Here is some handy linkage on coincidences. Thanks to a coincidence. I was reading the The #Skeptic’s Daily News and in it, by coincidence, were two separate papers on the subject of coincidence. Though only one was labeled such; the other, just happened by coincidence to be about the same thing.
I have written on coincidences before. How they mess with the heads of some epistemologists when they try to make sense of Gettier Problems (where coincidence can coincidentally cause you to believe a true statement for what is only technically a justifiable reason). And they have an epistemological and methodological role in Bayesian reasoning—for example, because effects “by coincidence” are less probable than “effects that are predictably caused,” and a lot of attempts to deny causation rely on pretending coincidences are more likely. So you have to be able to know when that’s not true.
Although, sometimes, coincidences are just as likely as causation, or near enough as to make no visible difference in our math, or even more likely the case. And thus we can’t rule them out. But sometimes we actually can. So you have to know when is which. Like when we look for evidence of meaningful literary emulation in ancient texts (Proving History, pp. 192-204). Or when some hucksters tried to claim we found the tomb of Jesus. Or when we look for evidence that the Jewish scholar Philo understood a character named Jesus in Zechariah 6 to be the same archangel Paul thinks his Jesus is, by noting that the alternative explanation requires so many coincidences to have occurred as to be extraordinarily improbable (On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 200-05), including the fact that Paul and Philo assign all the same unusual attributes to the same figure, and the fact that Philo said he made the connection because the archangel in question was already known to him as the Son of God and the High Priest, and the only person in the Zechariah passage he quotes who is identified as the Son of God and the High Priest, is Jesus. Or how coincidence actually better explains the conversion of the Apostle Paul than the Christian thesis that he “really saw Jesus.”
Coincidences are also an important hypothesis to test and understand when criticizing pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, paranormalism, “miracle claims,” and all sorts of things of interest to atheists and skeptics.
So the two papers that have come up lately will interest you, if you are interested in any of those things!
An Actual Study of Coincidences
The first I’ll mention, actually about coincidences, was noted by Dr. Len Fisher, who caught notice of a noting by Steve Strogatz, of a research article by Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller. What a lot of coincidences! Or not. As Fisher says:
[Coincidence is] a very important part of scientific thinking, because distinguishing coincidence from cause and effect is vital. But to distinguish the two is no mean task.
He then illustrates this point with an anecdote atheists will find most amusing:
Pascal and Fermat…laid the foundations for the modern theory of probability that scientists now use to distinguish random chance from real cause and effect. Here was certainty, far removed from statistics, but Pascal converted it into statistics through his famous ‘wager’, which is the argument that ‘it is in one’s own best interest to behave as if God exists, since the possibility of eternal punishment in hell outweighs any advantage in believing otherwise’. The argument sounds convincing, and has attracted much philosophical comment. None has been more trenchant, though, than that of Homer Simpson: ‘Suppose we’ve chosen the wrong god. Every time we go to church we’re just making him madder and madder’. Which just goes to show the dangers of statistics.
The Diaconis & Mosteller paper summarize research on the varieties of documented “coincidence” reporting and break down the results into four categories, or “kinds,” of coincidence, which I shall re-summarize from the original paper:
[1.] Hidden Cause. Much of scientific discovery depends on finding the cause of a perplexing coincidence. Changes in the world can create coincidences; likewise, changes in our own behavior such as a new pattern of reading or eating can create a pattern. Frequency of forecasting the same dire event improves the chances of simultaneity of forecast and outcome. Forgetting many failed predictions makes success seem more surprising. At the same time, vast numbers of coincidences arise from hidden causes that are never discovered. At the moment, we have no measure of the size of this body of occurrences. Similarly, we have no general way to allow for misrepresentation, mistaken or deliberate, that may lead to many reports of coincidences that never occurred.
