this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
93 points (92.7% liked)
Excellent Reads
1575 readers
39 users here now
Are you tired of clickbait and the current state of journalism? This community is meant to remind you that excellent journalism still happens. While not sticking to a specific topic, the focus will be on high-quality articles and discussion around their topics.
Politics is allowed, but should not be the main focus of the community.
Submissions should be articles of medium length or longer. As in, it should take you 5 minutes or more to read it. Article series’ would also qualify.
Please either submit an archive link, or include it in your summary.
Rules:
- Common Sense. Civility, etc.
- Server rules.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Are you denying Bayesian statistics now? I’d argue that is even more “unscientific” than denying the earth is round.
Given its irrelevance to the basic concepts regarding the shape of the Earth, I fail to see the connection
Under the Bayesian way to do science, you start off with some beliefs (”priors”) about what your trying to understand. You then devise experiments that either confirm or deny those believes. You then update your priors based on the data you see from the experiment.
A normal person might start off with, say, 70% belief that the earth is flat. They then look at some data (take an airliner around the world, look at pictures of earth taken by satellites, do some of those curvature measurement experiments, …). Each time they update their priors, and soon enough it becomes a 99.99% belief that the earth is NOT flat.
A flat earther, for some reason, starts off with a 99.99999% belief that the earth is flat, along with a 99.99999% belief that the government is trying to hide the fact from them. You show them some experiments, they might update their priors to a 99.999%. To convince them the earth is not flat, you would need a LOT of data. You might tell them to look at previous experiments done on this, but due to the 99.99999% belief that the government is lying, they would only have a 0.00001% confidence in the data reported by scientists. So it takes a lot more to convince them that the earth is not flat.
Now why did they start off with such strange priors? They’re probably conspiracy nuts. You can criticize them for that. But don’t call them unscientific if they are still doing experiments and updating their priors.