Marcus wrote: ↑Sat Mar 12, 2022 1:12 am
Philo Sofee wrote: ↑Sat Mar 12, 2022 12:04 am
I just saw this, and will begin the interaction as soon as I can. Thanks Ryan, GREAT to have ya here and sharing and discussing!
I should have been more welcoming myself, up here in Celestial! (Shulem sets a great example.
)
Welcome Ryan, and I look forward to our discussing the Bayesian concepts.
(autocorrect just turned bayesian into '
Batman,' so we're off to a great start!
)
Thank you so much. And I’ve never seen Batman and Bayes in the same room at the same time, so my hypothesis is that they are the same person. How else would Batman always know just what to do?
by the way I probably won’t reply as often as regulars here, but I will try to check in once a day when I’m involved in active discussions that are underway.
As far as Bayes goes, allow me to back up for a second. Before engaging on the board, I had been thinking that BYP was probably going to be the main person discussing things with me, and I was aware about how he feels Bayes helps him. So I was thinking in advance that his Bayes analysis could be a useful way of keeping the discussion friendly (allowing him to assign significance to data, while my main concern would be getting to the bottom of any disagreements and hopefully convincing him that the data doesn’t infer as strongly in the critic direction as his priors indicate.
I even was thinking of asking if he would want to start a
Book of Abraham Bayesian Logic Project where we could dissect every Book of Abraham-related data point and keep tabs on how each data point I bring up affects priors for him. I didn’t intend on it being a referendum on the Church ultimately being true, because that puts pressure on each side.
When I said in reference to Quincy’s account that I would explain from a Bayesian view why “it's not as reliable as we might have expected,” I essentially meant that I was prepared to argue, in dialogue, that the new data I’m bringing up displaces the priors regarding the reliability of the account.
I didn’t understand at first why you were thinking that I had claimed to have conducted a Bayesian analysis. But it does make sense as a reasonable assumption in light of me making claims about the way the data should impact the weight of the account (i.e. “not as reliable as we might have expected” is not a reference to a conclusion reached
through Bayes, but is saying that certain hallmarks of reliability which would have been counted on in the priors (based on the assumption that the vast majority of journal entries people write are accurate when giving explicit details), can’t be counted on in this case. And the correction for that is necessarily going to favor the view that the account is less reliable.
Another issue which I hoped BYP’s use of Bayesian reasoning (and it doesn’t matter to me how formally he implements it) could help avoid is the all-too-human propensity to assign guilt to someone if we already believe they are bad. In other words, in Bayes, at least in theory, old information has no power over new information. That doesn’t mean the old information doesn’t count; it means the old information doesn’t get to count
twice.
I no doubt have some learning still to do when it comes to Bayes, especially since I don’t personally use it, but I hope this clears up a little bit about the context in which I brought up the matter