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!!!
Or like 500 coins all lying heads up.
Well, yes, they do, William. They say precisely that. What about all that Granville Sewell stuff about only intelligence being able to reduce “entropy”?
It’s not true, of course, and nor does it mean that when entropy is reduced that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics has been violated, but you can’t say that it isn’t claimed.
And how are you defining “order” anyway? Would you disagree that a table on which 500 coins lie head up is configuration that displays “order”? If not, what is it about that ordered arrangement that causes you to infer “intelligent design”? Or do you disagree with Barry that you can?
If you are going to persuade anyone that my arguments are “outlandish” and “not to be taken serously” you will have to do better than simply point and laugh.
Exactly. Or homochirality?
IDers must think it’s against the law to ever consider the effects of selection and feedback in their goofy cartoon version of how evolution works. I’ve never come across one who has, including on this thread.
Well, Lizzie, actually I asked you what the word “fair” means, and I am pretty sure that there isn’t any dictionary in the world that would agree that the word fair means-“tossed by someone who has no idea of an outcome, and no way of influencing it.” I am pretty sure the definition of fair doesn’t include the words tossed at all in fact.
So when you argue that chance is too vague of a word, but you then INVENT your own definition for the word fair for this particular instance, doesn’t that make your complaint of the use of the word chance sort of silly? I mean if you can play humpty dumpty with the word fair, who are you to complain that you don’t like others definitions?
Lizzie,
Why don’t you tell this guy to read a standard reference on statistics about a fair coin? Otherwise he’s going to get lost in semantic meanderings.
WJM and phoodoo, it would help the discussion greatly if you two would please answer this question.
I meant in the context of “fair toss”, phoodoo, and I think you’ll find that any rigorous definition (for example in laws to do with gaming) will amount to more or less what I gave, and that would include throwing dice, spinning roulette wheels, or dealing cards. If the person doing the tossing, throwing, spinning or dealing is deliberately trying to influence the outcome then that person is not being “fair”. I’m not attempting to define the word outside this narrow context. After all tossing a coin may itself be an “unfair” action, in some decisions – an examiner who tossed a coin to decide whether a candidate passed or failed the exam would not be acting fairly.
So context matters. But in the context of “games of chance” I don’t think my definition is uncontentious. Be that as it may, it was the meaning I intended.
Actually, as I think I’ve said recently, I’m all in favour of humpty dumpty definitions. In science they are called “operational definitions” and they are essential. I never complain about other people’s definitions of the words they are using – I only ever object when they use definitions for my words that differ from the one I intended, and even then, only if they refuse to accept that the meaning I give is the one I intended, and not the one they inferred.
“Chance” is fine, as long as you don’t have to be precise. But if you need to be precise, and when testing a null hypothesis you do, it is not precise enough. There are countless processes that could be described as “chance” that would give different outcomes, and some of those include 500 heads, as I showed in my OP.
That’s why Dembski carefully said that the null hypothesis must be the relevant chance hypothesis. Unfortunately, he didn’t tell anyone how to find it.
Oh my heavens, you really have this backwards. It is the “non-intentional process which is dumb and chaotic in evolutionary theory, NOT the results of the process. Did you really not get this?
Of course people are proposing that the process which began, and continues to push along evolution is a dumb, chaotic process. Have you not ever read Dawkins? Do you not understand what a blind watchmaker means? The watchmaker is blind, he is dumb, he has no idea what he is making, he is chaos. Dawkins suggests that perhaps the first early life forms forms were sticky bits of silicon, sloshing around through muddy water aimlessly forming clumps. Seriously?
Guys, I’m needing to blow my ref’s whistle too often in here. Please re-read the rules.
It’s not that I have a moral objection to the breakages, just that if we are playing coin-tossing, then non-independent tosses go to guano. As it were.
Lizzie,
But Lizzie, that is absolutely preposterous. Fair is only precise because you are saying it is, and chance is only imprecise because you are telling others its too vague for you. And when have you ever heard anyone say shuffle the deck fairly as opposed to randomly shuffling the cards?
To say, oh I can think of other ways to use the word chance, that don’t mean what Barry might say it means, is no different than someone telling you, I can think of plenty of ways to use the word fair to not mean what you say it does. NEITHER is more precise than the other, and in fact, MOST people are pretty clear about what a random coin toss means. Or a chance coin toss.
