Fact-Checking the Torah -- DH's Conjunction Fallacy

The steps in DH that get to JE are all required and that makes this description a conjunction. The idea that DH is true is based on the Conjunction Fallacy. You might know about this fallacy if you know about the Linda problem, which you can find all over the web. The most common description is this:

“Linda is 31 years old, yadda yadda yadda. Which is more probable?

1. Linda is a bank teller.

2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.”

Most people pick the wrong answer, #2, the conjunction. Why is it wrong?

There are two terms in answer 2; let’s call them “bank teller” and “feminist”. Each of them has a probability of being true, let’s say X and Y.

Nothing in the description has probative value for either term, that’s why I “yadda’d” it. Since there’s no evidence either way, X and Y are between 0 and 1.

The probability of answer 1 which has only term “bank teller” is therefore X. But the probability of answer 2 is X times Y. Because  X and Y are both between 0 and 1, their product is lower than either one. Also, whichever of X or Y is less, the probability of answer 2 is less than that.

The subject doesn’t have to be Linda; it can be sports, foreign affairs, or anything else under the sun. In every case, most people pick the conjunction as more probable, and they are wrong. The only way to make them pick the other choice, is basically to give them a course in probability calculations, and even then some of them will pick the conjunction.

Most disciplines consist of conjunctions. Why are they not conjunction fallacies? Because their descriptions always contain evidence of the truth of their claims. They use observations, experiments, and mathematics to demonstrate the probability that their conclusions are true.

They don’t make guesses, they calculate what statements are more accurate to make. They make predictions that are borne out in experiment or observation. If not, people are forced to rethink things, sometimes leading to new discoveries. As new information turns up or new concepts appear, they refine their statements to be more accurate.

They tend to support each other, either around the edges or because information from one can be directly inserted into another. Use of radioactive decay known from physics, to provide dates for archaeology, is an example of the first situation; chemistry incorporating the findings of quantum mechanics in physics is an example of the latter.

And their results have turned out to be useful, time after time. The physics that tells geologists that the world is about 4.5 billion years old, helps doctors save the lives of cancer patients. The chemistry that shows how DNA is the fuel of evolution, also helps correct genetic diseases.

I’m about to show you what the difference is between the conjunctions that are the sciences, and the conjunction fallacy that is DH.

For my special invitees, you have studied DH and know where the fallacies and bad facts lie. I’d be flattered if you stuck around for more of my offbeat perspective, or at least checked in at the end of each month to see what else I posted since your last visit.

For the rest of you, have a blast! I did.

(I had to use Jan Gullberg’s book Mathematics to work out the math of the probabilities; I also used Gary Curtis’ Fallacy Files website. If I have messed this up, don’t blame them; it’s completely my fault.)

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- nuance of certainty epistemic

Genesis 1:5

 

ה וַיִּקְרָא אֱלֹהִים לָאוֹר יוֹם וְלַחֹשֶׁךְ קָרָא לָיְלָה וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר יוֹם אֶחָד:

 

Translation:       Gd named the light day and the darkness He named night; there must have been evening, there must have been morning, one day.

 

I have a two-fer this time, grammar and a midrash.

 

You can now sit back and absorb the certainty epistemics at the end of the verse.  We know there was evening because the creation story starts off with darkness; we know there was morning which occurred when the light was separated from the dark.

 

And it has been so ever since.  We have the evidence all through our lives that this happened because it still happens every day. 

 

In Jewish culture, a new calendar day starts when the first three stars appear at night, or the time rolls around when they would do so.  It ends with the next appearance of three stars.

 

There were no stars at the point we have reached in the creation story but, as when there is a cloudy night, that doesn’t matter because it got light after the darkness so we know that a time-keeping day is proceeding.

 

This nuance of the certainty epistemic – that something perceptible persists -- is crucial to a large number of verses in Exodus and afterward and I will show why in more detailed lessons after we get through this introductory work.

 

And now the midrash:  why does it say “one day” not “first day”?  The rabbis asked this centuries ago and came up with a number of theologically appropriate reasons.

