Evidence, Popular Opinion, and Prejudice - Page 2

PairTheBoard · #11 05-23-2007, 09:35 PM

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
In some situations better information doesn't exist and popular opinion doesn't matter.

Imagine you're a turkey in a group of turkeys. Every day the humans come out and give you food and watch you get fat. You have no reason to believe humans are anything but great and friendly. 90%+ of turkey's would think the same thing and keep eating the food the humans give them...and then Thanksgiving comes and you all lose your heads. Prior observation and opinion was rendered useless in a single day.

A proposition like "Does God Exist" lives in the world of extremistan, like the turkeys. We will live our days until the day we die believing one way or the other and then we will either be sent to some heaven or hell(who knows which religion is right) or we will just die and will never know we were right or wrong. 90% of the people believing either way is useless as evidence.

[/ QUOTE ]

Awfully results-oriented, don't you think?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm suprised vhawk. I thought it was a good representation of your weak-atheist view that legitimate evidence is not available so No Belief makes the most sense.

PairTheBoard

LA_Price · #12 05-23-2007, 09:36 PM

expand please. I don't get what part you find results oriented.

vhawk01 · #13 05-23-2007, 10:20 PM

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
In some situations better information doesn't exist and popular opinion doesn't matter.

Imagine you're a turkey in a group of turkeys. Every day the humans come out and give you food and watch you get fat. You have no reason to believe humans are anything but great and friendly. 90%+ of turkey's would think the same thing and keep eating the food the humans give them...and then Thanksgiving comes and you all lose your heads. Prior observation and opinion was rendered useless in a single day.

A proposition like "Does God Exist" lives in the world of extremistan, like the turkeys. We will live our days until the day we die believing one way or the other and then we will either be sent to some heaven or hell(who knows which religion is right) or we will just die and will never know we were right or wrong. 90% of the people believing either way is useless as evidence.

[/ QUOTE ]

Awfully results-oriented, don't you think?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm suprised vhawk. I thought it was a good representation of your weak-atheist view that legitimate evidence is not available so No Belief makes the most sense.

PairTheBoard

[/ QUOTE ]

My belief in this analogy, I think, if I'm understanding it correctly, is the same as the stupid 90% of the turkeys, i.e. that the humans are benevolent. There is no reason to think otherwise, thus, the standard position is they are good. I think you have my position confused with those who would actually say things like "I make no claims about my own knowledge or beliefs" or "I have no belief on the status of God." I have a belief on the status of God, and that is one of disbelief. I don't think God is impossible, I just don't believe in him. In this turkey example, they don't think its impossible the humans are out to eat them, they just have no reason to think it. Thus, the best guess is that the humans are benevolent.

It is entirely possible I am misunderstanding the analogy, though.

vhawk01 · #14 05-23-2007, 10:21 PM

[ QUOTE ]
expand please. I don't get what part you find results oriented.

[/ QUOTE ]

Because I think the turkeys are making the correct choice in believing the humans are benevolent, even though it turns out they are wrong.

LA_Price · #15 05-23-2007, 10:40 PM

This would be true if the turkey's lived in the world of mediocristan and the argument that the humans were benevolent on the 300 days or whatever prior wasn't vastly outweighed by the final verdict of their death on a single day. Results oriented analysis is wrong in the normal "bell curve" shaped world but when the impact of a single observation disproves all others it is not. Take the "all swans are white example". Europeans in the 1700's would have made this statement. Then they discovered Austrailia and black swans. They were wrong in their statement but their is nothing they could do, because the existence of a black swan was essentially unpredictable. Their failure was in making a statement that existed in the extremistan(unpredictable world), but then behaving like it existed in mediocristan. Taking individual people's observations on an exstremistan proposition and treating them as "evidence" as if the world is mediocristan would be this same mistake.