So, as they remark, one hidden cause of coincidences is simply just fabricating a claim of a coincidence. Obviously. I’ve even mentioned the problem of scientific fraud before, and why “statistical significance” testing does not even account for its frequency. And accounting for the frequency of such things is what Diaconis & Mosteller are concerned about: how often do observed coincidences turn out to have other never-discovered causes instead, like fraud…though that isn’t even the only one to account for. For example, fabricated coincidences even sometimes happen by accident (e.g. the telephone game), like when Christian apologist Francis Beckwith mistakenly claimed there was a “case in which fifteen people all had different and unique reasons for being late to a church choir rehearsal, and because of this none were killed in an explosion that went off shortly after they were supposed to have arrived.” That actually turns out to be largely untrue—and as it happens, other causes were operating as well (that day was unusually cold, a common cause of low turnout at that church). So when you add them all up (all the different kinds of known hidden causes of observed coincidences, besides random chance), what percentage of observed correlations are the products of causes we simply won’t ever discover, or haven’t yet? It can’t be zero.
So it’s significant that there are many other hidden causes these authors are suggesting often turn out, besides fabrication and bad reporting. Constantly predicting an event (and failing to be right) will inevitably result in a correct prediction by chance alone (since, if it’s not too unusual, the predicted event must occur eventually). I’ve noted this problem before with vague Biblical prophecies of lost battles or falling nations, or even a “bird landing on our head.” But most commonly of all, coincidences often do have nonrandom causes: just not the causes we think. If people later behind the scenes arrange for an event to occur as prophesied, it wasn’t God fulfilling the prophecy, nor was the prophet really prescient. Likewise, a coincidence found in a body of data might have some other scientific cause than we first guess it to be (Is a universal human behavior caused by convergent cultural evolution or neurobiological evolution? Is a pattern in the star field caused by an anomaly in the Big Bang event or an instrumentation error?). Thus exploring alternative causes is just as important as ruling out randomness.
[2.] Psychology. What we perceive as coincidences and what we neglect as not notable depends on what we are sensitive to. Some research suggests that previous experience gives us hooks for identifying coincidences. Multiple events emphasize themselves, and without them we have no coincidence to recognize. The classical studies of remembering remind us that frequency, recency, intensity, familiarity, and relevance of experience strengthen recall and recognition. Thus classical psychology has much to teach us about coincidences because they depend so much on recall and recognition.
Indeed, a lot of cognitive biases are manifestations of this, the various ways we err in estimating frequencies by using the wrong psychological cues. “A lot of violent crime in the news” becomes “violent crime is on the rise,” when in fact it’s on an overall decline and has been for decades. Or our attention and notice is triggered by a coincidence (because, perhaps, we evolved to overdetect them, since overdetecting coincidences costs less than underdetecting them, as in the case of the Agency Overdetection I discussed earlier this month), but not triggered by all the times that same coincidence didn’t occur, and in result we over-estimate the frequency of the coincidence because we under-count the times it failed to transpire. For example, all the times a thought about mom coincided with her phoning you—you notice that, but your brain doesn’t record (as being wholly uninteresting) all the times you thought about mom and she didn’t call you, or all the times your mom called you when you weren’t thinking about her.
Interestingly, it has been proposed that we might have some evolved controls for this, such as our occasional preference for non-coincidental arrangements in our visual field, prompting us to move our head when encountering a coincidental alignment, so as to check if it’s real, or an accident of where we are standing (Ramachandran’s “Counter-Symmetry Effect,” Sense and Goodness without God, VI.2.6, p. 358). If only such control behavior had been universally wired into us when encountering every kind of coincidence there is. Then we’d make far fewer errors and more reliably build a better database of correct knowledge. Oh right, our brain wasn’t intelligently designed. Bummer that. Which is why we need to invent and install so many software patches to fix it.
[3.] Multiple Endpoints and the Cost of ‘Close’. In a world where close to identity counts, as it is often allowed to do in anecdotes, and ‘close’ is allowed to get fairly far away, as when Caesar spoke of a military victory as avenging the death in battle, 50 years earlier, of the grandfather of his father-in-law, as if it were a personal revenge…then the frequency of coincidences rises apace. Some formulas presented here emphasize the substantial effect that multiple endpoints can have.
This is what psychics and prophecy peddlers play on when they use tactics like retrofitting to convince people something impressive has happened when in fact it hasn’t. The more you widen the set of “what counts as a coincidence,” the more coincidences you will find—by random chance alone.
[4.] The Law of Truly Large Numbers. Events rare per person occur with high frequency in the presence of large numbers of people; therefore, even larger numbers of interactions occur between groups of people and between people and objects. We believe that this principle has not yet been adequately exploited, so we look forward to its further contribution.
