My problem with the IDists’ 500 coins question (if you saw 500 coins lying heads up, would you reject the hypothesis that they were fair coins, and had been fairly tossed?) is not that there is anything wrong with concluding that they were not. Indeed, faced with just 50 coins lying heads up, I’d reject that hypothesis with a great deal of confidence.
It’s the inference from that answer of mine is that if, as a “Darwinist” I am prepared to accept that a pattern can be indicative of something other than “chance” (exemplified by a fairly tossed fair coin) then I must logically also sign on to the idea that an Intelligent Agent (as the alternative to “Chance”) must inferrable from such a pattern.
This, I suggest, is profoundly fallacious.
First of all, it assumes that “Chance” is the “null hypothesis” here. It isn’t. Sure, the null hypothesis (fair coins, fairly tossed) is rejected, and, sure, the hypothesized process (fair coins, fairly tossed) is a stochastic process – in other words, the result of any one toss is unknowable before hand (by definition, otherwise it wouldn’t be “fair”), and both the outcome sequence of 500 tosses and the proportion of heads in the outcome sequence is also unknown. What we do know, however, because of the properties of the fair-coin-fairly-tossed process, is the probability distribution, not only of the proportions of heads that the outcome sequence will have, but also of the distribution of runs-of-heads (or tails, but to keep things simple, I’ll stick with heads).
And in fact, I simulated a series of 100,000 such runs (I didn’t go up to the canonical 2^500 runs, for obvious reasons), using MatLab, and here is the outcome:
As you can see from the top plot, the distribution is a beautiful bell curve, and in none of the 100,000 runs do I get anything near even as low as 40% Heads or higher than 60% Heads.
Moreover, I also plotted the average length of runs-of-heads – the average is just over 2.5, and the maximum is less than 10, and the frequency distribution is a lovely descending curve (lower plot).
If therefore, I were to be shown a sequence of 500 Heads and Tails, in which the proportion of Heads was:
- less than, say 40%, OR
- greater than, say 60%, OR
- the average length runs-of-heads was a lot more than 2.5, OR
- the distribution of the proportions was not a nice bell curve, OR
- the distribution of the lengths of runs-of-heads was not a nice descending Poisson like the one in lower plot,
I would also reject the null hypothesis that the process that generated the sequence was “fair coins, fairly tossed”. For example:
This was another simulation. As you can see, the bell curve is pretty well identical to the first, and the proportions of heads are just as we’d expect from fair coins, fairly tossed – but can we conclude it was the result of “fair coins, fairly tossed”? Well, no. Because look at the lower plot – the mean length of runs of heads is 2.5, as before, but the distribution is very odd. There are no runs of heads longer than 5, and all lengths are of pretty well equal frequency. Here is one of these runs, where 1 stands for Heads and 0 stands for tails:
1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0
Would you detect, on looking at it, that it was not the result of “fair coins fairly tossed”? I’d say at first glance, it all looks pretty reasonable. Nor does it conform to any fancy number, like pi in binary. I defy anyone to find a pattern in that run. The reason I so defy you is that it was actually generated by a random process. I had no idea what the sequence was going to be before it was generated, and I’d generated another 99,999 of them before the loop finished. It is the result of a stochastic process, just as the first set were, but this time, the process was different. For this series, instead of randomly choosing the next outcome from an equiprobable “Heads” or “Tails” I randomly selected the length the next run of each toss-type from the values 1 to 5, with an equal probability of each length. So I might get 3 Heads, 2 Tails, 5 Heads, 1 Tail, etc. This means that I got far more runs of 5 Heads than I did the first time, but far fewer (infinitely fewer in fact!) runs of 6 Heads! So ironically, the lack of very long runs of Heads is the very clue that tells you that this series is not the result of the process “fair coins, fairly coins”.
But it IS a “chance” process, in the sense that no intelligent agent is doing the selecting, although in intelligent agent is designing the process itself – but then that is also true of the coin toss.
Now, how about this one?
Prizes for spotting the stochastic process that generated the series!
The serious point here is that by rejecting a the null of a specific stochastic process (fair coins, fairly tossed) we are a) NOT rejecting “chance” (because there are a vast number of possible stochastic processes). “Chance” is not the null; “fair coins, fairly tossed” is.
