Strega

@Enco –  You might want to do your own spell-checking instead of farming it out. It would be a better loving example to people you want to teach Critical Thinking.

I did. Liar and lair are both considered correct by any spell checker. It was a typo on my behalf and it was in the Sunday School post.But thanks for the rather snide comment.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Your initial belief (before evidence) + new evidence = updated belief.

That sounds very reasonable.

Unseen wrote:
It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support.” — Wittgenstein, On Certainty, sec. 141-42

That’s good too.  If ther…[Read more]

“When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole.) / It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support.” — Wittgenstein, On Certainty, sec. 141-42

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Bayes in action!!

Introduction to formal and informal fallacies.

Here is a more detailed explanation of Bayes Theory. Don’t be put off by the Math as the concept is more important if you are new to it.

I guess I should allow for the word “belief” and not just “understanding” as I think we all know the I don’t mean religious belief, i.e. belief that is not open to revision.

Another example:

Think of Bayes’ T…[Read more]

@ Unseen – The point you make about Columbus can be used as a basic example of Bayes Theory.  If he had being given new objective information about the location then he could have updated his understanding of what he had discovered. It would have changed his reality.  That is the essence of how Bayes works. It is not “shattering a belief”. It is d…[Read more]

I don’t know where to fit this in, but…

Christopher Columbus did not actually discover America because he maintained until his death that he had reached some portion of Asia. Doubts were emerging but it was Amerigo Vespucci who fully realized that the Americas were truly something else, calling them a “new world.”

The point: You can only claim…[Read more]

I thought that Bayesian reasoning was about extrapolating “what is” to “what might be”, thereby limiting new ideas.

Thanks Simon, Bayesian thinking is all about checking out new ideas. We don’t want kids to hold beliefs, we want them to have “understandings”. Then when a new idea (information) comes along, they will have the skills to reason through it and adapt their understanding accordingly.

Bayesian reasoning, logic, and fallacy recognition would do more…[Read more]

I think that’s brilliant Reg.  I’m not sure about Bayesian thinking though – it seems to repackage “what’s possible” as “based on what’s already the case” – not allowing in new ideas.

The United States sent $50 million in condoms to Hamas. Diversity programs caused a plane crash. China controls the Panama Canal. Ukraine started the war with Russia.

Except, no. None of that is true. Not that it stops President Trump. In the first month since he returned to power, he has demonstrated once again a brazen willingness to advance…[Read more]