Furthermore, if you in fact end up rejecting your null, which part are you ending up rejecting,the fairness of it? Because its still a coin toss right? So if you are saying you are rejecting the fairness, that is exactly the same as Barry saying he is rejecting the chance part of it. You reject fairness, he rejects chance.
Fairness isn’t a cause any more than chance is.
No, I don’t get it at all. Can you explain?
“He” is “blind” (metaphorically speaking) but not “dumb” (metaphorically speaking), and while “chaotic”, that’s actually the secret – evolution is profoundly non-linear. I realise you think that I am the confused one, here, phoodoo, but let me suggest that it may be you who are confused. First of all, Dawkins is not the sole arbiter of what evolutonary theory is, and is not. Secondly, while in many respects he is a fine writer, I personally find his metaphors often inapt. Thirdly, what you are referring to here are indeed metaphors. Certainly the theory of evolution does not propose a “watchmaker”. What it proposes is a system by which what happens to works best in one generation is repeated more often in the next than stuff that works less well. It’s “blind” in the sense that the system has no capacity to foresee the outcome of the system as a hole, and choose an action that will most likely bring about some goal. But it is far from “dumb” – it reliably results in a population of individuals that are at least as capable, and sometimes more capable, of exploiting the resources and avoiding the threats of the current environment up to and including their generating of offspring. This is indeed pretty cool – even cooler than a coastline that sorts pebbles, or a thunderhead that spawns tornadoes, and it is also highly chaotic – in most cases homeostatic, but can also rapidly flip into a dynamic state if a new environmental niche opens up.
No, not seriously. I have no idea where you got that idea, or when Dawkins is supposed to have suggested it, but I suggest you try Szostak, or other OoL researchers, rather than Dawkins, whose expertise is animal behaviour.
In any case, a citation would be useful.
Szostak’s suggestion is that early life, or proto-life forms were lipid vesicles containing crudely self-replicating polymers that affected the osmotic properties of the vesicle and their ability to grow and divide in response to convection currents and mechanical wave action.
Lizzie has given precise indications what she means by “chance” and “fair.” For the umpteenth time, here is a paragraph from the OP in which these things are defined:
To repeat,
Chance = all possible stochastic processes
Fair coin = one specific stochastic process well known in statistics.
This is completely unequivocal and non-controversial.
Well, I think it is important to be precise, so I am telling you precisely what I meant by fair. I didn’t mean “just” and I didn’t mean “blonde”, I meant “without knowing or influencing the outcome”. And yes, I’ve heard people talking about fairly shuffling cards – it’s all too easy to unfairly shuffle cards.
Which is fine. I’m not even objecting to that. What I’m objecting to is first of all using “chance” to mean “fair coin, fairly tossed” and rejecting it (correctly) as the null, and then using “chance” to mean “not designed” and concluding “design”. That is classic equivocation. I
I said clearly that I rejected “fair coin fairly tossed” as the null for how the 500 coins came to lie face up on the table. If Barry wants to substitute “chance” to mean “fair coin fairly tossed” he’s welcome. But having rejected that null (chance aka fair coin fairly tossed) then all I am rejecting is “chance/fair coin fairly tossed”. And there are millions of other ways that the coins could have got there other than “chance/fair coin fairly tossed” and some of those will also be describable as “chance” methods. I gave several in my OP. And of those, some will be “intelligently laid” and some ways will be “not intelligently laid”. In other words if you are going to use a definition of chance that means “not intelligently placed” then you can’t also use, in the same context, a definition of chance that means “fair coins, fairly tossed”.
Stick to one definition per argument, and you’ll be fine. Equivocate half way through and you will end up with a fallacy, as Barry did.
Well, fair tossing is a cause. But I’m fine if he calls it chance, as long as he doesn’t then turn round and say, therefore design. Barry’s error is:
That’s the equivalent of
That’s why I’m a stickler for definitions. I don’t care (much) which definition people use as long as they don’t switch definitions mid argument.
And I also insist that chance is not a cause, and that evolution is not the theory that “chance did it”. And because chance does not mean “not designed”, nor is it the theory that “designer didn’t do it”.
So not only is Barry’s argument fallacious, it’s irrelevant.
Yes, that’s right, the blind watchmaker part is a metaphor. Life didn’t arise from a blind guy making a watch. I think we can all agree with that. I am glad we got that straight.
Do you know what it is a metaphor for?