However, the second fallacy in the “500 coins” story, is that not only are we not rejecting “chance” when we reject “fair coins, fairly tossed”) but nor are we rejecting the only alternative to “Intelligently designed”. We are simply rejecting one specific stochastic process. Many natural processes are stochastic, and the outcomes of some have bell-curve probability distributions, and of others poisson distributions, but still others, neither. For example many natural stochastic processes are homeostatic – the more extreme some parameter becomes, the more likely is the next state to be closer to the mean.
The third fallacy is that there is something magical about “500 bits”. There isn’t. Sure if a p value for data under some null is less than 2^-500 we can reject that null, but if physicists are happy with 5 sigma, so am I, and 5 sigma is only about 2^-23 IIRC (it’s too small for my computer to calculate).
And fourthly, the 500 bits is a phantom anyway. Seth Lloyd computed it as the information capacity of the observable universe, which isn’t the same as the number of possible times you can toss a coin, and in any case, why limit what can happen to the “observable universe”? Do IDers really think that we just happen to be at the dead centre of all that exists? Are they covert geocentrists?
Lastly, I repeat: chance is not a cause. Sure we can use the word informally as in “it was just one of those chance things….” or even “we retained the null, and so can attribute the observed apparent effects to chance…” but only informally, and in those circumstances, “chance” is a stand-in for “things we could not know and did not plan”. If we actually want to falsify some null hypothesis, we need to be far more specific – if we are proposing some stochastic process, we need to put specific parameters on that process, and even then, chance is not the bit that is doing the causing – chance is the part we don’t know, just as I didn’t know when I ran my MatLab script what the outcome of any run would be. The part I DID know was the probability distribution – because I specified the process. When a coin is tossed, it does not fall Heads because of “chance”, but because the toss in question was one that led, by a process of Newtonian mechanics, to the outcome “Heads”. What was “chance” about it is that the tosser didn’t know which, of all possible toss-types, she’d picked. So the selection process was blind, just as mine is in all the above examples.
In other words it was non-intentional. That doesn’t mean it was not designed by an intelligent agent, but nor does it mean that it was.
And if I now choose one of those “chance” coin-toss sequences my script generated, and copy-paste it below, then it isn’t a “chance” sequence any more, is it? Not unless Microsoft has messed up (Heads=”true”, Tails=”false”):
true false true false false false false true true false true true false true true true false true false true true true true true false true false false false true true true true true true true true true false false false true true false true true false false false true false false true true false false false true false true false true true true true true true false false true false true true true true true true false true true true false true false false false false false false false false false false false false false false true false false true false true true true false true true true false true true false false true true true true true false true false true false false true true false true true true true true true true false false true false false true false false true true false true true true true false false true false false false false true false false true true false false true false true true false true false true true true true true true true true true true true true true false true false false true false false false true false false true true true false false true true true false true true true false false false true false true false false true false true false true true false true false true false true false false true true true false true true false false false false true false false true false true true true true true false true true true false false false true false true false true true true false false false false false false false true true false true false true false true true false false false true false true true false true false true true true true false true false false false false true false true true true true false false true false true true true true false true true false false true false true false true true true true true false false false true true true false false false true true true false true false true true true true true true true false false true false true false false true true true false true false true true false false true true true false true true false false false true false false false false true false false true true true true false false true false false true true true true false true false false true false true true false false true true false false true true false true false true true false false false false false false false true false true true false false false true true true false false false true false true false false false true true false true false true true true true false true false false false true false true true true false false false false true false true true false true true true false true true false true false false true false true false true true false false true false true false true false false true true false false
I specified it. But you can’t tell that by looking. You have to ask me.
ETA: if you double click on the images you get a clear version.
ETA2: Here’s another one – any guesses as to the process (again entirely stochastic)? Would you reject the null of “fair coins, fairly tossed”?
Here’s a sample run:
0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1
Barry? Sal? William?
ETA3: And here’s another version:
The top plot is the distribution of proportions of Heads.
The second plot is the distribution of runs of Heads
The bottom two plots represent two runs; blue bars represent Heads.
What is the algorithm? Again, it’s completely stochastic.
And one final one:
which I think is pretty awesome! Check out that bimodality!
Homochirality here we come!!!
That’s too bad, phoodoo, because the opening post has the word fair next to the word coin. And not once, but four times. That’s a clue, my friend.
Phoodoo asking about Lizzie’s description of a fair coin
December 30, 2013 at 1:26 am
“And what is the definition of fair-Is it equiprobable, or is it not being able to know the outcome in advance?”
