Re: Thomas Bayes and Bayesian statistics

From: George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Date: Sat Aug 30 2003 - 08:22:35 EDT

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    Inge Frette wrote:
    ......................
    > >"Mr. [sic] Swinburne, a commanding figure with snow-white hair and
    > >piercing blue eyes, proceeded to weigh evidence for and against the
    > >Resurrection, assigning values to factors like the probability that there
    > >is a God, the nature of Jesus' behavior during his lifetime and the
    > >quality of witness testimony after his death. Then, while his audience
    > >followed along on printed lecture notes, he plugged his numbers into a
    > >dense thicket of letters and symbols—using a probability formula known as
    > >Bayes's theorem—and did the math. "Given e and k, h is true if and only if
    > >c is true," he said. "The probability of h given e and k is .97"
    > >"In plain English, this means that, by Mr. Swinburne's calculations, the
    > >probability of the Resurrection comes out to be a whopping 97 percent. ".......................

            This reminds me of the way they used to weigh hogs down on the farm. Get 2 or 3
    farmhands together, wrestle the hog into the wagon, and go out to the woods where there
    are some big logs lying around. Wrestle one of the logs onto another as a fulcrum, then
    wrestle the hog onto one end of the top log and tie it down. Then wrestle some big
    rocks onto the other end of the log until they roughly balance the hog. Then guess how
    much the rocks weigh.
            
            Swinburne's procedure, as described above, is similar to what SETI people do
    with the Drake equation. That equation is unobjectionable in itself, but to get any
    numbers out of it you have to insert pure guesses for things like the fraction of
    favorable planets on which life develops. & of course GIGO.

                                                    Shalom,
                                                    George

    George L. Murphy
    gmurphy@raex.com
    http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/



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