Luis Dias wrote:Apparently, apart from the "Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits" swearing show off from some posters (some people here are too militant about "Goldenmane's 3rd rule" for my taste), no one was able to do the fucking obvious, which was to quote wikipedia's first words about Gamber's fallacy:

Wikipedia wrote:The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy (due to its significance in a Monte Carlo casino in 1913)[1] or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that if deviations from expected behaviour are observed in repeated independent trials of some random process then these deviations are likely to be evened out by opposite deviations in the future.

Clearly, this is what people here referred to as "Serial Trials Fallacy". Rainbow may still want to troll this thread even further trying to state, as he did, that this concept is unrelated to the gambler's fallacy. This is called sophistry, and luckily, barely no one in the RS will be convinced by rethorical bullshit. We prefer to discuss actual problems and eventual contradictions in interesting things... not semantical warfare.

Ok I am a little confused - obviously I am confused about what Rainbows point is or was or will be at some stage. However, as I understand the gamblers fallacy it is the idea that just because 10 heads (for instance) have been thrown people tend to assume the next trials are more likely to be tails. As I understand what Cali was getting at it was the failure to understand that improbably things become more likely the increasing number of trials that are occurring simultaneously. Are these two not different. It seems to me the idea Cali is getting at is more closely tied to theBirthday paradox than the gambler's fallacy. I am probably wrong so you can safely ignore me.

No fucking emotion in any of my fucking swearing. My motivation for the application rule # fucking 3 is different.

As for OT, the discussion of rule # 3 is considerably more interesting than Rainbow's diverse wibblings.

Lazar wrote:

Luis Dias wrote:Apparently, apart from the "Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits" swearing show off from some posters (some people here are too militant about "Goldenmane's 3rd rule" for my taste), no one was able to do the fucking obvious, which was to quote wikipedia's first words about Gamber's fallacy:

Wikipedia wrote:The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy (due to its significance in a Monte Carlo casino in 1913)[1] or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that if deviations from expected behaviour are observed in repeated independent trials of some random process then these deviations are likely to be evened out by opposite deviations in the future.

Clearly, this is what people here referred to as "Serial Trials Fallacy". Rainbow may still want to troll this thread even further trying to state, as he did, that this concept is unrelated to the gambler's fallacy. This is called sophistry, and luckily, barely no one in the RS will be convinced by rethorical bullshit. We prefer to discuss actual problems and eventual contradictions in interesting things... not semantical warfare.

Ok I am a little confused - obviously I am confused about what Rainbows point is or was or will be at some stage. However, as I understand the gamblers fallacy it is the idea that just because 10 heads (for instance) have been thrown people tend to assume the next trials are more likely to be tails. As I understand what Cali was getting at it was the failure to understand that improbably things become more likely the increasing number of trials that are occurring simultaneously. Are these two not different. It seems to me the idea Cali is getting at is more closely tied to theBirthday paradox than the gambler's fallacy. I am probably wrong so you can safely ignore me.

The relationship is that they both deal with deviations from expected behaviour. The serial trials deals specifically with said deviations becoming statistically inevitable when dealing with large sample sets.

stijndeloose wrote:

rainbow wrote:No, it was from truthinScience. Didn't you follow the links that I gave?

Now if truthinScience's links aren't good enough for you, please provide your own better links.

I asked you to substantiate that the Strawman Fallacy (as opposed to the Serial Trials Fallacy) has a place in formal logic. It's not my problem if you can't.

EDIT: I have to admit that insisting on providing a quote from a formal logic book would smell of luring you into an argument from authority. So I'd agree if you ignore my question and reply to 95theses's.

... and it's not a problem to me if you don't like the links I gave.
Out of very basic courtesy I'd expect you to comment on them, since you did ask for them.

hackenslash wrote:No fucking emotion in any of my fucking swearing. My motivation for the application rule # fucking 3 is different.

You don't understand. I don't care about your emotions in your swearing. What I want to share with you is an acknowledgement that swearing is an emotional tool against the receiver. You may not feel a thing, but the "receiver" will, and that's what fucking counts.

As for OT, the discussion of rule # 3 is considerably more interesting than Rainbow's diverse wibblings.

I fucking agree.

Lazar wrote:

Luis Dias wrote:Apparently, apart from the "Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits" swearing show off from some posters (some people here are too militant about "Goldenmane's 3rd rule" for my taste), no one was able to do the fucking obvious, which was to quote wikipedia's first words about Gamber's fallacy:

Wikipedia wrote:The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy (due to its significance in a Monte Carlo casino in 1913)[1] or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that if deviations from expected behaviour are observed in repeated independent trials of some random process then these deviations are likely to be evened out by opposite deviations in the future.

