to be right (or wrong!) but that’s … a rather broad definition to me.
One can imagine God as an entity. Like, I dunno, a space alien from an alternative universe (don’t ask how that universe was created; I don’t know, this is a story and not an explanation). With super advanced technology. So if we then ask “did God create the world” and we (somehow...?) went back in time and saw that, hey, this space alien was somewhere else at the time and, no, the planet formed via other means, then you’d have a definitive answer to that question.
But there are other definitions. God are the mechanics of the universe. So, what you’d call the laws of physics, no, that’s just God. That’s how God keeps everything going. Why, then, yes, God did create the world! But only because current scientific understanding says “we think physics did it” and then you say “Physics is God”.
Anyway, if you want a sane, useful, rational answer to your third question then you must define God. I personally treated God as 1 entity in my earlier answer, which leads to the problem of having to connect events to the same entity (which, when you know very little about that entity, is pretty hard). (If you didn’t connect events to that same entity then something else must have caused it, in which case you have multiple probable causes for fantastic events, and you might as well call them Gods individually?)
I don’t quite grasp what you mean with the last bit...
I am a theist, but I am appalled by the lack of rational apologetic, the abundance of poor ones, and the disinterest to develop a good one. So here I am, making baby steps.
God is a messy concept. As a theist, I am leaning more towards the Calvinistic Christianity. Defining God is very problematic because, by definition, it is something, which in it’s fullness, is beyond human comprehension.
Could you clarify?
Since ancient time, there are many arguments for and against God (and the many versions of it). Lately, the arguments against God has developed to a very sophisticated extend and the theist is lagging very far behind and there doesn’t seem to be any interest in catching up.
It is a very interesting quest you have taken on. As an atheist, I am always interested in hearing good arguments in favour of God.
Why don’t you start by answering: Why are you a theist? You have looked at all the evidence available to you, and arrived at a posterior where P(God exists) >> P(God does not exist). Explain your reasoning to us. If your reasoning is good enough for you, why would it not be good enough for me?
“Explain your reasoning to us. If your reasoning is good enough for you, why would it not be good enough for me?”
Christians will sometimes ask me this, trying to get me to explain why I no longer think that Christianity is true.
And it has a very good answer. There really are good reasons why my reasoning is good enough for me, and would not be good enough for them. Basically, they want me to give a few short arguments which they will, quite rightly, dismiss as unconvincing. I fully understand why they dismiss them as unconvincing. It is because “a few short arguments,” no matter what they are, will in fact be unconvincing. I understand that, because I would have dismissed them as unconvincing myself in the past, and I fully understand why I would have done that, and it would have been quite reasonable.
But my reasoning is good enough for me, because I have thought about these things for years, considering not just a few short arguments, but many, many many arguments, and replies to replies, and replies to replies to replies, and so on. So I understand how things stand overall, and this “how things stand overall” cannot be communicated in a few short arguments.
In that way, to the degree that “If your reasoning is good enough...” is rhetorical, and implies that if you are not convinced, they should not be convinced either, it is a fallacy.
This is very poorly formulated. But there are 2 foundations in my logic. First is, that I am leaning towards presuppositionalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presuppositional_apologetics). The only way to build a ‘map’, first of all, is to take a list of presuppositions for granted. I am also interested in that (see my post on http://lesswrong.com/lw/nsm/open_thread_jul_25_jul_31_2016/). The idea is that a school could have a non-contradicting collection of self-referential statement that covers the epistemology and axiology and another school have another distinct collection. And due to the expensiveness of computation and lack of information, both maps are equally good and predicting what should and should not happen (“and also what is actually happening and why”, what scientist, not rationalist, cares about).
The other part is, the basis of this post, personal experience. All of my personal life experience, up until this point, “arrived at a posterior where P(God exists) >> P(God does not exist)” exactly in the same way Eve arrived at hers in this OP.
Now I do realize that is very crude and not at all solid, not even presentable. But since you asked, there you go.
Which is why I use labels such as “an entity” which may or may not be “omniscient” or “omnipotent”. You can describe God in terms of labels; If I had a car, and had to describe it, I could say parts of it were made from leather, parts of it were made from metals, parts of it were made from rubber, looking at it gives a grey sensation, but there is also red and white and black...
If God really can do anything and everything then everything is evidence of and evidence against God and you have 0 reason to update on any of the beliefs surrounding God. Which is, once again, why you don’t tie 100% probability to things. That includes statements of the nature “God caused this”.