Its a metaphor for a system which has no intelligence, which has no direction, which has no purpose, which has no organization. Its just chemicals swirling around in a chaotic primordial dumb swamp.
I really think it hardly matters who came up with this metaphor, whether it was Richard Dawkins or Aristole. Yes, I can also agree with you that Dawkins is a simple minded self promoter who barely studied animals. But the relevant point is that it is YOUR community accepts most of his premises just the same, and your believers who have so enthusiastically hoisted him up on a pedestal as one of your great spokesman of his era. If his metaphors were so inappropriate to your theory, I sure as heck don’t hear about all the evolutionists going around on the speaking tours denouncing his metaphors as outlandish and not what the theory suggests at all.
You certainly don’t seem to mind denouncing the ID movement because you don’t like the words Dembski uses for instance. Perhaps I should just tell you to quote Behe instead.
Lizzie,
If you think your definitions are so precise, why do all of your apostles still keep having such a time time getting it. Like Olegt for example. He keeps thinking that the word fair coin is synonymous with the fair tossing of the coin. He can’t even separate in his mind the object of the randomness and the process of the randomness.
And I am sorry to say this, but I actually was giving you more credit than I now feel you deserved. You are not even a little bit right about this. You are flopping all over the place with your use of the word fair. First it means something about the way the coin is tossed without knowledge. Then it means something about intention. Then it means something about fairness, like as in equitable.
Then you are deriding Barry because once he uses the word chance as a shorter way of saying a chance coin toss, then he can’t use the word chance for the rest of the discussion. I really don’t find your word use to be precise, or logical or even very clear.
Frankly, I am kind of shocked that you don’t even get that the theory of evolution, first and foremost is universally accepted that it is predicated on the idea that the process is chaotic, its random, its a pure haphazard mixing of random molecules that just so happened to turn into something useful.
When I hear you arguing about the word fair, I now see more clearly why you don’t get this.
Well, in that case it’s a poor metaphor. The reason we use the metaphor “fitness landscape” and the term “attractor basins” is because many systems, including evolutionary systems, and chemical systems are highly directional. Also, you seem to be confusing OoL with evolutionary theory – Dawkins used the “Blind Watchmaker” metaphor for the system of heritable variation in reproductive success proposed by Darwin. You seem to be referring to the emergence of Darwinian-capable populations from the “primordian swamp” of “chemicals swirling”.
The citation I wanted was for your claim that “Dawkins suggests that perhaps the first early life forms forms were sticky bits of silicon, sloshing around through muddy water aimlessly forming clumps”. Where did he suggest this?
I don’t see that as either relevant or even true. Dawkins is a pop science writer, and makes many active research biologists cringe with his over-simplifications and sometimes outright misunderstandings. Sure, he makes some excellent points, but to quote him as an authority on the state of evolutionary science is unwarranted. In any case, science doesn’t proceed by pedestal-hoisting, nor by appealing to authority. The only valid test of a model is whether it fits the data and predicts new data successfully.
Well, perhaps ignore the “speaking tours” and concentrate on the actual scientific publications.
My problem isn’t with the words Dembsk uses, but with the content of his arguments, given his own definitions. Please read my actual posts, phoodoo – you keep denouncing stuff you assume I mean but have not actually said. Ditto as far as I know with Dawkins.
That is what the metaphor is for, but it is inaccurate to say the least. In particular, the problem with the metaphor is that evolution is not directionless. In fact, like Chesil Beach, evolution has quite specific direction and organization.
Please take a look at the histogram from Lizzie’s first simulation (100,000 runs of 500 fair flips of a fair coin). It appears that the mean percentage of heads is 50%. By eye, the standard deviation is roughly 2%. These numbers are both consistent with the proposition that P(H) = P(T) = 1/2. (I’ll let you check that the SD of 2% is indeed close to the theoretical value).
If you still claim that Lizzie’s model of “fair flips of a fair coin” does not include P(H) = P(T) = 1/2, show us how your model produces the same statistics.
This is probably the last I am going to say about this. I really didn’t want to be rude to you at all Lizzie. I don’t particularly mind being rude to some of your guests, because in my mind they have earned that.
But I didn’t want to come across that way to you. Clearly you are a smart girl. But there are just too many areas where I would disagree with your logic completely. You tend to state things as if you are sure you are right, and I am not so sure I am seeing that. There is just too much there for me to feel would be fruitful in trying to correct. So believe what you are going to believe in as amiable a way as you can, but plenty of your guests could use a bit of toning down before they go around trying to tell everyone what’s what.
