In God We Trust

[blackson]

Well that settles it. I'm convinced of Suki's opinion now.

See. That's all it took, bro. Three. Three is equal to USA Today. Two is, like, Weekly World News.

I'm in no way saying that because I've seen Atheists been treated badly, that they are consistently treated badly across the Nation; that's just ignorant.

It's important to be able to draw generalizations from patterns. Otherwise, the world is a meaningless vermillion soup.

Although I do agree with you, you have pretty low standards for what constitutes a pattern.

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

Well, see, then we're arguing on two different terms. I believe, completely, that the arguement was about violence against atheists.

I don't think we have anything left to discuss on that front, then.
Despite your repeated stress that you were contesting the statistics, addressing my accusations directly to that effect without any attempt to correct that as a mistake I have been making, and all the dancing you've done off and on that same issue, each time claiming you've been in the same position all along, I'm willing to settle with you on the idea that you were simply talking about something irrelevant the entire time. I can totally accept that plea-bargain.

Atilla's claims fully lack cogency because he's an Aussie. He lives on an island with 2/3 the population of California. California is a culturally bereft place because it considers itself its own nation, subordinate to yet divorced from the US. It's a pompous little vadge-shaped bitch whoring up the Pacific rim. Now, take that exceptional ability to manufacture self-contained culture and multiply it by an impressive 2/3. That's Australia. It's a snobby little lazy hunk of earth filled with criminals mostly too retarded to fully understand lofty American concepts like turning plants that actually taste good (unlike salty, fucking vegetables) into spreads.

I highly doubt the people living on the rock will draw the correct conclusions from any numbers that a prominent American news agency will churn out.

And some evidence in this thread would show that that same Aussie has a better understanding of American society as a whole than you do.
If I read a survey from a trustworthy source about a representative sample of size n in France feeling some particular way about a societal issue, I would value the input of n - 1 Frenchmen whom I personally interviewed as less valuable input than the survey (especially because I am worse at conducting a survey than certain agencies I trust). I'd also have the benefit of understanding French culture in that specific area better than any Frenchmen whose personal experiences conflicted with the results of that survey.
All in all, it was too stereotypically American move on your part; "you're wrong because you don't live in my country." And all I'm saying is that I thought better of you.

I could have easily said: "I heard somewhere that atheists, on the whole, report as many car-keyings as members of other faiths." I've created a potentiality of value by restructuring what I've said to include "I heard somewhere", but it shouldn't deceive anyone into thinking there's more content there. It's as meaningless as attributing the situations described to a personal experience.

If you had (falsely) qualified your anecdote with "I heard somewhere," then it obviously falls into the category of unsubstantiated statistical citation and does not contribute to the conversation, just like anecdotal evidence. I completely fail to see a problem here.
You can go ahead and reference made-up studies all you like, and each time I'll ask you for sources. If you can't provide them, then we'll only have wasted the few seconds it takes to find out that you believe the people around you are a perfect representative sample whose opinions can be proportionately extrapolated to the entirety of the US. And then, I imagine, we'd laugh at and start ignoring you.

If you want to bring back the cliffs and the parachutes, you can think of citing some statistic as having a parachute. But if you know you've made up the study and are just using it to sound more credible, you'd be a moron to jump off with a parachute you know is just an empty sack. My whole point is that you were wrong to decide that a Schroedinger's Parachute is exactly equivalent to a parachute that's guaranteed to fail.

And in the gambling world, one might shore up $5 for a Shroedinger's Cat that's worth $10. But I think it's far more reasonable to demand the real cat and pay $10.

Brilliant. You've just said it, yourself: demand the cat. You realize that this is exactly what you didn't do, right? Because you said, "fuck you, there is no cat. Now take a look at my non-cat."

As I'm not a risk taker, I value potentially-true information as I do completely-false information. As currently false.

I wouldn't call that the safe position at all! To say that you're not even willing to investigate the truth of something if it's not served to you on a silver platter is bullheadedness in your own opinions. I completely agree that the default position on something asserted should be false, but that only means that you should demand support, not run a mile and a half with it like you have.

Moreover, I don't see how a bit of anecdotal evidence is necessarily unusable, from an epistemological standpoint. I can see why it's hard to work with in Debate, but on a different scale or in a different medium, what someone has experienced might add to the discovery of what's truly going on more than a disinterested news agency's eye-in-the-sky view. Credibility is certainly an aspect of information that's not necessarily tied to statistics and USA Today, but to the veracity of the speaker--whoever it may be--and the clarity and consistency of the message.