The idea of the story is that there are no evidence.
But in the OP, you said:
she has known Adam very well and the Adam that she knew, wouldn’t commit murder. She uses Adam’s character and her personal relationship with him as evidence.
It seems to me that Adam’s character as observed by Eve is evidence. Not irrefutable evidence, but evidence all the same. It seems to me that, baring evidence of Adam’s guilt or evidence that Adam’s character had recently changed, Eve is rational for beleiving Adam to be innocent on the basis of that evidence.
Cain provided no such evidence, so Eve is rational in her belief.
That kind of knowledge is not part of the human condition. By making it a presupposition of your story, you render your hypothetical inapplicable to actual human life.
I will have to copy paste my answer to your other comment:
Yes I could. I chose not to. It is a balance between suspension of disbelieve and narrative simplicity. Moreover, I am not sure how much credence should I put on recent cosmological theories that they will not be updated the future, making my narrative set up obsolete. I also do not want to burden my reader with familiarity of cosmological theories.
Am I not allowed to use such narrative technique to simplify my story and deliver my point? Yes I know it is out of touch with the human condition but I was hoping it would not strain my audiences’ suspension of disbelieve.
The problem is that the unrealistic simplification acts precisely on the factor you’re trying to analyze—falsifiability. If you relax the unrealistic assumption, the point you’re trying to make about falsifiabilty no longer holds.
The idea of the story is that there are no evidence. Because I think, in real life, sometimes, there are important and relevant things with no evidence. In this case, Adam’s innocence is important and relevant to Eve (for emotional and social reasons I presume), but there is no, and there will never be, evidence. Given that, saying: “If there is evidence, then the belief could be falsified.” is a kind of cheating because producing new evidence is not possible anymore.
Okay...
So, say it turns out that, well, Eve is irrational. Somehow.
Now what? Do we go “neener-neener” at her? What’s the point? What’s the use that you could get out of labeling this behavior irrational?
Suppose Adam dies and is cryo-frozen. During Eve’s life, there will be no resuscitation of Adam. Sometime afterward, however, Omega will arrive, deem the problem interesting and simulate Adam via really really really advanced technology.
Turns out he didn’t do it.
Is she now rational because, well, turns out she was right after all? Well, no, because getting the right answer for the wrong reasons is not the rational way to go about things (in general, it might help in specific cases if you need to get the answer right but don’t care how).
....
Actually, let me just skip over a few paragraphs I was going to write and skip to the end.
You cannot have 100% confidence interval. Because then your belief is set in stone and it cannot change. You can have a googleplex nines if you want, but not 100% confidence.
Fallacy of argument from probability (if it can happen then it must happen) aside; How is it rational to discard a belief you are holding on shaky evidence if you think with near absolute certainty that no more evidence will arrive, ever? What will you do when there is more evidence? (Hint: Meeting Adam’s mother at the funeral and hearing childhood stories about what a nice kid he was is more evidence for his character, albeit very weak evidence—and so are studies that show that certain demographics of the timeperiod that Adam lived in had certain characteristics) You gotta update! (I don’t think that fallacy I mentioned applies; if it does, we can fix it with big numbers; if you are to hold this belief everywhere, then… the probabilities go up as it turns from “in this situation” to “in at least one of all these situations”)
So to toss a belief aside because you think there will be no more evidence is the wrong action to me. You can park a belief. That is to take no action. Maintain status quo. No change in input is no change in output. But you do NOT clear the belief.
Let me put up a strawman—I’ll leave it up to others to see if there’s something harder underneath—if you hold this action—“I think there will be no more evidence, and I am not very confident either way, so I will discard the output” to be the rightful action to take, how do you prevent yourself from getting boiled like a frog in a pan (yes, that’s a false story—still, I intend the metaphorical meaning: how do you stop yourself from discarding every bit of evidence that comes your way, because you “know” there to be no more evidence?)
In my opinion, to do as you say weakens or even destroys the gradual “update” mechanism. This leads to less effective beliefs, and thus is irrational.
Were we to now look at the 3 questions, I’d answer..
Again, Eve is irrational because she says it cannot be falsified. If we let Eve say “I still think he didn’t do it because of his character, and I will keep believing this until I see evidence to the contrary—and if such evidence doesn’t exist, I will keep believing this forever”—then yes, Eve is rational.
The second question, yes via this specific example. Here it can, thus it can.