Happy New Year to You.
No, they do not. Any reasonable person that has read even a small sampling of ID work knows that all ID proponents agree that mere order doesn’t require intelligence – such as the generation of ordered ice crystals found in snowflakes. You’re bluffing with a straw man so blatant even someone new to the debate can easily see through it.
You know better than this, which only leaves one conclusion available.
Both are relevant – that the coin is fair (balanced so that it is no more likely to fall one side or the other; heads one side, tails the other) and that the method of tossing precludes the tosser knowing or influencing the way the coin will land. I think Olegt understands this.
I’ve seen the word “chance” and “fair” used with all those meanings. But they are not interchangeable. That is why I specified what I meant when I used the word.
Do you not see a problem in using a word as though it means one thing at the start of your argument, and then using it as though it means a different thing at the finish? The technical term for this is “equivocation” and it is one of the canonical logical fallacies.
Equivocation.
This is exactly what Barry did.
Well, that’s interesting that you are shocked. Because I certainly don’t “get” that the theory of evolution is what you say it is. But I suggest that it is not I who is mistaken here. It’s a theory I understand pretty well, both theoretically and practically. The idea that evolution is a “pure haphazard mixing of random molecules that just so happened to turn into something useful” is mostly meaningless, but inasmuch as it means anything it is almost entirely wrong.
Molecules don’t simply “mix” for a start – they react, interreact, assemble and dissassemble according to very precise physical laws, the very opposite of “haphazard”. The word “haphazard” itself in any case is a synonym for “chance” and “chance” is certainly a way of thinking about the process, but not in regard to the “mixing”. Where “chance” comes in, as I said above, is in regard to what correlates with what. And while you are correct that the process is “chaotic”, as in the sense of “non-linear”, in that sense, “chaos” means something very different from “random”:
Distinguishing random from chaotic data
I have to say, I think the reverse is true – the fact that you do not seem to be seeing my point, which is that the definition of words within an argument matters crucially to that argument, perhaps enables me to see more clearly why you reject evolutionary theory.
Well, while being “rude” is not necessarily against the rules of this site (for example there is no rule about someone being rudely dismissive of an argument, or indeed about someone who is not actually a guest on this site) the rules of engagement here require posters to assume other posters are posting in good faith. And that does not include treating people as you think they deserve, or have “earned”. But that applies to everyone, and while I am not the most diligent of admins, that is the principle on which I move stuff to guano when I do, and I try to be even-handed. But I appreciate your desire not to be rude to me 🙂
Not sure whether a 61 year old counts as a girl, but I take your description in the spirit in which I am sure it was meant. And I am more than happy to unpack the logic with you.
You are probably correct there. Mostly I do think I’m right – as friend of mine used to say, if I thought I was wrong, I’d think something different! But I am certainly willing to consider I am wrong, and I’m sure regulars here will attest to my willingness to correct errors, indeed to my free admission that I am more than averagely prone to them. I’m certainly not frightened of being wrong. I’d far rather have my mistakes fixed than go around with them hanging round my neck!
Well, and you, but it seems to me you’ve hardly started. Can you point to an assertion of mine you dispute?
No, that’s not what Barry did. What Barry did was use the term “chance” colloquially the way countless scientists – including yourself – have used it – as a shorthand way of referring to the set of known non-intentional causes and any plausible probabilistic outcomes thereof. Many scientists have referred to “the chance hypothesis” or used the phrase “chance explanation” or “by chance” in this same exact manner – even in peer-reviewed, published papers.
What you are doing is (take note, ye heathens, because this is what it actually means) quote-mining Mr. Arrington – and other ID proponents – to continue propping up your straw man mischaracterizations.
First of all, define order in this context, and say how it differs from what does require intelligence.
Second, can you please answer my question and say whether you think an arrangement of coins heads-up on a table is “ordered” or not?
Third, if the answer is yes, why would we infer intelligence from such a configuration, if order does not signify intelligence? And if the answer is no, why not?
No, I do not “know better than this”. By Dembski’s definition, a sequence of pebbles arranged precisely in order of size has specified complexity: it is easy to describe, and yet is one of an extremely small number of possible configurations that can be as, or more, easily described.
I know that some ID proponents claim that the order in a crystal is different in some way from the specified complexity that allegedly signifies design, but I have never seen anyone explain how to tell one from the other. Can you do it?
