jordan_tar

Why???

Philosoft

Is this a joke?

beausoleil

Well, there either is one or there isn't one, so it's 50-50.

I think superstition is a bit like a drug - ok as long as you don't let it ruin your life. I think many people manage quite happily with a little social superstitioning without becoming superstitioholics. Some fundamentalists just developed dependency.

Nameless One

Sure, and there is a 50% chance i'll
win the lottery.

Doubting Didymus

I can almost understand how people can believe in something that contradicts all the evidence, but how on earth can someone believe in something even after making up their own mind that that thing is false? This just completely baffles me! Your freind now knows as well as you do that John Edward is a charlatan, but insists on believing it anyway? Put simply: she knows it's true but she knows it's false?

Someone who can do this with their mind just isn't thinking.

Boro Nut

Well, in Britain we stopped being superstitious generations ago. Its undesirable because we believe that being superstitious can bring you seven years bad luck.

Boro Nut

fwh

Troma said:
It turns out people don't want to hear the skeptics side of things! That still surprises me, I mean it's not like we rain on peoples parades or anyth... oh wait, uh, I guess we do...

me:
OK. I am skeptical of the idea that the habit of meticulously observing the facts of nature and systematically interpreting them in terms of physical cause and effect(science) is the ONLY method of interpreting facts-no matter how successful. And to be ornery, I would say that the belief in that notion is a type of superstition.

Mr. Sammi

Philosoft, Zspeed,

Either it is or it is not. Do you think superstition runs deeper than this for me? IF you do then there is a 50% chance you are fooling yourself.

Do not become mixed up with the depth of probabilistic analysis. For some, either they win or they do not win the lottery. IF you take into account the numbers played in relation to what can actually happen, then the probabilistic function would describe the probability of you picking the correct numbers. Quite a different thing from either you win the lottery or you do not.

Sammi Na Boodie (big big bad joker)

[ July 10, 2002: Message edited by: Sammi ]</p>

Philosoft

You know, while sitting around saying, "I don't believe that even though all evidence supports it and nothing contradicts it" might be some kind of pure skepticism, it won't earn you any respect among the philosophical skeptics around here.

Philosoft

The chances of a proposition being true are not simply a function of the number of possible outcomes.

<strong> It strikes me as exceedingly silly to speak like that. When we speak of two-outcome situations, the only time we say there is a 50% chance of one of two outcomes is when we have a "fair" situation. That is, all forces that affect the outcome are not biased. It is for this reason we say that a coin-flip is a 50/50 situation and not simply because there are two possible outcomes. If one side of the coin had a weight affixed to it, we might expect to see that side appear less. In a situation where there are two possible outcomes but something other than a 50/50 probability split. It should be obvious that god/no-god is much too complex a proposition to assign a 50/50 probability.