Re: Misconceptions about Me, Baye\'s, Rigor, Exodus, Evolution
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The reason why the expression is an ROP problem works like this. Suppose I claim that I can see coins as they are flipped and caught and thus can call them with near perfect accuracy. Would you believe me if I did it five times in a row? You shouldn't if you thought that it was a million to one against me having that ability (even after I claimed it). You would need well over twenty accurate consecutive calls. But even that shouldn't suffice. Unless the only two explanations were that I got lucky or I had the ability. I could also be cheating. And even if that was a 1000-1 shot originally, it would still be, due to ROP, much more likely. So I would have to go to extraordinary lenghths to prove I wasn't cheating.
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Not really. I supply the coin. I do the flipping. Easy. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
This reminds me of a common response I've gotten in the past from my replies to questions from Christains about "What would it take for you to believe in God/Jesus?" After I describe a test involving me telling God/Jesus what to do rather rather than God/Jesus doing something of their own choosing I typically get a response like, "how can you demand that God should do tricks at your beckoned call?"
The whole point is to minimize the chance that the claimant is cheating.
Also, I agree that bringing up Baye's Theorem isn't an argument from authority, unless we're talking about whose probability estimates we're using.
That's all I can say for now until you follow up on the details. Who else could get away with 1/2 starting a thread like this?
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