And/or can you cite someone who does? (BTW, I have read a substantial amount of ID literature, much of it very closely, not missing out the mathy bits)
If Barry meant, by the word “chance”, “the set of known non-intentional causes”. then my answer to his question as to whether I would reject “chance” as the cause of 500 coins laid heads up on the table is “no”. I would not. I would reject “fair coins, fairly tossed”. There are many other sets of known non-intentional causes I would NOT reject. And that is precisely my point. Barry appears to think that by conflating “chance” with both “the set of known non-intentional causes” and with “fair coins fairly tossed” he can demonstrate that by rejecting a pattern inconsistent with a process with an output that conforms to the binomial distribution we can also reject all other chance processes.
And Sal compounds this error by extrapolating to infer that homochirality (which he thinks is the equivalent of 500 heads) is not possible by “chance” processes.
My entire point, which you have entirely missed, is that “set of known non-intentional causes” comprises sets of causes that produce outcomes that include 500 heads. There is nothing about an “ordered” outcome (as you, oddly enough agree, though it puts you at odds with Barry and Sal in this case) that requires “non-intentional causes”. So an ordered outcome is no grounds for rejecting “chance” if “chance” means ” the set of known non-intentional causes”.
What we can reject confidently, is one specific chance process, namely, fair coins, fairly tossed. That leaves plenty of others unrejected.
Um, no. I’m not. I’m pointing out the equivocation in what he is saying. Although, actually, now that I come to check, Barry himself, does not say, on this occasion, “therefore we can infer design”. However, others do, and I’m not sure what his point is if it is only that we can confidently reject “fair coins fairly tossed” as the likely process by which 500 coins came to be lying heads-up on the table.
But if he’s not, you are: you are jumping the rejection of one specific chance hypothesis (“fair coins, fairly tossed”) to the rejection of “all known non-intentional causes”. Rejecting the first does not imply rejecting the second.
And thus rejecting the first does not allow us to infer “intention” from the table of heads.
phoodoo,
Before you leave, I hope you’ll take up my suggestion:
You’ve acquitted yourself rather poorly. Assuming that was not your intent, you may want to rethink your approach.
Liz,
Mr. Arrington explicitly stated that the 500-head coins on-a-table example he gave has “no tossing involved”. You have yet again mischaracterized for the sake of your straw man.
Being able to state that no coin tossing is involved implies that the history is known.
Rather defeats the point.
Well, I know he told us that. But he then invited us to reject “chance” as the null. My presumption was that he assumed that the person doing the “rejecting” had to do it on the basis of the table configuration only, and was not party to the information that the coins had not been tossed.
If we had been told they had not been tossed, what was the point of the stipulated 500 heads configuration?
Also, William, would you please answer some of the questions I have addressed to you?
For instance, would you call a table covered with coins heads-up an “ordered” configuration, or not? And why?
And how are you distinguishing between an “ordered” arrangement and one that indicates (in your view) design?
You are equivocating an argument about a specific case with a general argument about all cases of ordered outcomes. Mr. Arrington has made an argument about a specific case of ordering, not order in general.
Nobody has made the inane claim that because any outcome is “ordered”, it necessarily means the ordering is intentional, only that some ordered outcomes, because of the recognizably prespecified nature of their ordering (and the lack of known mechanical-necessity-category ordering that would plausibly generate any such outcome) is likely the product of the set of causes characterized as “intentional”. Finding all heads up on a table is Mr. Arrington’s example of such a case.
It is an obvious such case where “chance” is easily dismissed as a plausible “explanation”, and only egregiously anal, belligerent anti-ID hysteria can be the plausible cause of this avalanche of obfuscation-by-minutiae, mischaracterization, concept-bluffing and denial simply to avoid admitting to the obvious.
When one cannot even admit that if one finds 500 heads up on a table of 500 coins, ID is the best explanation without knowing anything about how they got there, then all that is required to persuade reasonable people is, in fact, pointing and laughing.
Anyway, let me be clear:
Barry asked, originally:
If I had been actually been told that no tossing had been involved, clearly I would not postulate any “tossing” method, to explain this particular configuration of coins. I would also reject “poured from a bag of coins”. However, I might not reject: “slid on to the table from the conveyer belt of a mint”. Or “spilled bag of reject coins that had been accidentally minted with two heads”.
I’m not sure which of these you’d describe as “chance”.
