I was challenging his pseudo-rational decision-making process. Nobody I know really makes decisions as he suggests. I don't think about the 0.01-0.1% chance of an accident before getting my car to drive to work in the morning, and weigh it against all the other possibilities as if I'm doing some EV calculation in my head and determining the best action. Do you?

Nice post AW. How do you assign a percentage that varies by individual and varies over time. That's a rhetorical question. No need to answer.

Aaron,

You dodged the point and then had Splendour congratulate you for it. Incredible.

I asked you if you have faith the sun would come up tomorrow and you didn't answer. I also asked how you differentiate between a %age and an amount of faith and you didn't answer that one either.
It's not even close to a rhetorical question. I'll answer it:

If there are changes, you simply make adjustments for them.

1) Person A bluffs a lot in poker. You call them down lightly. Do you need faith that they're bluffing this time?

2) Person A stops bluffing as much as they used to (they "varied by individual over time"). Should you change the amount you call them down? Should your faith that they're bluffing this time change?

It's hard to describe because most people define it and use it in a vague fashion. That's why I'm trying to pinpoint your interpretation of it, but you keep avoiding my questions.

I'll add one more "assertion" though. The words "confidence" and "trust" to me imply a higher level of certainty than evidence suggests.

What does an outside observer have to do with anything? We're discussing how faith affects someone's decision-making, which will not be clearly visible to anyone except the acting party. Even so, I still say you're wrong. The 95%-driving to work observer will see that I have insurance to protect me against the 5%, while the 100% observer won't because I won't have a need for it. Again, if I take action against the 5% risk, in no way am I acting as if it is 100% true.



No, he probably says all of those things in practice though over and over again, instead of just "trusting" his players to do all the right things when he first meets them. Maybe the coach doesn't know all of the percentages for the success of various plays, but that's only because he's a bad coach! A good coach knows where his shooters have higher shooting percentages and sets his play selection to maximize those, which leads to more points for his team. And you can bet that a lot of NBA front offices know exactly how well all of their players and opponents shoot from a variety of places on the court. Ever see a team force a player to constantly drive to the left side?

Yes? Can you distinguish between a Ray Allen three and a Yao Ming three?

The one point that I've been trying to make for most of this thread is that faith is either meaningless or damaging. You stated that faith does not affect your certainty in a proposition. My main question is then, how does faith affect your decision-making compared to only looking at the evidence itself? I know that someone is a 30% three-point shooter, and I'm deciding how many shots he should take per game. Now I introduce faith into the equation. Will that cause me to change how many shots I want him to take? If it does, than I am using something other than probability to determine my scoring distribution, which will lead to fewer points. If it doesn't, then faith has not affected my decision in any way and is purposeless.

Which part do you disagree with?

I would say that I have faith in the sun rising tomorrow. I am confident it will happen. But this example is deceptive in this discussion because it has nothing to do with my actions. It's hard to see how "faith" in the sun rising (or a failure of it) will change how I might behave.

As for the second question, I'm saying (and have been saying) that faith is made manifest in action. Two people can have an equal level of confidence in something as some abstract percent, but this does not mean that both people will act in the same way. Some people feel that "90% confidence" is enough to act on a particular proposition, but others would rather have "95% confidence" and so choose not to act because they lack "faith".

Notice that faith itself is not being quantified here. I'm not saying that the 90% person has "more" faith and that the 95% person has "less" faith. I'm just saying that the 95% person does not have faith while the 90% person does.

I don't think bluffing is a particularly apt analogy to apply to one's personal relationship with God but that's probably hard for a non-believer to see so I'll leave it at that.

End of thread for me. My congrats again on the well written posts AW.

What you completely leave out of this example (and, as a mathematician, you should be ashamed of yourself) is the possibility of either person assessing the probability incorrectly.

If both people were somehow handed the ABSOLUTE CORRECT probability for their decision, do you feel faith would still be necessary?

If yes, explain why faith is needed.
If no, explain why we should be using faith instead of seeking truth.

Faith is trust or confidence in something. This is the definition of faith that I've been pushing the entire conversation. But trust is difficult to describe in essence because trust is a mechanism that drives action, and it's hard to understand trust in the absence of action.

If I say "I trust you," it's meaningless until that trust is put to the test. And then when I act in a way that demonstrates that I actually do trust you are you able to see that trust has been established.

Good luck with that. If you really felt this way, it would be impossible for you to say that you are "confident" that the sun will rise tomorrow.