Clearly, this is what people here referred to as "Serial Trials Fallacy". Rainbow may still want to troll this thread even further trying to state, as he did, that this concept is unrelated to the gambler's fallacy. This is called sophistry, and luckily, barely no one in the RS will be convinced by rethorical bullshit. We prefer to discuss actual problems and eventual contradictions in interesting things... not semantical warfare.

Ok I am a little confused - obviously I am confused about what Rainbows point is or was or will be at some stage. However, as I understand the gamblers fallacy it is the idea that just because 10 heads (for instance) have been thrown people tend to assume the next trials are more likely to be tails. As I understand what Cali was getting at it was the failure to understand that improbably things become more likely the increasing number of trials that are occurring simultaneously. Are these two not different. It seems to me the idea Cali is getting at is more closely tied to theBirthday paradox than the gambler's fallacy. I am probably wrong so you can safely ignore me.

You're not wrong.
At last some sanity

Lazar wrote:

Luis Dias wrote:Apparently, apart from the "Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits" swearing show off from some posters (some people here are too militant about "Goldenmane's 3rd rule" for my taste), no one was able to do the fucking obvious, which was to quote wikipedia's first words about Gamber's fallacy:

Wikipedia wrote:The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy (due to its significance in a Monte Carlo casino in 1913)[1] or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that if deviations from expected behaviour are observed in repeated independent trials of some random process then these deviations are likely to be evened out by opposite deviations in the future.

Clearly, this is what people here referred to as "Serial Trials Fallacy". Rainbow may still want to troll this thread even further trying to state, as he did, that this concept is unrelated to the gambler's fallacy. This is called sophistry, and luckily, barely no one in the RS will be convinced by rethorical bullshit. We prefer to discuss actual problems and eventual contradictions in interesting things... not semantical warfare.

Ok I am a little confused - obviously I am confused about what Rainbows point is or was or will be at some stage. However, as I understand the gamblers fallacy it is the idea that just because 10 heads (for instance) have been thrown people tend to assume the next trials are more likely to be tails. As I understand what Cali was getting at it was the failure to understand that improbably things become more likely the increasing number of trials that are occurring simultaneously. Are these two not different. It seems to me the idea Cali is getting at is more closely tied to theBirthday paradox than the gambler's fallacy. I am probably wrong so you can safely ignore me.

I could be misunderstanding it myself but I don't think you have it quite right. I think the fallacy is simply named for the fact that subjects, such as abiogenesis, are so often mischaracterised as a sequence of events, such as consequtive lottery wins, when in fact this is not the case. It is called the "serial trials" fallacy because that is a fitting description of the specious proability arguments often erected, not because it is a fitting description of the correct way of understanding these phenomena.

As such, despite rainbow's objections, it seems to be quite fitting.

oh shit Rainbow agrees with me

hackenslash wrote:

The relationship is that they both deal with deviations from expected behaviour. The serial trials deals specifically with said deviations becoming statistically inevitable when dealing with large sample sets.

I would point out that both gamblers and Calis are valid so that is not the issue. However, the gamblers fallacy focuses on a observers belief that, should a sufficient deviation from HTHTHT in coin flips for instance, be observed that an deviation in the opposite direction will occur to restore the balance.

As I understand Cali's argument he is pointing out that people tend to base there believe on how probably an interaction between x and y is based on the probability of a single potential interaction, without noting that the more potential interactions there are the greater the probability that an interaction will occur. For example if you ask people what is the probability that two people in a party of 20 will share the same birthday they will tend to focus on a single interaction i.e. the chance of two people sharing a birthday is 1 in 365. However, a birthday party of 20 actually results in 190 interactions (if my in head maths is right) and those the probability is a great deal higher than.

UnderConstruction wrote:
I could be misunderstanding it myself but I don't think you have it quite right. I think the fallacy is simply named for the fact that subjects, such as abiogenesis, are so often mischaracterised as a sequence of events, such as consequtive lottery wins, when in fact this is not the case. It is called the "serial trials" fallacy because that is a fitting description of the specious proability arguments often erected, not because it is a fitting description of the correct way of understanding these phenomena.

As such, despite rainbow's objections, it seems to be quite fitting.

OK so the idea is that critics of abiogenesis tend to present it as a series of of improbably events in sequential order i.e. the probability of me winning the lotto two weeks in a row is much more improbable than the chance of me winning it once.

EDIT: re-reading Cali's post I think the fallacy he is referring to is basing probabilities on the idea that there is only ONE thing doing the work (i.e. one trial) when in fact there are billions/trillions of trials going on at the same time (i.e. in parallel). Thus even if the possibility of one trial resulting in the right outcomes is massively unlikely, the fact that many many many trials are going on simultaneously makes that improbable event quite probable.