Yes, it can be extended to belief in God. Provided we restrict “God” to a REALLY TINY thing. As in, gee, a couple thousand years ago, something truly fantastic happened—it was God! I saw it with my own eyes! You can keep believing there was, at that point in time, an entity causing this fantastic thing. Until you get other evidence, which may never happen. What you CANNOT do is say, “hey, maybe this ‘God’ that caused this one fantastic thing is also responsible for creating the universe and making my neighbor win the lottery and my aunt get cancer and …” That’s unloading a huge complexity on an earlier belief without paying appropriate penalties.
You don’t only need evidence that the fantastical events were caused, you also need evidence they were caused by the same thing if you wish to attribute them to that same thing.
Assume I observe X, Y, Z and form three hypotheses
A: All of X, Y, Z had causes
B: All of X, Y, Z had different causes
C: All of X, Y, Z had the same cause
A obviously has highest probability since it includes B and C as special cases. However, which one of B and C do you think should get complexity penalty over the others?
In you story:
The relevant comparison is: Given that God did X, what is the probability that God also did Y and Z, verses God did not do those things.
P(God did Y, Z | God did X) = P(God did X,Y, Z) / P(God did X)
v.s.
P(God did not do Y, Z | God did X) = P(God did X, and something other than God did Y, Z) / P(God did X)
I am uncertain about how to correctly apply complexity penalty, but I do believe that the multi explanation model “God did X, and something other than God did Y, Z” should get complexity penalty over the sing explanation model “God did X, Y, Z”.
The belief “God caused some tiny thing, a couple thousand years ago”, should correlated with the belief “God did this big thing right now”. This is why I firmly believe that God did not cause some tiny thing, a couple of thousand years ago.
Phrased like this, I see what you’re getting at; but in my mind, I was describing extraordinary, but different events. Say, miracle cures and miracle plagues or whatever. A whole bunch of locusts and your aunt being cured of cancer most likely have different causes. In that case, you first have to postulate an entity which can summon a bunch of locusts. The actual summoning need not be magical or spontaneous in nature, only their appearance. So keeping a bunch of locusts hidden away whilst feeding them (somehow), before releasing them like a plague, would do.
This SAME entity then also needs the ability to cure cancer. To me, adding abilities like this incurs complexity penalties on a pretty big scale. Especially when you start adding other stuff and start scaling this influence over time (same entity responsible for actions many thousands of years ago and events now)
This says that if you are, say, an Inca ruler and you hear about Spanish conquistadors, the fact that they can ride weird beasts AND shoot fire out of metal sticks AND do a lot of other supernatural-looking stuff implies that you should disbelieve their existence—probably not a good idea.
In general terms, the complexity penalties you’re are talking about are justified only if these different abilities are unrelated. But if, instead, all of them have a common cause (e.g. massive technological superiority), the penalties no longer apply.
I see.
Thank you for the reply.
My personal answer to the 3 questions is 3 yes. But I am not confident of my own reasoning, that’s why I’m here, looking for confirmation. So, thank you for the confirmation.
That is exactly what I meant her to say. I just thought I could simplify it, but apparently I lose important points along the way.
I am a theist, but I am appalled by the lack of rational apologetic, the abundance of poor ones, and the disinterest to develop a good one. So here I am, making baby steps.
The point is that these days… and I think in the days before that, AND the days before that… … Okay, so basically since forever, “God” has been such a loaded concept...
If you ask people where God is, some of them will tell you that “God is in everything and anything” (or something to that tune). Now, these people don’t have to be right (or wrong!) but that’s … a rather broad definition to me.
One can imagine God as an entity. Like, I dunno, a space alien from an alternative universe (don’t ask how that universe was created; I don’t know, this is a story and not an explanation). With super advanced technology. So if we then ask “did God create the world” and we (somehow...?) went back in time and saw that, hey, this space alien was somewhere else at the time and, no, the planet formed via other means, then you’d have a definitive answer to that question.
But there are other definitions. God are the mechanics of the universe. So, what you’d call the laws of physics, no, that’s just God. That’s how God keeps everything going. Why, then, yes, God did create the world! But only because current scientific understanding says “we think physics did it” and then you say “Physics is God”.
Anyway, if you want a sane, useful, rational answer to your third question then you must define God. I personally treated God as 1 entity in my earlier answer, which leads to the problem of having to connect events to the same entity (which, when you know very little about that entity, is pretty hard). (If you didn’t connect events to that same entity then something else must have caused it, in which case you have multiple probable causes for fantastic events, and you might as well call them Gods individually?)
I don’t quite grasp what you mean with the last bit...