Then a little more than an hour later:
December 30, 2013 at 2:47 am
“I didn’t ask what a fair coin was, that is why you trying to answer for her is so stupid.”
We’ve sure got us one confused puppy here.
Its too bad for you that Lizzie is not Wikipedia. otherwise she could just say whatever wikipedia says I believe, and she would never have to explain herself again. Likewise, unless Lizzie says, I believe whatever Olegt says, I will have to go what she says she means, and not what you say she means.
What in the world makes you think she would use a common and well defined statistical term like “fair coin” in a non-standard way with a completely different meaning? Besides your ever growing desperation that is.
Because she said a fair tossing, not just a fair coin. Does a fair tossing mean a fair coin. Again, why do you insist on insulting her? First you infer that she is too stupid to use the correct wording when she talks about the theory of evolution, and now you want to call her unnecessarily redundant. You really should be more respectful to her.
phoodoo,
A fair coin is a standard statistical process, Mr. Troll. Everyone with a passing familiarity with statistics knows what it is. If you wish to look up a definition, go to Wikipedia.
Because we can define a “fair coin toss” very precisely. A “fair coin toss” is one in which the tosser tosses in such a manner that she has no way of bringing about a certain outcome. There may be unfair coin-tossing techniques in which you deliberately toss a coin in a manner more likely to bring about heads than tails.
And to be really specific, a “fair coin toss” is one in which, of the myriad possible ways of tossing a coin, half of which seem to result in heads and half in tails, the tosser chooses one without foreknowledge of which pool it came from.
As I keep saying, the essence of “chance” lies in our lack of knowledge about what caused an event, not in the properties of whichever materials and mechanisms brought an event about.
A nice example is the game “rock, paper, scissors”. Who wins is largely a matter of “chance”. And yet person makes a deliberate and intentional decision as to which hand-position to “play”. There is nothing “chance” about my decision to present a fist, nor is there anything “chance” about my opponent’s decision to play “scissors”. But the outcome is chance simply because neither of us can know, nor have any substantial grounds for an informed guess, as to which hand-position the other will choose.
That’s why I say that chance is not causal except in informal statements (“it was just chance that caused her to win the bet; she picked scissors and I picked rock”). Saying that something was caused by “chance” is the same as saying that we do not know what caused it, or that the outcome was unpredictable. However, given more information, even about a coin toss, might well make the outcome predicable – because for an event to be “predictable” requires an agent to do the predicting, and how predictable the event is is a property of the information available to the predicting agent, not a property of the event itself.
And the reason an outcome might be “equiprobable” is that the factors that influence it happen to be such that those that sum to one outcome are exactly as numerous as those that sum to another.
Such events are pretty rare in nature, because most events have multiple causes, and sequences of events that lead to extreme outcomes are rarer than sequences of events that lead to moderate outcomes, which is what the Central Limit Theorem tells us.
Part of the issue here is the word “probability” which is sometimes used in a frequentist sense (i.e. simply to mean normalised frequency distribution), as in the case of runs of coin tosses (more “probable” kinds of runs, are those that occur more frequently than the less “probable” kinds), and is a property of a process, and sometimes as a measure of certainty, which may be based on past frequencies, but also on things like reason, and is the property of a predicting agent, i.e. an intelligent agent.
Oddly for people so interested in both probability and intelligence, ID proponents get these two meanings remarkably muddled up.
I’m still waiting for one of our visitors to explain what any of this ‘500 coin’ hoopla has to do with ID.
I think the point is that if we benighted evolutionists are willing to accept that 500 coins lying heads-up on a table means that they weren’t tossed there “by chance” and must have been intelligently laid, then we have conceded the key ID point that intelligence can be inferred by rejecting the null hypothesis of chance.
Moreover, the 500 number is the threshold number, according to Dembski (or 400, depending when he wrote it) above which we can reject the chance hypothesis as not merely improbable but impossible.
There is also a strong flavour of: people who claim that 500 heads could have been thrown by chance are in denial about the validity of the ID argument.
And thus there is a certain nonplussedness when many of us happily agree that we would reject “fair coins fairly tossed” or even, informally “chance”, as the explanation for those coins.
The fact that rejecting a specific stochastic process at p < anything reasonable is not the same as inferring design, that design processes are frequently stochastic, and that in any case, tossed coins are tossed by intelligent agents seems to be generally missed.
