William M. Briggs on Embracing Uncertainty and Stats as a False God – Thorinquiry

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I was interviewed by Duncan Thorin Shields (he goes by Thorin) last week. He asked the best questions I think I’ve ever been asked.

He starts off wondering if people have an innate intuitive sense of truth. The answer is yes, to various extent. Just as some are tall, and some not as blessed, not everybody can grasp every truth, or “see” every axiom. This fits in with the Class discussion, for those who have been following it.

Of course, our reigning ideology is that all are equal except for circumstance, so that everybody can know everything, which leads to the kind of madness we often discuss.

Thorin then gives an excellent example of the effects of evidence on belief. In this case on whether some guy cheated at some game (Thorin is a sports reporter). In stats terms, this is the probability a theory/model/law/event is true given evidence.

This lead me to recollect psychic research (once huge) and people lke Uri Geller. Can we say with definitiveness that they are cheating, even if we do not catch them cheating, because we can duplicate their supposedly psychic abilities using mundane means? For instance, Geller claims he can telekinetically bend spoons. I can also bend spoons making it appear I am using psychic powers. Is this proof Geller cheated?

I call this the Alternate Explanation Fallacy. That because you can come up with an alternate explanation to one claimed to cause some event, that claimed cause must be false. This fallacy is often used to dismiss miracles.

Obviously, you can always come up with alternate explanations for any contingent event. So the mere presence of an alternate explanation is useless. In other words, you have to catch Geller cheating.

Next: Thorin had good ideas on the difference between told what to think versus told how to think. I’m with him. Being told how to think works only with a vanishing minority of people, who still have to have a basis from which to work, which means even they have to be told what to think, at least to some extent. For nearly everybody else, the only way to is tell them what to think.

Which is, of course, what our Experts do. Tell people what to think. Only they tell them the wrong things to think. So people never learn how to think.

From there we moved to tracking “statistics”, and to the idea “the data told me”. Which is always wrong, or wrongheaded. The only reason data is collected is because you told the collection what the answer was in advance, if you follow me. After all, you have to decide, in advance, what to collect, and, more importantly, what not to collect. Which is most things. That is, you’re always leaving infinity on the table. We’ll get to this in the Class, too.

The religious impulse we all have was the next topic. And on belief and the leap of faith required for certain proposition. I point out that all rational thought is founded or grounded on faith. There’s no escaping faith. You at least have to have faith that your ability to reason is leading to truth. It must be faith because you can’t prove it. We started this in Class, too.

Thorin reminds us that you have to hear something a million and one times, the first million being insufficient, until you grasp it. Hence the repetition on the blog. Which, believe me, I’d rather not do. Do you know how happy I was when Trump was first elected, not because of anything else but that, I thought, I’d never have to write about global warming, a.k.a. “climate change”, again? I do not love writing yet-another article exposing scientists’ wee p-values. But since you still hear “P-values have some uses”, I must.

Then comes AI. Which is yet another moral panic. I explain my theory of the electric abacus. Computers are identical to abacuses, except one does its work at my command and direction in wooden beads and one in electric impulses. The brain-as-computer metaphor has wrecked many minds.

That’s only the start! Don’t miss discussion of Christopher Hitchens’s masterful use of the Bluff & Bluster Fallacy. A most interesting discussion.

You’ll enjoy this. Thorin speaks longer than I do, which you will welcome. My voice sounds muffled. Obviously something I did wrong. Don’t know what.

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