Week #25: Video Review

This one is a review of a youtube video. I don't normally do reviews of anything, but this guy pissed me off. Besides, Paula does book and cupcake reviews, so, nyah. Anyhow, my regular readers (all 4 of them) will probably hate this, but they have earned skipping just this one because they've been so nice to me on my other postings. The rest of you who are NOT regular readers are required to read every single word. Now.

So, what brought this on?

I've been getting myself back up to speed on basic calculus and statistics, and specifically, am re-doing a bunch of work on Bayesian analysis which, without putting too fine a point on it, is absolutely one of the best tools available to make rational decisions on incomplete data, and update those decisions based on NEW data. In fact the image above, which is one version of Bayes Rule, is on the lock screen of my iPhone as a reminder to stop, take a breath, and analyze before deciding anything.

As a result, I've been reading a lot of papers and watching a lot of videos on Bayes theorem/rule/inference/analysis, and in particular ran across this one.

It's an explanation of Bayes Theorem given at Skepticon 4. Skepticon is a conference of skeptical thinkers (supposedly in the analytic scientific sense, although their approach to religion in general and Christianity in particular are frequently unabashedly dogmatic, which is anti-skeptical-thinking on its face) that occurs yearly, usually in Springfield MO.

Richard Carrier, the presenter in this video, is something of a leading light in the "Frothing Atheist Activist" wing of the skeptical crowd, and, incidentally, a pretty good statistician. The video is about 45 minutes long, and is entitled "Bayes Theorem: Key to the Universe." A little hyperbolic, I suppose, but not by much. Bayes is pretty magic show, if you know how to use it in decision making and inferential critical thinking. Anyhow -- the review: 

Bayes Theorem: Key to the Universe, Richard Carrier at Skepticon 4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHIz-gR4xHo

Shame -- the instructional bits of this video are excellent. Then he shoots a hole in all of it by indulging in exactly the behavior of which he accuses the religionists.

He bases his purported analysis of the near-zero probability that God exists in the assertion that there's empirical evidence that can be used a priori that less than one in a million rational or "good" beings who could say anything about slavery without consequence wouldn't do so, based on the dataset he has available: Humans.

This is the rankest kind of BS.

Another way to look at this is that he is saying that of all the entries in the database set we have access to (humans,) one in a million or less WOULDN'T speak out against slavery. This necessarily includes all the humans in history (since God is theoretically infinite,) the HUGE majority of which had slaves, were slaves, or benefited from slaves, or drank from the skulls of their enemies or flayed prisoners for public entertainment or all manner of other "ill shit," which makes his assertion that only one in a million aren't as "good" as he is, frankly, ludicrous.

This is not to mention VERY large current populations in which entire classes (women, for example) are for all practical purposes slaves whether by name or not, never mind the philosophical debate as to whether minimum-wage flunkies are slaves.

He is saying that less than one in a million of all of these does not have the same moral standards he does.

Really? That passes unchallenged as a rational idea at a Skepticon conference?

A more accurate estimate is that historically and currently, about 95% of all the humans who have ever lived would be utterly mystified as to his anti-slavery stance to one degree or another. This is not to include the rest of the universe (since he's trying to disprove a universal God,) which is almost certainly populated, and of those populations most are very likely so utterly alien (that's why they call them that) that the odds of their morality being the same as Carrier's is, roughly, zero.

In short, he's essentially saying that his modern, western, ivory tower liberal sense of morality is the One True Path, and anyone who doesn't believe it can be dismissed as a statistical fluke, because their "excuse" for not being so would be less than 1% of the "true" hypothesis space.

Or to put it another way, what he has actually demonstrated is that God, as demonstrated by his purported actions and writings, isn't HIM, or, if you prefer, that there is a near zero probability that HE is God.

Believing that this applies to the existence of God is a giant pantload. No one (God or man) needs an "excuse" to not fall into this Carrier's morality model. It's simply the human condition.

Plug in an 80% likelihood that there are aliens advanced or super-advanced enough to have some sort of moral code, and that they vastly outnumber us, and you'll find that the universe in general probably has about a 1% chance of having some sort of code that he would even recognize, never mind be the same.

This leaves about a 99% chance (or "prior" as you will) that universe-wide intelligences at random would NOT have some sort of code that's the same as his. I'm feeling generous. Let's make it 95%.

Now, plug in a 20% prior likelihood that there are NO aliens of any kind, moral or not. Do the math and all of a sudden the probability of God's back to about 49.1% vs 50.9% -- a dead heat.

In short, if this clown wanted to use Bayes to establish the probable non-existence of God, he would have been hard pressed to find a stupider, more subjective, more highly corruptible way to attempt it.

Am I saying there's a 50/50 likelihood of a universal, all-powerful God? No, not for a minute. Science and physics does just fine in reducing the likelihood of an infinite God to near-zero, thankyouverymuch. I'm just saying that using THIS guy's own logic, we're back to 50/50.

So why did Carrier bother with this cluster of reeking crap?

Well, a reasonable Bayesian analysis of his raison d'être, with priors established by his entire writing and lecture series (including the books he's hustling without end in this video) makes it clear that this blindly rabid, near-destruction and prostitution of the Bayesian statistical method is a symptom of his obsessive-to-personality-disorder desire to rag on Christians and early Americans in general and "Southern Whites" in particular.

This entire section of his lecture is about as soundly based in real statistical inference as Scientology, and the crowd wildly applauding every time he said "fuck" in the same sentence as "God" was nothing short of a nauseating display of Political Correctness run amok in the sheep's clothing of "science." They'd as well have been a North Korean parliament meeting.

The review summary: This video is utterly despicable. The first half demonstrates that he actually has something useful to say, which he then twists to unrecognizability and buries under the horseshit of his personal agenda. This barely-even-bother-to-hide-it bait and switch fraud makes him just another carny barker hustling the rubes in to see the mermaid.

I'm surprised the "logical thinkers" of Skepticon 4 didn't run him out of the place on the same rail they'd reserve for Deepak Chopra or an Appalachian snake handler. Their failure to do so exposes them as being exactly the same bedazzled mouth breathers they claim they despise.

Deepak Chopra
Carrier's Analytic Thinking Twin

Give me a Neil DeGrass Tyson style of clear thinking every time rather than this amped-up load of evangelistic horseshit. 

Grade: C. Would have been an "F" if not for the first half.