There seems to be a misunderstanding of the so-called "serial trials fallacy". Regardless of whether it finds mention in formal logic etc., its underlying argument is correct, because it constitutes an incorrect way of calculating probability, by assuming that trials can only take place sequentially. This becomes important when time, rather than the no. of trials allowed is a constraining factor.

For example, the probability of obtaining 20 heads in 10 minutes is much lower while tossing a single coin sequentially, than it is while tossing 5 coins in parallel.

iamthereforeithink wrote:There seems to be a misunderstanding of the so-called "serial trials fallacy". Regardless of whether it finds mention in formal logic etc., its underlying argument is correct, because it constitutes an incorrect way of calculating probability, by assuming that trials can only take place sequentially. This becomes important when time, rather than the no. of trials allowed is a constraining factor.

For example, the probability of obtaining 20 heads in 10 minutes is much lower while tossing a single coin sequentially, than it is while tossing 5 coins in parallel.

yes that is pretty much exactly how I read it but I fucked up explaining it cause I placed it under another fallacy of thinking which was in some respects not right. Cali's thinking is spot on and exposes fallacious thinking he is just not exposing the gambler's fallacy.

iamthereforeithink wrote:There seems to be a misunderstanding of the so-called "serial trials fallacy". Regardless of whether it finds mention in formal logic etc., its underlying argument is correct, because it constitutes an incorrect way of calculating probability, by assuming that trials can only take place sequentially. This becomes important when time, rather than the no. of trials allowed is a constraining factor.

For example, the probability of obtaining 20 heads in 10 minutes is much lower while tossing a single coin sequentially, than it is while tossing 5 coins in parallel.

Exactly. I think you are the first person in this thread to correctly state what the serial trials fallacy is.
I actually had a longer debate about this in the original thread on RD.net with rainbow, specifically about Cali's presentation of the serial trials fallacy.

On that note, what did this thread begin from? What was Rainbow's initial comment that lead to someone claiming he committed the serial trials fallacy?

Regarding the serial trials fallacy, the most common erection of it to my knowledge deals with the RNA world hypthesis.
The argument goes :
The simplest known reliably self-replicating RNA polymer is some 120 nucleotides long(or something along that line). So, for life to happen, this specific 120 nucleotide long chain must find its way together in the exactly right sequence before it can start replicating.
So Creationists calculate the total amount of possible combinations of ribonucleotides in a 120'mer configuration and arrive at some obscene astronomical number(which incidentially might be correct), like 10^80 or something like that.
They then go on to state that in order for this specific 120'mer configuration to arrive by chance, the entire age of the universe plus a couple of hundred trillion years must pass before you hit the correct one.
The argument seems to work on the assumption that a single "machine" is building chains of RNA molecules from random monomers, in serial trials, until it hits the correct sequence.

As any reasonably intelligent person will have no doubt realized, this argument fails on almost as many levels as possible combinations of nucleotides in a 19.000'mer long strand of RNA.
Ignoring the multitude of problems with this line of argumentation, the "one true sequence" fallacy also being among them, even if the shortest possible reliably self replicating RNA chain IS 120 nucleotides long, expectedly in real chemical systems many hundres of trillions of RNA chains will assemple in parrallel, and so the initial impropability of arriving at the correct sequence in a given amount of time becomes substantially more propable.
There are countless other defeaters and counteraguments to this line of reasoning.

As long as we can all agree that the serial trials fallacy, whether offically part of formal logic or not, sets out to, and successfully deals with, actually fallacious thinking, then we can say to have made progress.

Rumraket wrote:
On that note, what did this thread begin from? What was Rainbow's initial comment that lead to someone claiming he committed the serial trials fallacy?

This kicked it off :

posting.php?mode=quote&f=39&p=47205

rainbow wrote:

UnderConstruction wrote:

Does the low likelyhood of it occurring due to a random event preclude the possibility of it occurring due to some well defined, testable mechanism instead?

No. You are confusing 'possibility' with 'probability'.
There is a possibility that someone might win the national lottery two weeks in a row.
The probability is very close to zero.
...so close to zero that if it did happen that person would be assumed to be cheating.
Would you agree?

^^In all fairness, he later denied that it was an analogy relating to abiogenesis but he had a number of people confused on that one.

Now as much as I feel I have a decent enough grasp of the difference between possibility and probability, I still can't say as I can quite figure out what he was banging on about. Is he suggesting that anything that is improbable can be considered random? Perhaps it was just a non-rigorous, colloquial use if "random". Who knows?

iamthereforeithink wrote:There seems to be a misunderstanding of the so-called "serial trials fallacy". Regardless of whether it finds mention in formal logic etc., its underlying argument is correct, because it constitutes an incorrect way of calculating probability, by assuming that trials can only take place sequentially. This becomes important when time, rather than the no. of trials allowed is a constraining factor.