This is the Law of Large Numbers that Christian apologist David Marshall once tried to claim didn’t exist. In order to ignore the fact that: the universe is so big and old, the extreme improbability of random biogenesis on a per-reaction basis actually becomes virtually 100% on cosmic sum. It is more formally referred to as the Infinite Monkey Theorem, as the Law of Large Numbers is also used to refer to what causes the Infinite Monkey Theorem to be true. So these authors coin a new way of referring to it, as The Law of Truly Large Numbers (I used The Law of Big Numbers for the same effect). The point is the same: the more occasions for a coincidence to occur, the more such coincidences will occur. And without a mathematical check, we cannot know from our isolated POV whether we are one of those coincidences or not. As the authors explain:
Succinctly put, the law of truly large numbers states: With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. The point is that truly rare events, say events that occur only once in a million…are bound to be plentiful in a population of 250 million people. If a coincidence occurs to one person in a million each day, then we expect 250 occurrences a day and close to 100,000 such occurrences a year. Going from a year to a lifetime and from the population of the United States to that of the world (5 billion at this writing), we can be absolutely sure that we will see incredibly remarkable events. When such events occur, they are often noted and recorded. If they happen to us or someone we know, it is hard to escape that spooky feeling.
This is the biggest math error most people make: they think amazing coincidences can’t be accidental. Well, guess what. Tons are. Because the world is so big, and so many things are happening in it. More than we actually have any real capacity to imagine (only to calculate—with one of those “software patches,” which we call mathematics). An even bigger problem this leads us to, is that science has grown in publication rate faster than it has adjusted its standards of evidence, and is now being overwhelmed by the multiple comparisons fallacy, often to the tune of a third or more of all peer reviewed science papers now being false. When you publish a thousand papers a year, you can no longer use a 1 in 20 failure rate as your standard, as that guarantees 50 false results a year, even if all your math is in order, but it’s been shown that in fact, the way the math is being done, the actual rate is so high at that standard that we are getting 300 false results a year. The problem of the Law of Large Numbers is a serious problem indeed. Coincidences are far too common now, for science to continue with such low standards of evidence anymore.
-:-
Their conclusion overall is even more interesting: they note that “coincidence” doesn’t exist outside the human mind. The very idea of a “coincidence” (as a proxy for “randomness”) is a hypothesis our mind builds, and then attempts to accept or reject, sometimes on unsound principles. Outside our mind, things just happen. They always have causes. Everything is caused. They just differ in what those causes are. Winning a lottery “the first and only ever time we played it” is not a “coincidence,” it’s just one more sequence of deterministic causal events. We assign the label of coincidence to it. We often then over-model its significance in our heads, because we attach too much meaning to certain events, and aren’t aware of the actual frequency of their expected conjunction.
The authors advise:
To get a better grip on coincidences that matter to people, it might be useful to employ a critical incidence study. The results might help us distinguish between those coincidences that genuinely move people and those that they regard as good fun though not affecting their lives.
For example, the UN picture at the top of this post: everyone is amused by the coincidence of where the soldier’s helmet just accidentally happened to be when the picture was taken; but no one thinks that’s anything other than a random thing, it isn’t God or the Universe sending us a message. It’s just funny. Because it’s ironic. And yet other coincidences people do regard as God or the Universe sending them a message, or even intervening in the course of events to favor or punish, or as evincing an amazing discovery or a grand conspiracy (the atheist versions of miraculism).
The authors continue (emphasis mine):
Such distinctions, if they are valid, would help focus further coincidence studies on matters people think are important. In a culture like ours based heavily on determinism and causation, we tend to look for causes, and we ask ‘What is the synchronous force creating all of these coincidences?’ We could equally well be looking for the stimuli that are driving so many people to look for the synchronous force. The coincidences are what drive us. And the world’s activity and our labeling of events generates the coincidences.
So learning what actually makes people choose between randomly placed UN helmets and the influence of gods or conspiracies would be of considerable use to us.