Have you really not been following the conversation? The person acting in faith is taking an action *AS IF* whatever proposition was true. This means that the action itself is *NO DIFFERENT* from the action taken by someone who believes the proposition is true. The act of you getting in the car and driving to work is identical whether you are 90% confident or 99% confident you will arrive at work safely. You just get in your car and go.

<sigh> I didn't want to overcomplicate this with insurance. I actually thought you might go that direction and considered changing the analogy, but I was really hoping you wouldn't. Oh well.

I really wanted to isolate the act of you getting in the car and driving to work. The act of driving itself is unaffected by your level of confidence of arriving safely at work.

LOL. No coach will ever say that such-and-such play has an x% chance of working. Those percentages are unknown (just as with the other levels of confidence discussed in other posts).

They know tendencies, sure. But they don't know percentages. I would be very surprised if you polled the front office of any NBA team and asked them for the shooting percentages for their players from the elbow, that they would be able to cite a number and that everyone would agree on this number.

You didn't answer the question. Reread it and try it again. You're talking about giving the ball to different people. I'm talking about giving the ball to the same person. You can't tell the difference between 30%-giving the ball and 60%-giving the ball to that player.

Faith is what leads to an action being taken. Looking at evidence does not require any commitment to the results of the calculation.

Faith won't be found in the planning stages of a game. Faith is what keeps the player in the game if you fall behind early and he misses his first couple shots. Faith is trust or confidence in something, and trust isn't made manifest unless it has been challenged in some way.

Necessary for what? What is the action that this probability is supposed to measure?

Let's put it in the driving to work context. If you were somehow to know that you were 99.87% to make it to work safely, you're still going to need to get in the car and drive to work. And it won't really matter if you were 99.87% sure of getting to work safely, or 100% sure you were making it to work safely. You're getting in the car and driving to work.

You've still got to drive to work, and when you drive to work, you're driving *AS IF* you were going to make it to work safely. The role of faith is putting your butt in the car and driving, instead of staying at home and hiding because of the .13% chance of not making it.

It seems like you're trying to make faith into a quantifiable here, and I'm going to continue to insist that it isn't. The faith in this case is not found in the probabilities, but in taking the steps towards actually making it to work.

Ahhh I see where the disconnect between us exists.
No, it's not. You have a certain amount of trust (faith) in everybody based on past experiences with them. If you don't have any past experiences with this particular person, then you can still make useful judgments based on general situations surrounding this person. And if you don't have that, you can base things on humanity in general.

This is how the brain works. It computes all of the factors before you even know it. I don't understand why you feel the need to invoke some sort of mystical, supernatural force when it's clearly not needed. We call this the Argument From Personal Incredulity. "I can't believe this is possible, so it can't be true."

WE'RE the ones who don't have complete information. But it can theoretically be learned. Naming the incomplete information "faith" isn't really a solution.

You can insist all day long, but it's VERY clear that faith is quantifiable. Some people obviously have more faith than others...even if the proposition is the same.

I would sit home in this example; and it's not a faith-based decision either.

Using your numbers, I'd be even money to be in a car accident every 3 years. No thanks. Web design and poker from home are safer.

I think someone else mentioned this, but there is a difference in actions. The 99.87% person buys car insurance and wears a seatbelt. The 100% person would do neither of those things. IMO this nitpick is very relevant to the discussion.

What supernatural force have I invoked? Are you defining "faith" as a supernatural force now?

And FWIW, I don't think the brain actually "computes all of those factors" and I think you would be hard pressed to find evidence that it does. If it did, humans would take a huge amount of time to make *ANY* decision. In fact, I believe the best evidence shows that the human brain does *NOT* process all of the available information before making a decision. It's a complex blend of irrational emotional and rational analytic factors.

It's not about lack of information. It's how one acts in light of information.

Perhaps "uniformly quantifiable" would be a better phrase. What I'm trying to say is that you cannot rank various levels of "faith" in some universal sense like a probability. And my view of faith is that you either have it or you don't. Not having "enough" faith is the same as "not having" faith when it comes to how decisions are made and life is played out.

Someone who doesn't wear a seatbelt changes the probability of getting to work safely. A small accident that might not prevent you from getting to work can go from non-injury to major injury very quickly.

But really, these "nitpicks" are diversions from the fact that a person needs to get in the car and drive, and that this act is identical for the 99.87% driver and the 99.88% driver.