Does this person often claim that he's been raped and car-keyed by Christies? Does this person have a track record for gaining personal pleasure in punching defenseless Asian infants? Maybe this is a guy whose word we shouldn't trust. :/

This is why I've tried my best to include "in the context whose scope is beyond interpersonal relations" or something similar every time I talked about the uselessness of anecdotal evidence. When you're dealing with the opinion of a nation, I sincerely doubt that any input from an individual's personal experiences will at all be meaningful. If we're talking about the opinion of all the people in your neighborhood, then your personal experience is definitely worth mentioning. On this large a scale, however, it can't be. You heard the comparison I gave with the brick wall and the grain of sand, didn't you? Should I repeat it?
Besides which, if every respondent had a history of being raped and car-keyed by Christians, I think the subject of the survey would quickly turn into oppression against atheists.

I consider anecdotes the same way. Meaningful if substantiated. Maybe more difficult to substantiate.

Okay, yes, that's been quite clear. You've still never offered an explanation as to how, nor any sort of response to my repeated attempts to explain how they could not. At this scope, anecdotes are pointless except as fluff. If you disagree, and think that personal experience can ever be meaningful at this scope, I've been waiting to hear it.

You'll find the Thelma and Louise cliff metaphor is universal in its scope. Also, I'm holding onto Atilla's hand and grinning as we fall, while the credits play and we review out weekend.

So all of that antagonism was supposed to be friendly? You thought that implying that he's incapable of understanding our culture on principle would lead to a conversation about your weekend? And your Thelma & Louise references have never started to make sense here, unless you're about to switch to the more accurate explanation that involves Atilla being the cop locked in the trunk. Atilla comes in and mentions a factoid, and you're immediately up in his grill with "fuck you, foreigner," before demanding that your experience alone outweighs that of the several thousand people surveyed. If I were in Atilla's shoes and in that car, you'd bet I'd be terrified of what the nutjob beside me is going to do next.

[blue_tetris]

Well, see, then we're arguing on two different terms. I believe, completely, that the arguement was about violence against atheists.

I don't think we have anything left to discuss on that front, then.
Despite your repeated stress that you were contesting the statistics, addressing my accusations directly to that effect without any attempt to correct that as a mistake I have been making, and all the dancing you've done off and on that same issue, each time claiming you've been in the same position all along, I'm willing to settle with you on the idea that you were simply talking about something irrelevant the entire time. I can totally accept that plea-bargain.

I never debated against his figures. Many a post ago, I made that clear. His numbers were not the issue. You believed it was, so I clarified. You continued believing it was.

And some evidence in this thread would show that that same Aussie has a better understanding of American society as a whole than you do.

I don't understand the deepthroating contest here. How does Atilla have you better reigned than I have my own SlappyMcGee. This is unconscionable.

All in all, it was too stereotypically American move on your part; "you're wrong because you don't live in my country." And all I'm saying is that I thought better of you.

If you thought for a moment that I was "better than being American", you were wrong. I don't understand why you hate America, but I can only venture that it's because you're a terrorist. Stop terrorizing things.

I could have easily said: "I heard somewhere that atheists, on the whole, report as many car-keyings as members of other faiths." I've created a potentiality of value by restructuring what I've said to include "I heard somewhere", but it shouldn't deceive anyone into thinking there's more content there. It's as meaningless as attributing the situations described to a personal experience.

If you had (falsely) qualified your anecdote with "I heard somewhere," then it obviously falls into the category of unsubstantiated statistical citation and does not contribute to the conversation, just like anecdotal evidence. I completely fail to see a problem here.

So we're agreed that sourceless information is equally sourceless, whether I try to conjure up a superior source or use myself as the sole provider of the information.

You can go ahead and reference made-up studies all you like, and each time I'll ask you for sources.

Again, to repeat myself, you didn't in the case of Atilla. You took previously anticipated truths as necessary truths, which is cool, as long as you don't selectively call out people on the basis of their dissenting opinions. When you do that, you can be the same idealist that you wanna appear to be in a given thread, but the true followers of that thread (like my boys, Demonz and scythe--love you guys, thanks for the support) will see a glaring hypocrisy in your pick-and-choose behavior.

If you want to bring back the cliffs and the parachutes, you can think of citing some statistic as having a parachute. But if you know you've made up the study and are just using it to sound more credible, you'd be a moron to jump off with a parachute you know is just an empty sack. My whole point is that you were wrong to decide that a Schroedinger's Parachute is exactly equivalent to a parachute that's guaranteed to fail.

Well, I don't perceive most sourceless facts as lies, either. I don't have any reason to believe a person is lying. Whether they bring up an untraceable statistic or a personal story, they are presenting information that is very real to them. So, when a number of people providing anecdotes have experienced a broad series of personal encounters which have led to a single conclusion, and they truly experienced those things, the law of averages suggests that it's likely it's a common experience. And when someone administers surveys to 100 people (agian, telling the truth as they see it) and gets a certain result, we can assume it's a common experience. To put it in a way that you and your fellow USA Today readers can comp., we're collecting surveys by which we can interpret the situation right here. We don't need a press pass. We need to willingly listen to and record each person's experience as they enter the thread. Maybe a poll would conjure a quicker (and less accurate to our specific conversation) respose. But we're collecting shared experiences here anyhow. So that we can divine a specific response to our specific inquiry as it develops.