Placebos as Coincidences
Which brings us to the second paper (coincidentally paired with the first), which relates to exactly that point about coincidences: it shows that most of what people call “the placebo effect” is actually no such thing, but just an inevitable expectation of coincidence. At DC’s Improbable Science (tagline, “Truth, falsehood and evidence: investigations of dubious and dishonest science”) is a recent entry, “Placebo effects are weak: regression to the mean is the main reason ineffective treatments appear to work.” They begin with a quote from a researcher in 1983:
Statistical regression to the mean predicts that patients selected for abnormalcy will, on the average, tend to improve. We argue that most improvements attributed to the placebo effect are actually instances of statistical regression. Thus, we urge caution in interpreting patient improvements as causal effects of our actions and should avoid the conceit of assuming that our personal presence has strong healing powers.
Amen. The problem is this:
Consider the common experiment in which a new treatment is compared with a placebo, in a double-blind randomised controlled trial (RCT). It’s common to call the responses measured in the placebo group the placebo response. But that is very misleading, and here’s why. The responses seen in the group of patients that are treated with placebo arise from two quite different processes. One is the genuine psychosomatic placebo effect. This effect gives genuine (though small) benefit to the patient. The other contribution comes from the get-better-anyway effect. This is a statistical artefact and it provides no benefit whatsoever to patients. There is now increasing evidence that the latter effect is much bigger than the former.
And yes, studies have been done to tease these apart: “The only way to measure the size of genuine placebo effects is to compare…the effect of a dummy treatment with the effect of no treatment at all. Most trials don’t have a no-treatment arm, but enough do that estimates can be made.” The results of one such survey? “We did not find that placebo interventions have important clinical effects in general.” Only “in certain settings placebo interventions can influence patient-reported outcomes, especially pain and nausea,” though even then biased reporting is hard to rule out. But importantly, “In some cases, the placebo effect is barely there at all.”
DCIS concludes:
So the placebo effect, though a real phenomenon, seems to be quite small. In most cases it is so small that it would be barely perceptible to most patients. Most of the reason why so many people think that medicines work when they don’t isn’t a result of the placebo response, but it’s the result of a statistical artefact. … The get-better-anyway effect has a technical name, regression to the mean. … [And] when you think about it, it’s simply common sense. You tend to go for treatment when your condition is bad, and when you are at your worst, then a bit later you’re likely to be better.
In other words, hidden cause: your own natural immune system is already always on the job. Unlike your desk computer, which when it malfunctions can’t fix itself, your body has a number of systems always busily trying to do just that. You repair damaged tissues. Your body’s native responses (swelling; phlegm overproduction) dissipate inevitably as they are programmed to do. Your immune response overwhelms an invader. The invader just dies of its own accord (because it’s mortal, and can’t always successfully reproduce). There are so many things already happening naturally in your body, that with no treatment at all, you usually get better from things.
And the contrast in your perception is magnified when you “seek external treatment” at the highest point of discomfit (when the pain rises to its worst peak, etc.), precisely when a reversion to lower points is most expected to soon happen (obviously your pain will start to lighten after it reaches its worst point—that is almost a tautology; the only thing preventing it being so is when your natural responses can’t stop the stimulus, e.g. permanent damage, causing that set-point of pain). And yet that is precisely when most people seek external treatment.
Thus, what we have here is a hidden cause of a coincidence (natural biology, and pre-understood patterns of human behavior), magnified by a psychological cause (“noticing” the coincidence of an external treatment and an accidentally correlating improvement, but not remembering all the times such improvement happened without an external treatment), that becomes a multiple endpoints fallacy (any improvement is considered a cure, even though the condition often persists without real external treatment), compounded by the Law of Large Numbers (some people will just randomly get better faster or more often or from more stubborn ailments, simply because there are so many people on earth; yet if each assumes they are special, and ignores all the people like them who didn’t recover, it’s easy to conclude your recovery was caused by the external treatment, when it wasn’t).
Welcome to the power of coincidence.
Can I just check, does this post “end all rational debate” on this subject? Perhaps you could specify in each of your posts whether it does or not, then I’ll know that once I’ve read it I don’t need to read anything further on the subject.
I don’t even understand the question. What “debate” are you referring to?
And having a complete guide to x, does not end debate about x. For any x. Ever. So I don’t understand why you have such a misplaced standard of utility in guidework. That’s not what guides are for. They can help you in debates. But ending debates requires a lot of other factors.