Make sure you are not drinking coffee or other beverage. I don’t want to be blamed for a ruined keyboard.
Apparently, Sal Cordova thinks that homochirality is the result of the equivalent of tossing 500 coins and getting them to come up the same way every time.
Neil Rickert,
Sal has been conspicuously absent from TSZ lately, mostly preaching to the choir.
http://pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v48/i4/p2547_1
Lizzie,
Ah, but what about rock paper scissors lizard Spock?
“Extrapolations based on the model suggest that the probability of an American nickel landing on edge is approximately 1 in 6000 tosses.”
Those are better odds than I would have guessed.
lol
Patrick,
An insight into how ID fails with “if not this therefore that”. ONLY if elements are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.
Here is what I can conclude from this thread:
First yes, Lizzie is kind of right that chance by itself causes nothing, but since most of the time we use chance as an adjective, it is kind of a stupid point to argue, because we simply need to know what noun chance is describing. Once we know that, we can already assume that noun when we say it was caused by chance. A chance coin toss, a chance sampling. Gregory is pretty much correct, in that it is not a very serious question.
But what we CAN learn from this thread is that first, Lizzie is either too intellectually dishonest or lazy to even defend her own position by defining her own words. So who the fuck knows what she means by chance or fair, since she posts a challenge and then basically doesn’t respond, and instead just allows a bunch of minions to distort and dilute and otherwise make meaningless her whole point that she began. So more than just being technically correct that we need to describe which chance process we are discussing, she is kind of full of shit because that is not a very deep thought. All she was really trying to do was substitute the word fair for the word chance, when in reality in this context they mean EXACTLY the same thing. Not sort of the same thing, or parallel meanings, they mean exactly the same thing. They mean an unknown outcome that is not intentionally biased. I think it is pretty easy to expose who the idiots on this forum are, when they start arguing that “a chance” means the same thing as chance. As in you can still have a chance, even if your chances are very small. This thread is a great identifier for me of who the true dunces on this forum are.
But the reason that Lizzie is so full of shit, is because she already knows this. But she wants so badly to keep the word random or chance out of the theory of evolution, that she bends over backwards to say the word is fair, as if that erases the need for the word random and chance in evolution. It doesn’t, she well knows that, and she tried to play a stupid semantics game, that she then ran away from once she was called on it. YOUR theory MUST have random as its core belief. It can not have intention, it can not have direction, it can not have intelligence. It can only be a theory which requires dumb, chaotic mixing of pointless shapes of molecules which just luckily for us happened to stick together in just the right way to enable us to type on a computer and consider the very existence of those chemicals. But Lizzie must try to downplay the role of chaos, and of nondirection, because if you really come down to it and consider it more deeply, she knows most people aren’t going to believe that pure random chaos is the cause for everything. Its too patently obvious that its not the case, but doggone it, I hate religion, the Priest is mean, and crosses creep me out, and besides my mom forced me to go to church and I hate my mom, and I just don’t want people thinking about how a cell could form and why bacteria never changes. Just leave my worldview alone dammit!!
So she attempts to obfuscate, and then runs away. Poor poor form. Gregory was right, you are impotent on this subject. But at least we can see who your attempted fluffers are quite nicely.
Epic teenager meltdown Bro. I give it a 9 out of 10.
phoodoo,
There’s still a chance for you to learn something from this thread. Try answering my questions from earlier:
That seems unfair. I’d say that Lizzie has been clear enough. I do somewhat agree that this is not a very serious question, which is why I have mostly kept out of this thread.
The more serious point is that there are times when one can use words casually and informally, and there are times when one should be precise and explicit. I take Lizzie’s main point as being that Barry (at UD) was using words casually and informally in circumstances that demanded more precision.
Since Lizzie chose not to defend her position, I guess we all can make our own conclusions. But I think its pretty clear she was trying to hide the words random and chance, because they simply make her little theory too silly to believe.
keiths,
There is also a chance for you to learn something. How the coin was tossed was never the point.
What?? I have to admit I’ve found your posts quite confusing, but it seemed that you kept coming back to the question of what “fairly tossed” meant. If “how the coin was tossed” wasn’t the point, what was?
Ironically, the opening post contains this sentence:
Anyone remotely familiar with statistics can immediately see what Lizzie means.