Here’s mine.  One of the things that happens because of narrative past, is that you have narrative tension.  From your point of view, these things are already in the past.  But from the point of view of the characters living through these times, nothing is over until the narrative is over. 

 

If the narrator says “first day”, it implies a second day.  You only have a “first” if you have a second.  By saying “one day”, the narrator leaves it open that something will happen that will change everything.  Gd could return everything to its primordial chaos.  Narrative tension is preserved.

Next: what's wrong with labels.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

 

Mendel Beilis Trial -- Day 30

R. Yosef Gabriel Bechhofer did it to me again.

I've been listening to his audio lectures on Jerusalem Talmud.

Today I got to a lesson on Maaser Sheni, pages 32 and 33.

He discussed something on that page which I remembered was brought up in the Beilis trial.

So I have replaced the PDF of the transcript and re-linked to it from the menu and from the summary for that day.

It's footnote 35 to item 212 in Zamyslovsky's closing argument od day 30.

So you see,  as long as I'm learning, I'm not done with making the transcript  and its supporting info as accurate as I can get it.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Knitting -- lace, Da Puzzle from Unst

Unst Island has produced a number of unique Shetland lace motifs, and Da Puzzle is one of them.

One blogger found a reference to it in a notice about an exhibition.
http://barbaraknitsagain.blogspot.com/2015/08/shetland-lace-shawls.html

Turns out this is one of the motifs in Elizabeth Lovick's Magic of Shetland Knitting and snaps have been posted, I won't say where. But the snaps show the swatch and chart, no stitch counts.

So here was an excellent chance to use that symbols page I found
http://www.craftyarncouncil.com/chart_knit.html

and transcribe the pattern for those who, like me, are absolute beginners at reading charts.

I learned a new secret about lace knitting.  It's like matrix math.

I never could get matrix math until I found a web site that showed me that you can't just look at the matrix and get the answer. You have to work it step by step.

So with lace knitting, at least until you get familiar with the pattern, here's my suggestion. Once you've placed your markers for the first row of the pattern and you've turned it, before you start working on the new row, see how many stitches there are up to the next marker. If it's not as many as the repeat is supposed to be, you messed up the previous row for that repeat. Turn it BACK around, undo that repeat, and find out where your mistake was. Fix it, turn the work and NOW work that repeat on the other side.

It will slow you down early on but it will keep you from working for hours and rows and suddenly finding oh crap, it's not working out because of a mistake WAY BACK THERE!  It will also let you catch dropped stitches early instead of late.

The other lesson I learned from this pattern is WE ARE ALL HUMAN and even people who publish on a subject can make crucial mistakes. Which I have ranted about on the Fact-Checking blog.

Anyway, there was a mistake in Lovick's pattern that made rows 2 and 6 come out wrong. Once I got the courage to say it was wrong, I realized how it had to be and then I was OK. There's a quote in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina that makes a similar point. Never be afraid of saying "I don't care what you say, this doesn't work out right."

I also FINALLY used "safety lines" working this pattern. It's so complex that if you accidentally drop stitches, you have to go back  to the beginning and start over. I used two lengths of yarn in a contrasting color, one actively inserted through the row, one on the tapestry needle until I got to the next row I wanted to anchor. You have your choice of anchoring each pattern repeat in the row, or waiting until you finish and then anchoring the whole row. Just be careful to put the needle THROUGH the loops and not split the yarn.

And last, there's something in this pattern I never saw before, a double yarn over. Well, making it is easy, but when you do the next round or row, how the heck do you work it? I looked at a bunch of videos and picked this one as the best demonstration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NEAw0qtR70

Basically, you work the first one in the same stitch as the rest of the row (K or P) and the second one the opposite stitch (P or K).



Joanne'sWeb posted a diagram for an edging from a Vogue pattern, to show you how to copy a chart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kznP2CUFjks&index=10&list=PLtqSRloqJqzoW3Bd67Zvx6zM4nLasS8pC

When I first saw it, I asked "Joanne" how to take it around a corner.  Thanks to that other video I was able to do it.
http://www.lavisch.com/site/knitted-on-border-turning-the-corner/

This is not a Shetland edging. But I used one Shetland edging on two different pieces and I wanted something different.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- predicting the product

So we’ve established that the probability that DH is true relies on the probability of every claim it makes, for all the claims that are required to say what DH wants to say about Torah.