I would be curious to know if the argument of the extreme improbability of a coincidence can be applied successfully on the analogy between Josephus Antiquities 18:55-62 and Luke 23:1-25, too.
1) Pilate that in Josephus introduces insignia by night to show them to Jews at day as a good conspirator becomes in Luke the Sanhedrin who conspires against Jesus by night presenting him to Pilate at day.
2) Pilate that appeals to the emperor in Josephus becomes in Luke Pilate that appeals to Herod, in both cases without success.
3) Pilate that in Josephus exhibits the threat of physical violence (as extrema ratio), becomes in Luke the same Pilate the wants to persuade Jews showing them the real risk that, if Jesus should be crucified, then the violent Barabbas will be free in his place.
It cannot be a coincidence that only in the Gospel and in Josephus it is found a Roman governor (named just Pilate!) who succumbs at the insistence of the Jews, despite having appealed before to a superior and then to the threat of physical violence, regarding the introduction of images of ”so-called” god-men.
Under a mythicist paradigm, Pontius Pilate was introduced because he was a perfect example of a Roman governor who first had succumbed to the insistence of the Jews of Jerusalem with regard to the introduction of so-called symbols of foreign ”gods”.
But as the episode of the busts of emperors told by Josephus is a credit to the insistence of the Jews in their tenacious protest to Pilate (as proof of their loyalty to their traditions and laws), the point of the evangelist is exactly antithetical to that of Josephus : being forced by their laws and traditions (definitively not divine) the Jews insist before Pilate not for a good cause (as it could be rejecting the idolatrous images of the emperors) but for an unjust cause (condemn to death the Son of God).
The result is a condemnation of the same traditions and laws which led the Jews of Jerusalem to stand protesting against Jesus before Pilate.
Curious to know your view about.
First, we already know Luke used Josephus as a source. So we already have a strong prior probability for that thesis in any particular case within Luke. However…
Second, some of the evidence you present comes from Mark, not Luke (e.g. items 1 and 3, fully 2/3rds of your evidence). That all but rules out causation from a book written decades later.
Third, we know some Christian stories had it that Jesus was crucified by Herod (e.g. as we see in the Gospel of Peter, although that is likely also a later harmonization, of a different type). This introduces the competing hypothesis that the Herod-Pilate story harmonization in Luke is Luke trying to harmonize two different Gospels (one of which doesn’t survive for us to know of it; GPet is in the same relationship to that ancestor-text as GLk is, they each resolving the contradiction in a different way).
Fourth, there is no “appeal to the emperor” in Josephus that in any way parallels Pilate’s buck-passing to Herod in Luke.
So, no. We don’t have any coincidences here that are improbable enough to warrant any conclusion.
You really have no idea what I was referring to? I was quoting you in a comment on a recent post: “That is the function of my writing. It ends all rational debate.”
I can’t help wondering whether there’s any subject that you don’t think you offer the definitive opinion on.
But there is no “debate” about the subject of this post you can be referring to. Everything I write here is from peer reviewed and expert sources, or follows therefrom. And no rational debate exists about any of it.
Unless you mean the miraculists et al. In which case, yeah, they have no rational debate to offer on this subject.
And that is my aim. I hope to hit that target as often as I can. And when I miss, I correct or revise.
Honestly, I read this LONG article (because I figured I owed you one, and you had linked to this post elsewhere, for my edification), and I just think this is funny. Even funnier that somebody else said:
“I can’t help wondering whether there’s any subject that you don’t think you offer the definitive opinion on.”
You just come back so dogmatic, like you don’t even sense the hint that you come across as all-knowing, and always right. It’s off-putting, but then it makes me laugh. This whole big article is an assertion meant to explain away the “miraculous” and “supernatural” by instead having us believe there is such a thing as coincidence. Now, the article will admit that:
(1) “Succinctly put, the law of truly large numbers states: With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.”
Yet, in a universe this vast, it is off-handedly deemed impossible that the “most outrageous” things of all could happen: the existence of a Creator, a heaven, a hell, a spiritual plain that is invisible to our instruments & natural senses, that God became flesh, performed miracles, and resurrected from the grave, that this Creator/Saviour is sovereign in the affairs of his creation, that he works in ways that are foreign to our understanding. We are expected to swallow the concept of coincidence and currently imperceptible causation, in lieu of exercising faith in the divine system of things. And that-which we-currently-cannot-perceive-but-is-nevertheless-causation is not allowed to comprise the miraculous or divine…that is deemed “irrational”.
(2) “At the moment, we have no measure of the size of this body of occurrences. Similarly, we have no general way to allow for misrepresentation, mistaken or deliberate, that may lead to many reports of coincidences that never occurred.”
We are expected to believe in coincidence, even though, scientifically, there is no way to measure it, account for it, rule it out, validate it, count it, etc. This belief is deemed rational. Isn’t that an exercise of faith? And if such prodigious minds as these exercise faith in that which they can neither explain, perceive, nor measure, why then do we look so condescendingly upon others who place their faith in God?
I am not positing this as an explanation for the inexplicable, rather, I am sitting here reading all of this psychobabble & guesswork and it’s as clear as day (to me) that people who reject God are still at a loss to explain that which they have deemed to be impossible–the evidence of the unseen. They just prattle on ad nauseum, scratching away at the “exterior” of something which they refuse to study as it should be studied (and therefore cannot understand). They prefer to guess & call it fact, confuse knowledge with understanding.
It’s like a deaf person, standing outside an arena, trying to convince people (as they exit from a concert) what they didn’t hear and didn’t experience. It’s lunacy. These “expert sources” are too proud to admit their own inability to perceive, and it’s just laughable. Yet it makes me immensely sad…I can take no pleasure in the deafness of others, when music is so beautiful & powerful to experience.
3) “This is the biggest math error most people make: they think amazing coincidences can’t be accidental. Well, guess what. Tons are.”
Again, this is laughable. It’s as if you can speak something into existence, and I’m supposed to believe it to be so…but you won’t allow for the possibility of God doing the same thing. The biggest error YOU have made: you fail to give proper attribution for the actions of the Creator of the Universe. You make up something you call an “accident” to take his place. You speak something into existence in an effort to prove that things cannot have been spoken into existence. I’m just supposed to accept that contradiction and then applaud your massive collective intellects.
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, being understood by what has been made, so that they are without excuse.
For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their reasonings, and their senseless hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible mankind…”
-Romans 1:18-23
I normally don’t type out extended passages of the Bible in a comment section; a mere reference where interested folks can find it and look at it for themselves usually suffices, IMO. But this was one time where it was all summed up so perfectly and so on-topic, I couldn’t say it any better myself…so I typed it up for your consideration.
There’s your rational debate.
This passage just informed you that:
A) The fact that sin has consequences is an evidence of God’s wrath (and, therefore, of God’s existence).
B) It points to your own conscience as another witness to this truth–how does right & wrong even get invented, much less passed on to succeeding generations? (Yeah, I know you’ve written a book on that…) In a world that supposedly descended from the survival of the fittest, neither conscience nor morality makes any sense. It cannot evolve. It must be divinely “injected” into humanity.
C) Lastly, it calls creation itself to the witness stand to testify for the intelligence behind its own existence.
D) Then–most importantly–the passage explains why I can perceive God and you cannot. You have chosen to be handicapped & I have chosen to be His. You exalt your own wisdom and honor yourselves. I try in every way to acknowledge & point to the glory of the incorruptible God and be a student of His wisdom.
Each of us looks at the other as a sort of fool. We each put our faith in different “experts”. Yours guess about what happened in the past and attempt to extrapolate predictions for the future. Mine tells me what I missed and what I have to look forward to. Either you have the answers or God does.
You can’t disprove the existence of God, so…
“You need to brush up on how probability works.”
I cover this elsewhere. See:
The God Impossible
Naturalism Is Not an Axiom
The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism
Why the Fine Tuning Argument Proves God Does Not Exist
Things have to be possible before they can have any measurable probability. You are thus confusing epistemic with physical probabilities. That we can know something given the evidence is an epistemic probability (the probability we are right to believe something exists or happens at all). But that something happened is a physical probability (which follows only from physical facts).