But it seemed to me that the point of Barry’s question is that if you saw a table full of coins, heads up, that had in fact not been tossed, but you didn’t know that, would you be able to reject the hypothesis (correctly) that they had not been tossed?
And the answer is, of course, yes.
guano
OK. But you do agree that a table full of coins all heads up, is an “ordered” arrangement?
Good.
Right. So some “ordered” outcomes bespeak design, and others do not, right? And the difference between the two is that if we don’t know of a “mechanical-necessity” process that would generate an ordered pattern, we can infer design?
So if we can’t think (do not know) of any non-design way in which a pattern could have arisen, we can infer design?
I don’t think many IDists would agree with you, William. That’s classic designer-of-the-gaps.
And in any case, on that argument, your objection to my Chesil beach example fails. Nobody knows for sure why the pebbles are so exquisitely ordered, and graduated so finely, over 18 miles of beach. Does that mean we can infer design? It’s not like a repeating crystal, where the repeats are highly determined by the molecular structure, which in turn is a function of its atomic properties.
And you would be turning the whole ID thesis on its head – which is that we can infer design from the pattern, not that we can infer design by not knowing how the pattern can have come about by non-design.
What is “obvious” is that the coins were not fair coins, fairly tossed. Every single person whose comment I have read has readily agreed with this.
What some of have said, in addition, is that by rejecting “fair coins fairly tossed” we are not rejecting “the set of known non-intentional causes”. In this case, the most reasonable explanation would seem to be that someone laid them all, face up, on the table. But in what Sal seems to think is a comparable example, of a set of molecules all with the same chirality (spiraling the same way), we are teld to analogously “reject chance”. Why? Do you, or Sal, know that “the set of non-intentional causes” excludes, with high probability, homochirality? Why should it?
I happily admit that ID is the most likely explanation of how they got there.
Not only that, but I’d say that the ID didn’t toss the coins, but carefully laid them there heads-up for some purpose (possibly testing an evolutionist on their ID detection skills). Not only that, but I wouldn’t require 500 coins. 50 would be more than adequate for me to conclude that an Intelligent Coin-layer was the most likely explanation.
I don’t think a single evolutionist disagrees with me.
So what do you think Barry’s point was?
That we should similarly infer ID if we see a bunch of homochiral molecules?
Also, William: please say what how you are distinguishing between an “ordered” pattern, that does not, apparently according to ID, necessarily imply design, and the kind of pattern that does.
Thanks.
How can it possibly seem that Mr. Arrington’s point was about whether or not one could conclude that the coins had been/had not been tossed when Mr. Arrington specifically excluded tossing – “no tossing involved”?? How can you possible insist that Mr. Arrington is equivocating wrt “fair coin, fair toss” when Mr. Arrington specifically excludes tossing from his example?
You are arguing with a blatant straw man about things that have nothing to do with Mr. Arrington’s actual specific example. But, this is a pattern for you – and many hysterical anti-ID advocates: claim you know what ID advocates mean even when they correct you, even when they explicitly, unequivocally state otherwise, even when your own assertions about what they said are demonstrated to be false.
I note that kairosfocus is floundering a bit trying to produce a rigorous definition of Chance, over at UD, and falling back on an appeal to “common sense”, passing a few probability distributions on the way.
Rubbish! “ID” is not an explanation. It is a default assumption. And what that default assumption amounts to is never stated. “ID” is equivocation personified.
Happy New Year Everyone! Or Bon Reveillon as we say here!
You have the only-possible valid interpretation of B. Arrington Esq’s post — any other interpretation would depend on him being insane or completely pointless.
It’s a shame he’s so incoherent. Well, legal cases have famously been won on incoherent arguments (OJ Simpson, anyone?) so it may not handicap B. Arrington Esq too much in his chosen profession. But his nonsense has to be translated into sense before it can be part of a scientific discussion.
You may be giving him far too much charity to assume he had any point to begin with, but if he did have a point, you’ve certainly identified it and restated it correctly here.
Because the only sensible reading I could make was that he was telling us that the coins had in fact not been tossed, and asking us how we could deduce that fact from the all-heads configuration. If he meant something else, I have no idea what he meant.
If you know the coins were not tossed, and you can see they are all heads, what “chance” hypothesis is he inviting us to reject?
Well, I’d like to know whether Barry himself agrees that in his thought experimenter, the testee was supposed to know that the coins had not been tossed.