Correct. Being presented as a Fallacy implies that it is accepted as being such in Logic. It is not, and it has never been accepted as such outside of this, and the RD forum (and some linked sites).
I object to this dishonesty.
It is not a Fallacy, but an Argument.
Cali's piece might even be a valid Argument, but it is a misrepresentation to present it as a Fallacy.

What is even more objectionable is that it gets dragged out whenever probability is mentioned within any argument on Abiogenesis. It is being used as a Sledgehammer to stifle proper debate.

For example, the probability of obtaining 20 heads in 10 minutes is much lower while tossing a single coin sequentially, than it is while tossing 5 coins in parallel.

Fair enough, I've no problem with this. It certainly has no points of coincidence with the Gambler's Fallacy. (Except perhaps that they might both use tossing coins by way of illustration)

rainbow wrote:Correct. Being presented as a Fallacy implies that it is accepted as being such in Logic.

Fucking drivel. It implies that the thinking behiond it is fallacious. That's what a fallacy is. Whether it has been accepted is irrelevant, and your continued implication that an argument from authority was logically acceptable before Locke's elucidation was accepted by logicians is noted.

It is not, and it has never been accepted as such outside of this, and the RD forum (and some linked sites).
I object to this dishonesty.
It is not a Fallacy, but an Argument.
Cali's piece might even be a valid Argument, but it is a misrepresentation to present it as a Fallacy.

It is a fucking fallacy.

What is even more objectionable is that it gets dragged out whenever probability is mentioned within any argument on Abiogenesis. It is being used as a Sledgehammer to stifle proper debate.

No, it is being used as a sledgehammer on vacuous probability calculations that have no bearing on reality.

Fair enough, I've no problem with this. It certainly has no points of coincidence with the Gambler's Fallacy. (Except perhaps that they might both use tossing coins by way of illustration)

Bollocks. The point of coincidence is in deviation from 'common sense' norms. They highlight different, but related, problems with the kind of fuckwitted probability calculations erected by the terminally fucking stupid.

rainbow wrote:

iamthereforeithink wrote:There seems to be a misunderstanding of the so-called "serial trials fallacy". Regardless of whether it finds mention in formal logic etc., its underlying argument is correct, because it constitutes an incorrect way of calculating probability, by assuming that trials can only take place sequentially. This becomes important when time, rather than the no. of trials allowed is a constraining factor.

Correct. Being presented as a Fallacy implies that it is accepted as being such in Logic. It is not, and it has never been accepted as such outside of this, and the RD forum (and some linked sites).
I object to this dishonesty.
It is not a Fallacy, but an Argument.
Cali's piece might even be a valid Argument, but it is a misrepresentation to present it as a Fallacy.

What is even more objectionable is that it gets dragged out whenever probability is mentioned within any argument on Abiogenesis. It is being used as a Sledgehammer to stifle proper debate.

For example, the probability of obtaining 20 heads in 10 minutes is much lower while tossing a single coin sequentially, than it is while tossing 5 coins in parallel.

Fair enough, I've no problem with this. It certainly has no points of coincidence with the Gambler's Fallacy. (Except perhaps that they might both use tossing coins by way of illustration)

Rainbow I gotta say I don't get it. It is a fallacy in that in represents a result/position/etc derived from incorrect reasoning.

What I get you as saying is that it gets used incorrectly in relation abiogenesis on this forum. Well then would it not make more sense to point out that it gets used incorrectly and show where. This attack on what is a legitimate argument because it does not appear in formal logic is very strange. It is hardly the arguments fault that it gets used incorrectly.

Is it that you feel the argument/fallacy/whatever has reached a stage where people do not have to explain what it means they just invoke it whenever abiogenesis comes up whether it is relevant or not.

rainbow wrote:
What is even more objectionable is that it gets dragged out whenever probability is mentioned within any argument on Abiogenesis. It is being used as a Sledgehammer to stifle proper debate.

Let's assume for a second that you or anybody else really had introduced the consecutive lottery wins as an analogy to refute abiogenesis. Since that is what prompted this thread, can you please explain what was wrong with referring to it in this case?

Can you please explain why the serial trials fallacy does not accurately describe comparing abiogenesis to winning the lottery twice in a row?

(Whether you intended this or not is irrelevant to this question. We most certainly do get people invoking these kind of analogies on an alarmingly regular basis.)

Does Rainbow think there is some sort of committee that sits in judgement on whether or not an argument which shows a common error of reasoning can wear the 'approved by Formal Logic' label, and thus become a Formal Fallacy?

A formal fallacy is simply a pattern of reasoning which can be demonstrated to always result in a faulty conclusion - nothing more. It doesn't need any external authority to show that it is a formal fallacy; it is shown to be a formal fallacy by the merits of its own reasoning.