vhawk01 · #16 05-23-2007, 10:48 PM

[ QUOTE ]
This would be true if the turkey's lived in the world of mediocristan and the argument that the humans were benevolent on the 300 days or whatever prior wasn't vastly outweighed by the final verdict of their death on a single day. Results oriented analysis is wrong in the normal "bell curve" shaped world but when the impact of a single observation disproves all others it is not. Take the "all swans are white example". Europeans in the 1700's would have made this statement. Then they discovered Austrailia and black swans. They were wrong in their statement but their is nothing they could do, because the existence of a black swan was essentially unpredictable. Their failure was in making a statement that existed in the extremistan(unpredictable world), but then behaving like it existed in mediocristan. Taking individual people's observations on an exstremistan proposition and treating them as "evidence" as if the world is mediocristan would be this same mistake.

[/ QUOTE ]

Its a bell-curve world because we are talking about the general approach, not the specific outcome. Yep, the turkeys are wrong about the humans, and the Europeans were wrong about the swans, but these are the outliers, and most of the time, this approach is correct. Thats what I meant by results-oriented.

LA_Price · #17 05-23-2007, 10:58 PM

I think you're still misunderstanding. It is not always a bell shaped world. It is only a bell curve shaped world if one observation does not outweigh all the others. Take the 1000 random people and put them in a room. Now put the world's tallest man in. The average height will not change much. Now send in bill gates and see what happens to the average wealth.

Applying some "General bell shaped curve approach" to things that do not correspond to the bell curve is a big error. It isn't ok because it "works most of time". The point is that when you make a decision or want to test proposition that is extremistan in nature you can not use the bell curve because it will cause you to ignore the outliers and their huge impact.

P.S. I suggest getting taleb's book as he explains it much better than I.

vhawk01 · #18 05-23-2007, 11:04 PM

[ QUOTE ]
I think you're still misunderstanding. It is not always a bell shaped world. It is only a bell curve shaped world if one observation does not outweigh all the others. Take the 1000 random people and put them in a room. Now put the world's tallest man in. The average height will not change much. Now send in bill gates and see what happens to the average wealth.

Applying some "General bell shaped curve approach" to things that do not correspond to the bell curve is a big error. It isn't ok because it "works most of time". The point is that when you make a decision or want to test proposition that is extremistan in nature you can not use the bell curve because it will cause you to ignore the outliers and their huge impact.

P.S. I suggest getting taleb's book as he explains it much better than I.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ok. I guess I'm still not following. I agree with you on the "not always a bell curve" part, I just don't see why the turkeys are making a mistake. Sure, the final result, that they die, is a huge result, and blows the previous data out of the water. But they made their decision BEFORE that, right?

Or are you saying that we should take the opinion of the hypothetical turkey that just got killed over the opinions of the 90% that think humans are awesome, even though he is the minority and the mean opinion is still "humans are nice?" If this is what you are saying, I have definitely been misunderstanding you this entire time, and I certainly agree. Although, I'm not sure I see the parallels to atheism/agnosticism. However, if you can clear this up, I'm positive you can explain the rest of the analogy to me. It seems like I just misunderstood the whole time.

Phil153 · #19 05-23-2007, 11:19 PM

You mention courts. The irony is, the jury system is set up on exactly this premise - the more people that agree with a position on a question of fact, the more likely it is to be correct.

However on difficult technical questions (including evolution), popular opinion is irrelevant, as the basis for those opinions is not based on an understanding of the evidence or lack of, but merely the cherry picking of bits and pieces they understand or that fit with their feelings.

LA_Price · #20 05-23-2007, 11:43 PM

The mistake the turkeys are making is in believing that in an extremistan world, their observations or their commonly held belief based on past observations will help them predict the future. They can never assume that the humans will not chop their heads off tomorrow, no matter how many previous days they observe. The 90%+ of turkeys that operate on the assumption that the humans have "always been benevolent and always will be" can not predict what is going to happen. The humans know what happens on thanksgiving , but they don't and so to them they're just going to get their heads chopped off on a random day.