Hence you have to show the facts exist the combination of which would produce the outcome, and that the probability of that outcome is within cosmic possibility (e.g. whole rabbits quantum mechanically appearing on your desk are not; but electrons quantum mechanically teleporting through a nanoscopic barrier is). If you could do that for God or anything other than the natural coincidences I document then you’d have a case. But you can’t. Because there is no sufficient evidence for God and the supernatural as there is for natural physical coincidences.
I said the opposite of that. I said we have to ascertain the epistemic probability of a thing before believing it. In other words, belief must be based on evidence.
Both statements are illogical. The possibility of God is not supported by the evidence. The possibility of random natural accidents is extensively proved by evidence. Note the difference. I’m not the one speaking things into existence. You are. All my claims are based on evidence. None of yours are. You might want to rethink that.
I’m glad you mentioned LLN, because I was thinking about the Chaotic Eternal Inflation models of cosmologist Andrei Linde. One of these models gives the radius of the Universe, in centimetres, as this number:
10^10^12
Which is 1 followed by a trillion zeroes. This number disturbed me quite a lot, as it was beyond my faculties to comprehend such a number. In a universe that size, virtually anything could happen, given enough time. To me this not only solves the riddle of our existence, but gives an affirmative answer to the question ‘Are there any other sentient beings elsewhere in the cosmos?’.
If Linde’s model is correct, of course.
Hi Dr. C. I have a couple of questions regang some numbers that concern me. I was hoping you could help me determine if my concerns are valid ir if I am just freaking out over coincidences due to confirmation bias and other errors in thinking that you discussed in this article.
Two bloggers on the Freethought Blogs network (PZ Myers and Jason Thibeault) have stated on their blogs that they have been accused of rape. A third blogger that was kicked off of FTB (Avicenna) also claimed he was accused of rape. According to the authoritative source Everyday Feminism (http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/03/examples-of-rape-culture/) only about 2% of rape claims are false. It seems highly improbable for there to be 3 bloggers on the same network who were all falsely accused of rape. Is it possible that this is just a coincidence, or is one of the three likely to be guilty of rape?
The second question I have concerns atheist conferences. In a blog post of yours earlier this year, you mentioned that you were sexually assaulted at an atheist conference. You also started that you had several friends who were also sexually assaulted at conferences, is the fact that you and so many of your friends have b been sexually b assaulted at conferences statistically significant, or is it just a coincidence? I want to know if it is safe to go to atheist conferences. Please help put my mind at ease.
Wrong math. The probability of finding two men falsely accused of rape in any random sample of men is not the frequency of false rape claims. So, maybe you could get the correct math problem on the board first?
But you also might want to look up the gambler’s fallacy. Anyone who thinks rolling a six after a six is less likely than rolling the first six, doesn’t know how probability works. And the conjunction still has to be put in ratio to the other conjunction (e.g. rolling a one after a one, for example; i.e. a conjunction of actual rapists is also less likely than a conjunction of falsely accused people, so again, you need the ratio of the two conjunction rates).
But also, you have to start from real data. Avicenna’s claim appears to have been fabricated by himself. So that leaves you with two cases, not three.
Then when we look at those two cases, another disappears: there has never been a false rape accusation againt PZ Myers. It was a threat of a possible future accusation of sexual harassment (not rape), and the woman who threatened was caught and confessed.
So now you are down to just one actual false rape accusation. Which occurred when the accused was a minor. And was disproved by physical evidence.
In other words, you have committed the exact same mistake as Christian apologist Francis Beckwith did with the Exploding Church.
And of course, MRAs are now keen on fabricating false rape claims against us, so as to prove they exist. So we can no longer rely on the general rate of false claims. Having an organized motive to fabricate claims against a specific group of people, will hugely increase the rate of false rape claims in that sub-group.
As for the risk of sexual assault at conferences (not just atheist ones; the risk exists at all conferences of all kinds), you definitely should factor that into your decision making (as to attendance or cautions upon attendance). Because it happens. It is probably declining because of better policies and policing and awareness. But I move in a circle of several thousand people who all communicate in the same network about attending conferences in the atheist circuit. If the risk is 1 in 100 over a lifetime of conference going, then I can be expected to know dozens of assault victims and their stories. Just as it must also be the case that dozens of sociopaths have attended those conferences…because that actually is the rate of sociopathy in the general populace.
