>
> I have received a deluge of email responses to Laskey's wager. I find it
> fascinating that with only a few exceptions, the skeptics copy the entire
> list and the "believers" send me private messages expressing support. The
> private messages generally say things like:
>
Now here is an interesting statistical fact! Kathryn, would you be so kind
as to publish the Bayes net of the variables Believe-in-God and
Prefer-Anonymous?
Not sure which way the arrow should go :-) though...
Indeed there may be a latent variable affecting both, but...
but ... well publish the joint distribution any way....
Doesn't our belief in 'science' (whatever that is) rest on a kind of
faith? Most of what science does is measure things and try to tease
a few axioms out of a (usually narrow) domain consistent with those
measurements and with some predictive power? The whole enterprise of
measurement is fraught with philosophical difficulties. To count objects,
we need to decide that two objects are of the same class, a human
artififact. And to quote Henry Kyburg, we were taught in high school
that if we get the same result twice when measuring some quantity, we
aren't trying hard enough? And doesn't the mathematics we use to formalize
these domains rest on theories not proven to be consistent? (e.g.
set theory).
Eric
b