He certainly didn’t give that impression his subsequent responses. Nowhere in this post, for example, did he say “Silly Lizzie, I already told you the coins hadn’t been tossed?” Instead he writes a whole OP about p values and null hypothesis testing. Why would that be necessary, if the response to his question didn’t require the testing of a null hypothesis?
What would the null be if “tossed” was ruled out a priori? Barry may be wrong, but he’s not stupid.
My experience with you, William, is that whenever anyone attempts to unfathom one of your statements, by paraphrasing, perhaps, you habitually respond along the lines of “No, that’s not what I meant”. No meaningful elucidation follows.
Bon Reveillon to you too!
Oddly enough, even you, here, assume that the person making the inference does so “without knowing anything about how they got there”. But then you claim that we are supposed to make the inference knowing something rather important about how they got there – that no “tossing” was involved.
Examples of what Liz characterizes as “chance” (as a category) mechanisms to explain the 500 heads:
Points. Laughs.
And a perfectly valid default assumption in this case. We know that coins and tables are human artefacts, and that one thing that human beings do is toss coins, and another thing they do is lay them on tables in special configurations on tables in order to make points about probability.
So my priors would be very high for an intelligent coin-layer in this case.
Not so with homochirality, for which there could well be a non-intentional process, especially one that involved feedback.
And what point are you laughing at? I have already said that an Intelligent Coin layer would be my favored explanation.
The point of my other examples is to show that rejecting one “chance” hypotheses does not necessarily entail rejecting all. In this case, tossing and laying are the two most likely processes and if you rule out one, you can infer the other with high probability.
But if you want to generalise then you need to consider the broader point.
If you don’t, then what the heck is the point of the example at all?
So William votes for one of the alternatives “[Arrington] being insane or completely pointless.”
Good to know that’s how other IDists see B Arrington Esq.
I’d agree that the likeliest explanation is for a human coin layer. I’m not sure we could infer the level of intelligence of the coin layer. But William tells us “ID” is the explanation!
Well I have to say, that I assumed that the point of the original question, which was addressed specifically to Nick Matzke, the “evolutionist” Barry loves to tangle with, was to somehow provoke Nick into making either what Barry thought would be a damaging admission (“yes, obviously I would reject chance”) or an absurd refusal (“sure it could have been chance”), the 500 heads being specifically chose, as Barry has chosen in the past (this is not the first 500 heads post of Barry’s) as representing “500” bits, and thus a probability lower than Dembski’s UPB, 2^-500, of occurring “by chance” (i.e. from fair tosses – the probability would be considerably higher from other random processes).
And to tell us, as you yourself have just done, that if we are so far gone as to not reject chance when presented with 500 heads (not that any of us have done so), no wonder we believe the Evolutionary Fairy Tail.
Unfortunately, of course, we poor benighted DDS sufferers are perfectly happy to reject “Chance” (i.e. that the coins were fair coins, fairly tossed) and conclude that the mostly likely explanation is an Intelligent Coin Layer – and our point is that by doing so we are not making any kind of awkward admission, because we are perfectly capable of distinguishing between the expected distribution of coins from a fair coin tossing process and the expected distributions from various other non-intentional processes, unspecified.
You can’t have it both ways, William – either Barry’s question was trivial, and a straightforward “no” binds us to nothing other than his example, or it was not trivial, in which case, we are bound to point out the non-applicability of coin-tossing distributions to the myriad other distributions that result on highly ordered, and, indeed, specifiably complex, configurations of stuff.
How about the probability of protons lying one way in a large magnet?
Its not as though the probability of any one proton being oriented with the magnet is very high – most do not. But the number that are is far more than under the null of “no magnet”.
Chance? We reject the “chance” null. “Necessity”? not at all, because most protons are not aligned, and there is no way of predicting which will align.
Intelligent magnets? If not, why not? William? KF?
As I said, you may be far too charitable in assuming that Barry had any point to begin with.
The purpose of his post could, with high probability, have been to say any incoherent pointless thing to serve as an opening for his UD followers to excoriate the stupid Darwinists yet again.
William’s behavior in this thread is evidence that my hypothesis about Barry’s purpose is correct. Or rather, I should say, gives me no reason to reject the null that UDers responses do not differ in reaction to cases where Barry has a point versus has no point.
Same bubbling anger about “belligerent anti-ID hysteria can be the plausible cause of this avalanche of obfuscation-by-minutiae, mischaracterization, concept-bluffing and denial” in either case.