Can you have a look at this?

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Some allegedly Bayesian stuff has been added to Evidence. Smells fishy to me. I've reverted it once already, but the BoN apparently returned and registered an account.

ZooGuard (talk)13:16, 18 March 2013

It's mostly right based on Yudkowskian rationalism, which is a fairly robust approach to thinking about hypothesis testing but unfortunately suffers from too much subjectivity when trying to assign an actual, i.e., numerical, prior probability to things. Indeed, my snarkastic view of Bayes theorem is that you just fiddle with P(B) until it gives you the answer you want.

Overall, it's not the best wording of it, I must say. But the subject is worth including in the article on evidence. The example is okay. You expect to see Christians exist in the world if God exists and you expect to see Christians in the world if God doesn't exist but religion is a social phenomenon. The question is which is more likely as does this "evidence" actually tell you the difference.

Scarlet A.pngmoral13:48, 18 March 2013

"According to the tenants of Bayesian Reasoning, you should determine whether a statement is true or false by asking yourself what you would expect the world to look like in each case." That's not Bayesian reasoning, that's empiricism.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)14:09, 18 March 2013

Also: "... tenants ...""... tenets ..." shurely. Gives me little confidence in the editor.

Scream!! (talk)14:20, 18 March 2013

The author's a member of the JREF forums: http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=9079247 :|

ZooGuard (talk)16:46, 18 March 2013
 

It's Bayesian if you update based on a prior idea. Hence the discussion of how probable it is God exists and whether the presence of many Christians can change that.

Scarlet A.pngsshole19:42, 18 March 2013

True, but there is other stuff thrown in with that in the edit, like the sentence I pulled out above which described empiricism rather than Bayesianism. That's the problem with relying on Yudkowsky -- he's packed a bunch of tangentially related philosophical suppositions and schools of thought into the umbrella term of "Bayesianism."

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)22:20, 18 March 2013

We don't refer to it as The Church of Bayes for nothing, you know.

Scarlet A.pngsshole12:10, 19 March 2013
Ceiling cat.jpg W A R N I N G

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