Plan your life accordingly.
“I don’t even understand the question. What “debate” are you referring to?”
I presume Jimmy Joe is referring to the same debate you were referring to when you recently said about your blog posts that “That is the function of my writing. It ends all rational debate. Thus all continuing debate becomes demonstrably irrational”.
Ah, that’s what he means. Thanks for catching that.
Yes, indeed, that is true, with respect to my aims. I hope to hit that target as often as I can.
Excellent introduction!
But perhaps this is feeble praise, since it means I found it admirably understandable? (Except for how you can use statistics, even Bayesian style statistics, to resolve Gettier problems in science when they involve very large scale phenomena. Many things, like the existence of an objective reality, don’t even seem to permit meaningful calculations of probability.)
And it’s admirably concise too. Jordan Ellenberg’s How Not To Be Wrong takes many more words.
I’m afraid there are things which cannot be explained by mere coincidences.
For instance, there are successful tests that real scientists developed and found that some phenomena can’t be explained by physical processes. I’ll give you an example.
Here is an important one: “In 2008, psychiatrist Ganesan Venkatasubramanian and his colleagues conducted a brain-imaging study in which they prepared images for a mentalist (someone who is purportedly telepathic) and a control subject. The mentalist was able to produce an image very similar to the one prepared for him, whereas the control subject was not. These investigators have demonstrated that when the mentalist was successful, the right parahippocampal gyrus (PHG) was activated, whereas it was not activated in the other person. Instead, the left inferior frontal gyrus was activated. This finding was similar to a prior study too.”
Source: The Biology of Telepathy – PsychologyToday
You can see the original article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3144613/
In your book (Sense and Goodness Without God – Not Much Place for the Paranormal) you wrote the following: “It should be apparent by now that Metaphysical Naturalism holds little place for the paranormal, things unnatural or supernatural: gods, ghosts, psychic powers, faith healing, you name it. Anything involving sentient beings and powers beyond nature (as in not grounded or formed naturally, or existing prior to or independently of nature), and anything purely mental (like true mind-over-matter or purely mental attributes, like a disembodied desire), anything like that excludes naturalism.”
How do you solve that?
Dude. International Journal of Yoga? That’s a bogus journal. Its impact factor is barely above 1. And the study’s control size was far too small to produce statistically significant results. These kinds of bogus studies have been numerous and always fail replication tests. We’ve been through this so many times before. There is a reason these guys never won the million dollar James Randi prize: their methods never pass real peer review, and can never produce real results.
Their own conclusion reveals the scam:
As the famous Joe Nickel would point out, the fact that the supposed telepath couldn’t reproduce the results on a different day, and made up an excuse to avoid being tested, gives away the game: they knew they’d get caught if they tried to replicate their scam. The fact that there was only one control subject and only one test subject likewise renders the entire sturdy scientifically useless. Both failures any real peer reviewers would have nixed this study for.
And lo and behold, when [a] telepath [like] in this study [gets] tested under real conditions, he [is] proved a fraud.
There is a clear difference between the two studies; one of them was performed by a mentalist and the other was performed by two homeless and drunk guys who were probably “just trying to get lucky and hoped that he and his buddy could guess enough cards to get them enough easy money to get off the streets…”
Furthermore, in this simple test, the drunk guys did not get a single card correct. 0 out of 52. But in the study I presented to you, the results were different; the “mentalist” was able to produce images very similar to those prepared for him.
Even the author of the article you presented to me stated that “while statistically possible (although very unlikely) to pass a preliminary test by luck alone the second more rigorous test would expose any guesswork and show the subject as a failure.”
That’s right. It is very unlikely. And I should note that the mentalist managed to achieve something even more unlikely, since his task was not to predict some limited cards, but rather any image that was prepared for him. So, the unlikelihood is more evident here.
Finally, I question the conclusion that we should simply ignore these perplexing results just because the test has not been repeated. You have the burden to explain how the ‘mentalist’ fooled the researchers in this experiment.
That’s my point. When these guys refuse to be tested again, that’s how we know they ran a con. You can’t get scientific results with only one test with only one subject and only one control. That would never pass peer review at any real journal anywhere. And when they are tested by real tests, they fail. This happens all the time. It’s why we laugh these studies off.