Re: Bayes in your Luggage

Actually it was on this flight during easter
when I miraculously escaped detention to Guatanamo
that Bayes theorem came to my attention.
Imagine you had never heard of Christianity
before nor any resurrection stories. Despite
all the billions examples of people and living
beings dying and not resurrecting, if someone
came to you and told you that their Grandpa Joe
claimed to be a manifestation of God and resurrected,
then before hearing any more, you give him 1 chance
in 4 that he tells the truth?
It all began in 1748, when the philosopher
David Hume published An Enquiry Concerning
Human Understanding, calling into question,
among other things, the existence of miracles.
According to Hume, the probability of people
inaccurately claiming that they’d seen Jesus’
resurrection far outweighed the probability
that the event had occurred in the first place.
This did not sit well with the reverend.
In 1767, Richard Price, Bayes’ friend,
published “On the Importance of Christianity,
its Evidences, and the Objections which have
been made to it,” which used Bayes’ ideas to
mount a challenge to Hume’s argument. “The
basic probabilistic point” of Price’s article,
says statistician and historian Stephen
  Stigler, “was that Hume underestimated the
impact of there being a number of independent
witnesses to a miracle, and that Bayes’ results
showed how the multiplication of even fallible
evidence could overwhelm the great improbability
of an event and establish it as fact.”
John schrieb:

On Thu, 11 Apr 2024 23:48:28 +0200, Mild Shock <janburse@fastmail.fm>
wrote:
 

Last year making it to LAX was quite troublesome:
>

<<snipped>>
   Oh, a troll and a top-poster. Ah, well, welcome to the filtered zone.
   G'bye.
                                                        J.