I don’t understand why you invoke probability theory in a situation where it has no rhetorical value. Your conversation was a rhetorical situation, not a math problem, so you have to evaluate it and calibrate your speech acts accordingly—or else you get nowhere, which is exactly what happened.
Your argument to your friend was exactly like someone justifying something about their own religion by citing their bible. It works great for people in your own community who already accept your premises. To anyone outside your community, you might as well be singing a tuneless hymn.
Besides that, the refuge available to anyone even within your community is to challenge the way that you have modeled the probability problem. If we change the model, the probabilities are dramatically changed. This is the lesson we get from Lord Kelvin’s miscalculation of the age of the Sun, for instance. Arnold Sommerfeld once remarked that the hydrogen atom appeared to be more complex than a grand piano. In a way it is, but not so much once quantum mechanics was better understood. The story of the Periodic Table of Elements is also a story of trying different models.
Mathematics is powerful and pure. Your only little problem is demonstrating—in terms your audience will value—that your mathematics actually represents the part of the world you claim it represents. That’s why you can’t impose closure on everyone else using a rational argument; and why you may need a few other rhetorical tools.
Your confidence in your arguments seems to come from a coherence theory of truth: when facts align in beautiful and consistent ways, that coherence creates a powerful incentive to accept the whole pattern. Annoyingly, there turn out to be many ways to find or create coherence by blurring a detail here, or making an assumption there, or disqualifying evidence. For instance, you consistently disqualify evidence from spiritual intuition, don’t you? Me, too. How can we be sure we should be doing that?
Why not learn to live with that? Why not give up the quest for universal closure, and settle for local closure? That’s Pyrhhonian skepticism.
Why use probability even in conversations with people who don’t understand probability?
Because probability is TRUE. And if people keep hearing about it, maybe they’ll actually try to start learning about it.
You’re right of course that this needs to be balanced with rhetorical efficiency—we may need to practice some Dark Arts to persuade people for the wrong reasons just to get them to the point where the right reasons can work at all.
The rest of your comment dissolves into irrationality pretty quickly. We do in fact know to very high certainty that “spiritual intuition” is not good evidence, and if you really doubt that we can deluge you with gigabytes of evidence to that effect.
Pyrrhonism is sometimes equated with skepticism, in which case it’s stupid and self-defeating; and sometimes it’s equated with fallibilism, in which case it’s true and in some cases even interesting (many people who cite the Bible’s infallibility do not seem to understand that relying on their assessment would be asserting their infallibility), but usually is implicit in the entire scientific method. I don’t know which is historically closer to what Pyrrho thought, but nor do I particularly care.
I don’t understand why you invoke probability theory in a situation where it has no rhetorical value. Your conversation was a rhetorical situation, not a math problem, so you have to evaluate it and calibrate your speech acts accordingly—or else you get nowhere, which is exactly what happened.
Your argument to your friend was exactly like someone justifying something about their own religion by citing their bible. It works great for people in your own community who already accept your premises. To anyone outside your community, you might as well be singing a tuneless hymn.
Besides that, the refuge available to anyone even within your community is to challenge the way that you have modeled the probability problem. If we change the model, the probabilities are dramatically changed. This is the lesson we get from Lord Kelvin’s miscalculation of the age of the Sun, for instance. Arnold Sommerfeld once remarked that the hydrogen atom appeared to be more complex than a grand piano. In a way it is, but not so much once quantum mechanics was better understood. The story of the Periodic Table of Elements is also a story of trying different models.
Mathematics is powerful and pure. Your only little problem is demonstrating—in terms your audience will value—that your mathematics actually represents the part of the world you claim it represents. That’s why you can’t impose closure on everyone else using a rational argument; and why you may need a few other rhetorical tools.
Your confidence in your arguments seems to come from a coherence theory of truth: when facts align in beautiful and consistent ways, that coherence creates a powerful incentive to accept the whole pattern. Annoyingly, there turn out to be many ways to find or create coherence by blurring a detail here, or making an assumption there, or disqualifying evidence. For instance, you consistently disqualify evidence from spiritual intuition, don’t you? Me, too. How can we be sure we should be doing that?
Why not learn to live with that? Why not give up the quest for universal closure, and settle for local closure? That’s Pyrhhonian skepticism.
Why use probability even in conversations with people who don’t understand probability?
Because probability is TRUE. And if people keep hearing about it, maybe they’ll actually try to start learning about it.
You’re right of course that this needs to be balanced with rhetorical efficiency—we may need to practice some Dark Arts to persuade people for the wrong reasons just to get them to the point where the right reasons can work at all.
The rest of your comment dissolves into irrationality pretty quickly. We do in fact know to very high certainty that “spiritual intuition” is not good evidence, and if you really doubt that we can deluge you with gigabytes of evidence to that effect.
Pyrrhonism is sometimes equated with skepticism, in which case it’s stupid and self-defeating; and sometimes it’s equated with fallibilism, in which case it’s true and in some cases even interesting (many people who cite the Bible’s infallibility do not seem to understand that relying on their assessment would be asserting their infallibility), but usually is implicit in the entire scientific method. I don’t know which is historically closer to what Pyrrho thought, but nor do I particularly care.