fdrake

No it's not, it's a sign of the ancient wisdom in the Old Testament. They knew what they were dealing with. Just false. If true, true incidentally. As...

No. Marriage must be allowed to be between a man and many women, if it is to be taken at all. You need only read the Old Testament to see this in its ...

Btw, if anyone asks me for sources on this stuff I'll change the topic slightly through uncharitable fisking, then do that repeatedly until everyone t...

Nah. You've just not read me charitably enough. You're arguing about criminalising adultery, your argument is based ultimately on a contemporary Chris...

It isn't BS Agustino. It's my religion. If you payed more attention the posts are actually very carefully constructed. You're not making any real argu...

It was more than that. The animals ignored him, he became unsuited to the wilds right after his shag. That's why he agreed to go into Uruk in the firs...

I have a bubble blowing machine with lots of nobs and dials on it. It's a pretty crap bubble blowing machine because it's hard to find the settings th...

All this is meaningless drivel. Unprimordial, filtered puritanically. If you want to really understand civilisation you have to go further back to its...

Marriage can be between many woman and one man, as spoken by God. If a man needs sex but is unmarried, he should obtain a holy concubine. Animals have...

I think I'm going to convert to an ancient Sumerian religion or ancient Islam to worship God by having sex with prostitutes and concubines. Then I'll ...

When looking at a scenario with randomness in it, it's quite interesting to look at what sources of randomness there are and how they interact. (1) In...

The thought that everything ends is a haunting one. It comes most persistently in times of personal transition. When things change, when there's confl...

Conscript reporting.

This is really good. It's not very documentary-ish but it's definitely... very informative... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayuqizp4fyY

This is a Whitehead question. @"Janus" might be able to help.

Yeah. In my analysis this shows up when you ask what the raw probability of receiving X is, not the conditional probability of receiving X given that ...

'Uninformative' priors usually aren't uninformative, and sometimes they aren't even probability functions. For example, the equiprobability 'prior' yo...

Random sampling's good. p's also random since it's uncertain. This is the point.

If you assume equiprobability as a prior then you're only not influencing the results if your prior is a pointmass on 0.5 and the actual value is 0.5....

That's a principle of indifference then. Equally possible things are equally probable. A rule for assigning subjective probabilities.

Why is equiprobability simple but other priors aren't? There's no simple reason to assume equiprobability. Doing so requires appealing to more sophist...

This is exactly why andrewk and Pierre's comments are on point. They found ambiguities in the problem (the equiprobability assumption, which as stated...

You could pick up a bad habit like charitable reading or obtain some appreciation towards the other half of statistics, or worse even, philosophy in g...

ITT Jeremiah forgets that frequentist expectation calculations are asymptotic.

There's an infinity of well justified approaches if you relax both the equal probability assumptions I used. But yes, probability's just a modelling t...

As an aside, I think we're saying the same thing from different angles. The fundamental error Michael's making is losing track of what the sample spac...

Would you agree that my analysis would work if you didn't look in the envelope? Or that looking in the envelope was irrelevant?

If you're in case A, you don't know whether you're in case A. This means you don't know if you gain or lose by switching. Same with case B. In case A ...

Right. So there are two cases. A: One envelope is filled with X and the other 2X. B: One envelope is filled with X and the other X/2. Knowing that you...

Right. Let's try another thing. What's the probability that the two envelopes are filled with {5,10} and the probability that the two envelopes are fi...

In your set up. There are three possible values for envelopes, {5,10,20}. Imagine that all envelopes are still closed. And you are given an envelope. ...

Then what's the probability of receiving an envelope containing 10? Not the probability of having 10 given that you just looked,

If 5 and 20 are permissible values for the envelopes, does it stand to reason that I could receive an envelope which is 4 times another envelope?

Would you agree that {5,10,20} are the possible values for things in the envelopes?

Ok. This is from how expectations work. Imagine that we have two envelopes, one filled with X and one with 2X. If I have an envelope containing X, and...

You always observe X in your envelope. What was the probability of obtaining U=X? Not the conditional probability of getting X given that you opened t...

X is a fixed dollar amount. Set it equal to 1 if you want, the reasoning proceeds the same way.

Ok. I'll say it without the abuse of notation. There are 2 envelopes. You open an envelope and see the value U. So your random variable is U. The enve...

Where did I switch between stuff?

There are 2 envelopes. You open an envelope and see X. The envelopes could have been filled with either X and 2X, or X and X/2. These are jointly exha...

It seems to me that most of the disagreements aren't actually about how to calculate probabilities given a scenario, but rather on which scenario we'r...

Almost as if that kind of reporting is serving an agenda!

I've been through a very similar discussion on here before, with @"SophistiCat". If you're interested give it a read.

Exactly. I wear mostly black so that it doesn't show any of that disgusting Bangladeshi or Vietnamese blood from their dirty little hands on it. Then ...

Wars for land control have economic features of motivation and strategy, yes. Big difference between that and a city being sacked for its accumulated ...

I've not read Augustine's City of God. Perhaps it's insightful in other ways, but demonstrably that's not why most military conflict takes case now. T...

Eh, this pacifism as an ideal gives a comparative advantage to immoral violence as a strategy. When a coordinated military shows up, you cede all grou...

Does pacifism allow violent resistance to violence in your book?

It feels strange to have my red hat on again.

I remember reading that article some time ago. Gave it a re-skim. I have two comments on it. The transformation problem applies in much the same way t...