Could you clarify?
God is a messy concept. As a theist, I am leaning more towards the Calvinistic Christianity. Defining God is very problematic because, by definition, it is something, which in it’s fullness, is beyond human comprehension.
Since ancient time, there are many arguments for and against God (and the many versions of it). Lately, the arguments against God has developed to a very sophisticated extend and the theist is lagging very far behind and there doesn’t seem to be any interest in catching up.
It is a very interesting quest you have taken on. As an atheist, I am always interested in hearing good arguments in favour of God.
Why don’t you start by answering: Why are you a theist? You have looked at all the evidence available to you, and arrived at a posterior where P(God exists) >> P(God does not exist). Explain your reasoning to us. If your reasoning is good enough for you, why would it not be good enough for me?
“Explain your reasoning to us. If your reasoning is good enough for you, why would it not be good enough for me?”
Christians will sometimes ask me this, trying to get me to explain why I no longer think that Christianity is true.
And it has a very good answer. There really are good reasons why my reasoning is good enough for me, and would not be good enough for them. Basically, they want me to give a few short arguments which they will, quite rightly, dismiss as unconvincing. I fully understand why they dismiss them as unconvincing. It is because “a few short arguments,” no matter what they are, will in fact be unconvincing. I understand that, because I would have dismissed them as unconvincing myself in the past, and I fully understand why I would have done that, and it would have been quite reasonable.
But my reasoning is good enough for me, because I have thought about these things for years, considering not just a few short arguments, but many, many many arguments, and replies to replies, and replies to replies to replies, and so on. So I understand how things stand overall, and this “how things stand overall” cannot be communicated in a few short arguments.
In that way, to the degree that “If your reasoning is good enough...” is rhetorical, and implies that if you are not convinced, they should not be convinced either, it is a fallacy.
This is very poorly formulated. But there are 2 foundations in my logic. First is, that I am leaning towards presuppositionalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presuppositional_apologetics). The only way to build a ‘map’, first of all, is to take a list of presuppositions for granted. I am also interested in that (see my post on http://lesswrong.com/lw/nsm/open_thread_jul_25_jul_31_2016/). The idea is that a school could have a non-contradicting collection of self-referential statement that covers the epistemology and axiology and another school have another distinct collection. And due to the expensiveness of computation and lack of information, both maps are equally good and predicting what should and should not happen (“and also what is actually happening and why”, what scientist, not rationalist, cares about).
The other part is, the basis of this post, personal experience. All of my personal life experience, up until this point, “arrived at a posterior where P(God exists) >> P(God does not exist)” exactly in the same way Eve arrived at hers in this OP.
Now I do realize that is very crude and not at all solid, not even presentable. But since you asked, there you go.
Which is why I use labels such as “an entity” which may or may not be “omniscient” or “omnipotent”. You can describe God in terms of labels; If I had a car, and had to describe it, I could say parts of it were made from leather, parts of it were made from metals, parts of it were made from rubber, looking at it gives a grey sensation, but there is also red and white and black...
If God really can do anything and everything then everything is evidence of and evidence against God and you have 0 reason to update on any of the beliefs surrounding God. Which is, once again, why you don’t tie 100% probability to things. That includes statements of the nature “God caused this”.
But in the OP, you said:
It seems to me that Adam’s character as observed by Eve is evidence. Not irrefutable evidence, but evidence all the same. It seems to me that, baring evidence of Adam’s guilt or evidence that Adam’s character had recently changed, Eve is rational for beleiving Adam to be innocent on the basis of that evidence.
Cain provided no such evidence, so Eve is rational in her belief.
Yes, that’s exactly what I had in mind.
What I meant was that there are no possibility of new evidence.
I also think that Eve is rational. But I’m not sure if I am correct. Thank you for the confirmation.
How do you claim to know that?
Well… That’s part of the story. I’m sure there is a term for it, but I don’t know what. Something that the story gives and you accept it as fact.
That kind of knowledge is not part of the human condition. By making it a presupposition of your story, you render your hypothetical inapplicable to actual human life.
I will have to copy paste my answer to your other comment:
Am I not allowed to use such narrative technique to simplify my story and deliver my point? Yes I know it is out of touch with the human condition but I was hoping it would not strain my audiences’ suspension of disbelieve.
The problem is that the unrealistic simplification acts precisely on the factor you’re trying to analyze—falsifiability. If you relax the unrealistic assumption, the point you’re trying to make about falsifiabilty no longer holds.