By “chance” she means the collection of all possible stochastic processes. A stochastic process is a standard, and very basic, term in statistics. See Wikipedia.
By “fair coin” Lizzie means one specific stochastic process known to any student of statistics as (wait for it!) a fair coin. Again, see Wikipedia.
Lizzie never hid the meaning of her terms. They are standard, well-known, uncontroversial, run-of-the-mill, basic notions in statistics.
Several of the forum participants explained to phoodoo the meaning of these terms, but that was still not enough.
And now phoodoo throws an epic temper tantrum, slams the door, and heads in the general direction of Joe Gallien.
Oh well.
Come to think of it, has anyone even seen phoodoo and Joe “never met a doughnut I didn’t like” Gallien in the same room together???
olegt,
And you are one of her biggest fluffers. What did fairly tossed mean? It meant it was a chance toss. And thus by rejecting the null, you are rejecting chance (toss). Stupid argument, but its obvious to anyone with a brain why she is making this dumb point. The same reason she conveniently left random mutations out of her theory of evolution. Pure bunk.
I have zero interest in hearing what your preferences for convention are. The point is why Lizzie felt it so important to run from her words.
Phoodoo yesterday
Phoodoo today
I guess having a major crying meltdown makes one forgetful.
They are not just my preferences. Or thorton’s. Or keiths’. Or Lizzie’s. They are universally accepted basic notions in statistics. If you choose to ignore them, be prepared that people will have fun at your expense.
Why should I get into the specifics of the point, if Lizzie couldn’t even be bothered to respond. It was her who made the challenge. She has a worldview that insists that life is all about just crazy, wild, lucky chaos, without being able to actually admit that this is her philosophy. So she just plays word games.
You were asking for definitions of chance and fair coin. Those definitions were contained in the opening post. Why would she have to define that which has already been defined?
phoodoo,
The answers to my questions are:
1. 0.5
2. No
3. Yes
4. Yes
A fair toss is a chance toss, but a chance toss isn’t necessarily a fair toss.
With that in mind, I suggest you reread the thread. It will be embarrassing for you, but revelatory.
Fluff, fluff, fluff…it still won’t work. Fair =chance.
You’re not even trying, phoodoo. If after all this brouhaha you are still conflating all possible stochastic processes (“chance”) with one of them (“fair coin”), there is no hope for any of us, including Lizzie, to get the point across.
Give it up, my friend. There is no point in overexerting yourself with no observable results so far.
Then play a betting game with me. We take turns rolling an unbiased die. Every time a 6 comes up I pay you
10. Since we both have a chance of winning it must be a fair game.
Fair = chance according to you, right?
Put your money where your mouth is.
Dear Santa, thanks for Phoodoo. He’s ace. He makes us all laugh a lot.
Richardthughes,
We ought to invite him to AtBC and give him his own thread.
Do it! GaGa is getting pretty boring.
thorton,
+1
Nope, wrong again. “Crazy” “wild” and “chaos” are opposite to how Lizzie (and pretty much every intelligent person) describes natural processes of evolution. Now on the contrary, “crazy” “wild” and “chaos” are exactly what we’d expect from your supposed god letting loose its miracles which break the functioning laws of nature.
Here, Lizzie described the non-crazy, non-wild, non-chaos view in her OP:
What’s the matter, Cupcake? Too many big words for you to comprehend the meaning of Lizzie’s paragraph? You can’t sound out “stochastic” so you throw around “crazy” instead? “Homeostatic” got you flummoxed?
You could get help with that, it you weren’t so quick to lash out instead of asking …
Serious question—if you google “fair coin”, you will find countless sources stating that for a fair coin, the probability of heads and the probability of tails both equal 1/2.
Do you have any source which states that P(H) = P(T) = 1/2 is not a requirement?
Hi, phoodoo – apologies for not responding to your posts earlier – I have been busy with a lot of Christmas visitors. So thanks for this summary, to which I will now respond.
I’m glad we agree that chance causes nothing! And indeed, when chance is used as an adjective, it is mostly harmless. However, this conversation started because Barry Arrington asked us to reject “chance” as a “hypothesis”, and specifically said that “chance” was the “null hypothesis”. My point, which was not, I submit, a “stupid point”, is that when we do null hypothesis-testing we have to be very specific about what our null is, and “chance” is not nearly specific enough. There are many “chance” processes (using the word informally, as an adjective) that can produce deviations from the distribution we expect from “fair coins, fairly tossed” and I have given many examples in this thread. Some of these give quite high probabilities of large proportions of one side rather than the other; others give probabilities that are too small for even minor deviations from 50:50 for us to conclude that they were the result of “fair coin fairly tossed”. Yet all are stochastic processes – in other words I did not program in a single sequence of tosses, but left every sequence to depend on the output of my computer’s random-number generator.
Well, firstly, I did define them. Secondly, if I didn’t respond to requests for further clarification early enough for you, there is an option you haven’t considered – that I was busy cooking multiple meals for a dozen people! As well as making beds, wrapping gifts, decorating trees, and keeping everyone generally entertained!
Well, it has very important repercussions for ID. If a “chance” process other than “fair coins, fairly tossed” produce outcomes other than “50:50” for coin tosses, why can’t such a process also produce, for example, homochirality? The way I got my final distribution (the bimodal one) was simply to make each “toss” non-independent of the previous tosses, in such a manner that the more of heads (or tails), there had been, the greater the probability that heads (or tails) would fall next. This is a classic positive feedback loops, and the non-living world, as well as the living world, is full of them. The same was true for the one above, but influence of previous tosses was set to be a little lower. For my “ETA2” distribution, which at first sight looks like the output of “fair coins, fairly tossed” – in fact any one run would be less likely to be rejected than from the true “fair coins, fairly tossed” run – I also made each toss dependent of previous tosses, but instead of making heads more likely after a run of heads, I made it less likely. So the distribution has a smaller standard deviation than the binomial distribution, and runs of like-tosses are shorter. So, ironically, this sequence, which is a homeostatic sequence (also common in both living and non-living systems), is more likely to escape detection as being “unfair” than an actual fair sequence.
So no, my point is not shallow, or “full of shit”. It’s absolutely critical to the error at the heart of ID. In other words, it is ID that is shallow – at least those IDists who think that by rejecting a binomial distribution of coin-tosses we can infer design. We can’t. There are many non-designed distributions that are not binomial. Dembski knows this, which is why he specifies “the relevant chance hypothesis” as his null, not just “any old chance hypothesis”. But he doesn’t tell us how to define that “relevant” null. And there lies the entire ID problem.
No, I wasn’t. I’m not sure if you’ve actually read my OP, but in all my examples, the average proportion of heads to tails over all 100,000 runs is 50;50. So if you were betting on heads, you’d win exactly as much as you lost. And on any given run, if you bet on “more heads” rather than “more tails”, you’d win as often as you lost. So the House was fair. But the methods of determining the outcome of each “toss” were not normal toin-cossing methods. I think you’ve missed the point of my OP here, phoodoo. Try reading it again.
No, not at all. (btw, this kind of post – not assuming that I am posting in good faith – is against TSZ rules, which I tend to police fairly lightly, and I’m leaving in this instance, not least because it is directed at me, and I don’t actually mind, but I have moved some posts, including but not restricted to yours, to guano, as they did overstep that rule).
I have no problem in using the word “random” or “chance” in regard to the theory of evolution – I just insist that they are used correctly, and the word “stochastic” is usually more precise (“random”, like “chance” has too many meanings in common usage). Another useful word is “error”. When we build predictive models they often contain “error” terms, which is the difference between the values predicted by the model and the actual data. The differences themselves are called “residuals” – what is left over when you have predicted as much as you can, and we often say that the “residuals” are what are “due to chance”. They aren’t, of course (as we agree, “chance” doesn’t cause anything”), but it’s a way of saying that they are due to “factors we didn’t model”. If we include more factors in our model, we can often reduce our residuals, so our error terms are reduced.
But more important in this context is that it is important to see what factors are correlated with other factors. “Chance” is often used to mean “orthogonal to” – in other words “uncorrelated with”. For instance, shoe size pretty well uncorrelated IQ. That means that if we find a person with high IQ and huge feet, we say that that combination was a “chance” combination. On the other hand shoe size is very highly correlated with height, and so if we find a person who is very tall and has huge feet, we don’t say that the combination was due to “chance”. It’s not that “chance” caused the first person to have a high IQ but didn’t cause the second person to be tall, it’s just that we have no systematic model that predicts IQ from shoe size, but we do have a systematic model that predicts height from shoe size.
And in evolutionary theory, there is no overall correlation between the direction of a genetic change and what impact it has on the fitness of the organism in which that change occurs. To that extent, the change is “chance”. And I am quite happy to use that term, as long as my reader is well aware that I do not mean that the change was caused by “chance” (it was caused by chemistry and physics), nor that there is no feedback between that change and the environment (there is).
And this is a beautifully expression of just what is wrong with the ID conception of evolutionary theory. You have, here, conflated “chance” and “unintentional”. None of the sequences in my OP were “intended”, in the sense that I had no clue what any one sequence would be before it came out. In some runs, the next coin toss was predictable, at least statistically, from previous tosses, but in none was a violation of that expection impossible, and many actually occurred. In other words, “chance” is related to “predictability” – and only indirectly and non-necessarily to “intentionalness”. If I can see that you intend me friendship, by your smile, I can predict that you may offer your hand to shake. But if I can see a dark cloud approaching, I can also predict that it may rain, even though the cloud has no intention of raining on me. “Dumb chaotic mixing” is not the only alternative to “intentional, intelligent design”. Indeed intelligent agents are perfectly capable of “dumb chaotic mixing”, while non-intelligent systems are equally capable of exquisite sorting – un-mixing. I offer, yet again, my example of 18 mile long Chesil Beach, on the south coast of England in which chaotically mixed stones are sorted by “dumb” tidal forces and coastal topography so beautifully by size from west to east that reputedly, fisherman landing on the beach in the dark could tell where they had landed by rolling the pebbles in the palmsof their hands. It is simply not true that intentional intelligence is required to bring about order in non-living systems – so why should it be true in living systems? The principle is wrong at its core.
Well, no. I certainly don’t downplay “chaos”, which, in its technical sense, is critical. Unlike “fair coin, fairly tossed” sequences, my sequences in the OP were generated (well the last few) by systems in which there was feedback between one toss and the next – resulting in non-linearity. This could be homeostatic (resulting in less variance from 50:50) or positive (leading to long runs of either heads or tails). And Darwin’s theory was, as we would call it today, of a non-linear, chaotic system, in which both feedback loops lead to both homestasis (equilibrium, or “eek”) and rapid change (the “punk” or puntuated part) just as water from a tap will sometimes flow smoothly, and then, for no apparent reason, flip to a mess spray, and back again. Read James Gleick’s book on Chaos – it’s very readable. Not only that, but chaos turns out to be critical to cognition – the brain is a chaotic system. If it weren’t, we would be unable to flip our attentional focus from one thing to another at anything like the speed we can.
As for your assumptions about my views on religion – they are almost comically way off.
And as for “why bacteria never changes” – I don’t even know what you mean. What “bacteria never changes”?
I neither obfuscated nor ran away. I tried to explain as clearly as I could, then had to leave and cater for a houseful of family visitors.
Have a happy new year!
Lizzie
Lizzie,
So many assertions, where to start? How about the question I asked long ago, what is your precise definition of the word fair?
Liz continues to offer up and beat her ridiculous dead straw men. Let’s look at one in particular that is truly outlandish:
As if ID advocates argue that only intelligence can create “order”. ROFLMAO. This is a perfect example of why Liz’s “arguments” are not to be taken seriously.
There we go again.
And by the way, Happy New Year to you too!
William J. Murray,
I agree with you completely, never once was it suggested that unintelligence can’t create things that looked pretty cool. Like a bunch of rocks on a beach. Rocks on a beach however don’t think very intelligently, in fact I am pretty sure they don’t do anything at all, but that is a different story. It would be splendid if she could at least stick to a point that has been raised.
OK (I think I gave this, but I’ll do it again): tossed by a person who has no idea what the outcome of her toss will be and no way of influencing it.
That you keep demanding the same thing over and over just because you don’t like the answer you were already given a dozen times doesn’t speak well of your intelligence or integrity.
OK, but in that case you need to change your description of what you think that evolutionary theory is:
Nobody is proposing “dumb chaotic mixing” of anything which “just luckily for us happened to stick together”. As I’ve just shown, non-intentional processes can result in extremely precise unmixing. The small pebbles of Chesil Beach don’t “just happen” to end up at the western end and the large at the eastern end. They arrive there with a high degree of reliability. We can predict, to extremely fine tolerance, the average size of pebble at any given point along the beach.
So, if unintentional processes with feedback can sort a beach of pebbles, what is to stop unintentional processes with feedback from sorting proteins?