We identified that the calculation of the final probability is the product of the probability of every single one of these required claims. We can’t add them because addition is the calculation for options.

We can’t go above 1.  The value of 1 represents 100% probability or truth, which would mean there is observational evidence or hard physical examples of the four documents as well as of the interim products in their merger.

I know you’re saying that even if each probability isn’t 1, it could be greater than zero.

Sure, it could.  All the probabilities in the DH table are between zero (false) and one (true) if you can’t disprove them and there is no external evidence that any of them happened.

You have to multiply them.  What do you get?  Go back to your grade school arithmetic.  The product of fractions less than one is less than each of the fractions.  0.5 x 0.5 = 0.25; 0.9 x 0.9 = 0.81.

The probability of two dice turning up any given combination is 0.167 x 0.167 = 0.028 or a little less than 1 in 30 instead of 1 in 6.

The probability that a sequence of required steps will ALL happen is less than the probability of the least probable step.

Once we know the probability for each of the steps, whichever of the probabilities is SMALLEST is the most that the probability can be for DH. 

The smallest value out of all of them is the highest value you can get, and after you multiply, the result will be smaller than that.

And if any claims in DH are based on fallacies, they automatically become false, and the probability of every required step based on them is zero; when you multiply anything by zero you get zero.

Now notice that even if you start with optional steps for any part of the history, you can’t get to JEDP without identifying a path of required steps to each of the documents and their combination.

No matter how you get to JEDP, you have to do some multiplication.

I’ll  finish  up next week.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- "call, give a name"

Genesis 1:5

 

ה וַיִּקְרָא אֱלֹהִים לָאוֹר יוֹם וְלַחֹשֶׁךְ קָרָא לָיְלָה וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר יוֹם אֶחָד:

 

Transliteration: Va-yiqra elohim la-or yom v’la-choshekh qara lailah va-y’hi-erev va-y’hi-voqer yom echad.

Translation:     Gd named the light day and the darkness He named night; there was evening and there was morning one day.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

 

יִּקְרָא	call (to), call by name, name
לָ	Indirect object preposition, genitive preposition, possessive
יוֹם	day
לָיְלָה	night
עֶרֶב	evening
בֹקֶר	morning
אֶחָד	one

 

We have another lamed alef verb in this verse, and we have it in narrative imperfect.  Here’s the qal imperfect aspect, on which the narrative imperfect is built.  Memorize this; you will see it again.

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֶקְרָא	נִקְרָא	First
תִּקְרָא	תִּקְרְאוּ	Second/masculine
תִּקְרְאִי	תִּקְרֶאנָה	Second/feminine
יִקְרָא	יִקְרְאוּ	Third/masculine
תִּקְרָא	תִּקְרֶאנָה	Third/feminine

 

BUT notice that when He names the darkness, it’s perfect aspect.  Why?

 

The perfect aspect here closes off this episode in the creation story.  Something else is going to happen after this, nothing to do with light at all.

Next is a two-fer.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Garden -- feeding the birds & bees

I planted lots of things in my garden and fostered others to attract birds and feed bees.

This thing with the yellow flowers, I planted years ago. I think the seed packet said Korean Dill which certainly tracks with the leaves, but I can't find new seeds for it. It was open-pollinated and not only survived but self-sowed.

I planted it for the lacewings because they destroy harmful insects. But this month the bees are all over it and that is a Good Thing.

This is chicory. I planted it from open-pollinated seed some  years after the dill.

The goldfinches mob it and tear the petals off to get at the green seeds, but enough survived to keep the plant going.

This is something you probably have never seen because you prune your euonymus in summer instead of at the end of winter like you should. The little four-petal yellow-green things are the flowers.

If you leave your euonymus alone next summer, you will get these and they will develop into pretty pink berries that are favorites of mockingbirds. This particular bush is shaded all year long and its berries don't ripen well. Luckily I got my mockingbird to take raisins last winter and he has developed an addiction to them.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved