Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
Why "instead" when you say:
Then you're an agnostic atheist.
Or did you mean (as in the thread title) "rather" instead of "instead"?
Why I am agnostic rather than atheist.
- Thread starter Eukaryote
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Or did you mean (as in the thread title) "rather" instead of "instead"?
anandus
Errorist
Is that possible? Aren't the terms mutually exclusive?
If not, then I am an agnostic atheist.
Edit:
I see they aren't mutually exclusive, strictly speaking, so yes, I am an agnostic atheist.
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
Welcome to the club 
timtofly
One Day
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Randomness has nothing to do with it. The person who placed the marble in the box knows the color. I would be wrong if the marble was always there, but then the whole premise would be wrong, because there would be no choices at all. No one would would be able to even offer that the color would be balck or red.
Really? That's considered a code blue fallacy where I'm from.
Mise
isle of lucy
The probability is unknown.
The reason we sometimes think of these things as being 50/50 is that usually this kind of sentence construct is describing something that is implicitly 50/50. For example, if you don't know which way the nearest toilet is and you need to decide whether to go left or right, you will have a 50% chance of going the right direction. Why? Because there is an implicit assumption that toilets are evenly distributed throughout the building; that there is no bias in the building towards building a toilet towards the building's left or its right. If you know nothing else, then you assume this. And it's a pretty reasonable assumption, that nobody would call you on, because all of your experience in real life tells you that buildings have no bias either way: some buildings have toilets to the left, others to the right.
More mathematically, assume there is only 1 toilet. You don't know where the toilet is. You also don't know where you are. For all intents and purposes, the toilet is randomly distributed on a x-y plane, with you at the origin. Key phrase: randomly distributed. When a thing is randomly distributed on a plane, there is an equal likelihood that it is to the left or to the right of the origin -- or at least, that is the implicit assumption that you're making. And, again, this assumption seems valid when we compare it to our experiences: toilets don't appear to have any bias towards appearing to our left than to our right, or vice versa.
So when you talk about red or black balls having a 50% chance of showing up, you're making an implicit assumption that those balls are evenly distributed. And, at a push, I would agree that the balls are evenly distributed -- because when people pose that sort of question to you, they usually mean to imply that they are evenly distributed. My experience with picking either black or red backs this up: Black and Red show up in equal numbers on roulette tables, and there are an equal number of black and red cards in a standard deck of playing cards. But my experience also tells me that there might be more red than black balls: what if the person posing this question took balls from a snooker table, then picked one at random? 9 reds or whatever vs 1 black. Not 50/50 now is it. But usually, when people ask me to pick a coloured ball out of a bag, or guess which coloured ball is in a bag, they mean to imply that there is an equal probability of me guessing the right ball. And indeed, in asking me to pick a colour, red or black, they are usually making the assumption that there is no human bias or predilection in favour of red over black, or vice versa. So there is an implicit mutual agreement here, one that is unwritten, but one that is backed up by countless social interactions and experiences with picking either a Red and a Black.
Another way of thinking about it is this: you are making an assumption about how the red or black ball got there. If you assume that it was picked randomly, then you have to make an assumption about what it was picked randomly from. Is it snooker balls? Or is it a bag that contained an equal number of balls? You can again use your experience as a guide here. If you assume it was picked deliberately, then you have to make an assumption about the person picking. Does this individual have a bias? What is the probability that this individual has a bias? Again, experience can be the judge: maybe if it was a ball that smelt like crap vs a ball that felt like boobs, then more people would pick the boob ball than the crap ball. But with red or black, your experience tells you that people don't really have a preference either way. Or maybe they do -- maybe you do, but you don't know it. Well, again, we're back to the toilet distributed on a plane -- except there are two toilets. What if the toilets have a bias to the left? Well, the first toilet might land at some co-ordinate, but the 2nd toilet still has an equal probability of landing to the left as to the right of the first toilet.
Again, though, the point is you use your experience to make some assumptions about the problem. You never have zero information: you have some biases about the problem, and you use those biases to come up with a probability. In your case, you've decided that a person asking that question would probably mean to imply that it's a 50/50 deal. I suspect that most people would think similarly. But the point is, what we're doing is building some assumptions in order to calculate a probability, and those assumptions come from our real life experiences and interactions with similar problems.
There is no such experience when we talk about God, however. We don't have anything to back up the idea that there is an equal probability that God exists. In fact, we have a lot of experience to suggest that God doesn't exist -- we've never seen him or heard him or anything. So you can't use this same implicit assumption of randomly distributed toilets or randomly selected balls from a snooker table or whatever. There's nothing that you can use, no experience that can guide you; or, worse, the only experiences you have suggest that God doesn't exist.
So no, 50/50 isn't in any way the default probability you assign to unknown outcomes. There's always some assumption you're making, if you assign a 50/50.
Mise
isle of lucy
Also, you're also making all sorts of other assumptions about the problem, such as that the person isn't simply lying. I will accept that there is an equal probability that the ball is red as that it is black, but only insofar as the probability is Null. There is an equal probability that the ball is green or yellow, because the person could be lying about the colour, or that the ball is actually a sheep's liver, because the person could be lying about it being a ball at all. If the person asking the question was a magician, I would expect that the sealed box wasn't sealed at all; assuming 50/50 means assuming that the person asking the question isn't a magician, which seems weird given that this is exactly the sort of thing that gets asked by magicians but by no-one else.
EDIT: Actually, if you assume that there is a 50/50 chance of the person lying, or being a magician, or of the balls being picked from a snooker set, or whatever else you can think of, you eventually divide your probability up into more and more chunks, until you end up with zero probability for all outcomes. Or, in otherwords, the probability of any single outcome is zero.
EDIT: Actually, if you assume that there is a 50/50 chance of the person lying, or being a magician, or of the balls being picked from a snooker set, or whatever else you can think of, you eventually divide your probability up into more and more chunks, until you end up with zero probability for all outcomes. Or, in otherwords, the probability of any single outcome is zero.
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
Borachio, just so I know what I'm dealing with. When you buy a lottery ticket, and you don't know how many tickets are sold and you either win the jackpot or you don't.
Is winning the jackpot in the lottery a 50/50 proposition?
Is winning the jackpot in the lottery a 50/50 proposition?
What's the probability that 50:50 is the correct probability distribution for the existence of God?
Randomness has everything to do with it.
There is no practical difference in drawing a single marble between a box with a 50% chance of having 2 red marbles and a 50% chance of having 2 black marbles or a box with a red and a black marble.
Borachio
Way past lunacy
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This is a terrible example with me, since I think lottery tickets are a tax on the gullible.
(Not that I have anything against gambling. It's losing I can't abide.)
I am waiting for the opportune moment for buying a lottery ticket. When I feel lucky enough I shall buy one with the full expectation of winning.
I have admitted it in a previous post, probability baffles me. And I should, probably, stop typing random nonsense on the subject.
But to be serious, the chances of picking a winning number in the UK lottery were in the region of 1:13,000,000 the last time I did the sum. I don't recall it depended on the number of tickets sold. Why is this relevant?
Borachio
Way past lunacy
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Good one.
What's the answer?
I'm guessing it's exactly the same as the correct probability for the existence of God. Otherwise we'll get involved in a recursive inquiry.
Oh dear. I shouldn't have started typing on this subject. It's as well if I stop.
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
Probing how deep the 50/50 rabbit hole goes.
With regard to the probability of the existence of God, you're far from alone.
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
They aren't.. I am both an agnostic and a (weak) atheist.
However, by saying that you believe that God doesn't exist, that makes you a strong atheist. That could affect your status as an agnostic (technically speaking), but I'm not sure.
anandus
Errorist
I had to look up the exact meaning of both words as I thought it was exclusive, but it's not.
Atheism is about believing that there isn't a god or gods, agnosticism is about the logical reasoning (or lack of possibilities to do so) of the existence of a god(s).
To quote Wikipedia on agnosticism:
So atheists and theists alike can also be agnostic.
One can define stricter definitions and distinctions for a particular context, but roughly, an agnostic is someone who isn't sure about the existence of God, and an atheist is someone who thinks God does not exist. It is better to assume people use the broader definitions, that try to force people into your own definitions for these words. Debating the ideal semantics of the two terms is a much less purposeful exercise than discussing the actual existence of God.
In this thread it's quite clear that the rough definition of agnosticism fits Drool4Res-pect much better than atheism.
In this thread it's quite clear that the rough definition of agnosticism fits Drool4Res-pect much better than atheism.
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
That's dangerous, because under that definition I would not be an atheist.
However, I do not believe that God exists. I'm an atheist.
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
I think the distinction is in the word 'rather'. Even though one can be both, one can feel more aligned with just one of them.
Do you have no idea if God exists, or are you reasonably sure God doesn't exist?
Both strong and weak athiests could be said to think that God doesn't exist, though a weak athiest would claim that they don't have sufficent evidence to claim knowlege of the non-existence of God (knowledge requires evidence).
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