Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Saturday 7 July 2018

Bayes and the existence of God

In a 1767 essay, Price shows that even if a person observes that the tide has come in a million times, on statistical grounds they cannot reasonably say it will never stop coming in. Using Bayes’ theorem, based on those million observations, Price calculated that there is a 50% chance the true probability of the tide not coming in one day is somewhere between 1 in 600,000 and 1 in 3 million. Therefore, he argued, it is not possible to eliminate the chance of a miracle based on a large number of negative observations.

Also this : https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/blood-of-the-bayesian

Bayes is fine as far as it goes. It's not the end of rationality though.
https://qz.com/1315731/the-most-important-formula-in-data-science-was-first-used-to-prove-the-existence-of-god/

1 comment:

  1. Saving for later. You have my permission to go off-topic with impunity. :)

    ReplyDelete

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