And in the gambling world, one might shore up $5 for a Shroedinger's Cat that's worth $10. But I think it's far more reasonable to demand the real cat and pay $10.

Brilliant. You've just said it, yourself: demand the cat. You realize that this is exactly what you didn't do, right? Because you said, "fuck you, there is no cat. Now take a look at my non-cat."

Yes. Atilla offered no cat. I also offered no cat. We both fronted the same wager: no cat. Whichever cat was more likely to eventually exist was mostly irrelevant. There was no cat. You demanded a cat. From me. Then you went on your thing about how everyone should provide cats. Only I was demanded to kitty up to the challenge. Why?

As I'm not a risk taker, I value potentially-true information as I do completely-false information. As currently false.

I wouldn't call that the safe position at all! To say that you're not even willing to investigate the truth of something if it's not served to you on a silver platter is bullheadedness in your own opinions. I completely agree that the default position on something asserted should be false, but that only means that you should demand support, not run a mile and a half with it like you have.

I'm willing to investigate the truth. Atilla, iangb, Slappy and I just hadn't gotten around to it. And we weren't going to assign blame to any specific one of us for not ratcheting up to that degree. If someone wanted to do that, cool. But if someone wanted to berate the methodology of the group for not seeking out answers established elsewhere in journals of widely-accepted opinion yet, there's a good chance we'd view that someone as an asshole. Go ahead and bring your newspapers to our fireplace convo, bro, but don't shitfling in the process. Especially when you shitfling at a single member of said fireplace convo, while you dole out shitbrellas and shitosols to his conversatory pals.

This is why I've tried my best to include "in the context whose scope is beyond interpersonal relations" or something similar every time I talked about the uselessness of anecdotal evidence. When you're dealing with the opinion of a nation, I sincerely doubt that any input from an individual's personal experiences will at all be meaningful.

Or any 100 people, for that matter. Hell, even 1,000 people might not be the appropriate sample group for that entire nation. I mean, we are talking about the second most populous democracy, here. The one with 300 million dudes in it. It's hard to believe any sample size under 51% of that nation's population could indicate a majority of opinion absolutely. And we're not dealing with values even near to that amount. We're dealing with a collection of people giving an answer on a topic similar to the one we're discussing. And a sample size of 101 is better than a sample of 100, ain't it? I don't see harm in adding yourself as respondent #58 to what is a highly inexhaustive list of Americans.

Again, it's not hugely meaningful, I agree to that. But there's something to be said of presuming even 100 is a large enough group. Sometimes we like to hear the responses of individuals and their personal experiences with discrimination (or their relative lack thereof) as a component of being sociable. You know, as a component of developing a shared social situation. Certainly there's the idea that each commentator is just a grain of sand against a wall of brick and mortar. But when you're sand, it's important, sometimes, to talk with and form experiential links to other sand. That giant brick that's lying nearby is an interesting conversation piece, but it's not the conversation. And Atilla, iangb, Slappy and I were having a conversation. So when bricks started dropping near out close-knit pile of sand, we were forced to desert* what we were doing to deal with that.

*mild pun

I consider anecdotes the same way. Meaningful if substantiated. Maybe more difficult to substantiate.

Okay, yes, that's been quite clear. You've still never offered an explanation as to how, nor any sort of response to my repeated attempts to explain how they could not. At this scope, anecdotes are pointless except as fluff. If you disagree, and think that personal experience can ever be meaningful at this scope, I've been waiting to hear it.

Dude, it's difficult to grasp for you, but: Surveys, and any collection of data for that matter, are actual a collection of comments that people have made. Those people might not be Atilla, blue_tetris, and Tunco123, but they are people, nonetheless. 100 or so of those people are compiled to make numbers and those numbers are fronted by USA Today. At their core, however, those statistics are tidbits of anecdotal evidence supplied to an entity. And that entity processes them. To think that Tsukatu is not capable of the same process--the compilation of human-oriented information--is downright silly. You, too, can create a statistic. Just intercept what we're saying and turn it into a number. Moreover, enjoy yourself. Like, take in the conversation and enjoy the process of listening to other humans slowly become numbers in your MS Access document (don't forget to set your key!).

Another time: Whether or not it's fully realized, this is precisely what your USA Today does. It receives human-oriented responses (perhaps of a dubious nature, when taken alone :O) and compiles them to create a number. The numbers come from humans. We are also humans.

So... Yes, the stat is 100 dudes that are all leveled against whoever follows the statistics. But up to that point in this conversation, those 100 dudes hadn't entered the convo. It was just me and Atilla. Those 100 dudes didn't matter. We were busy being dudes. And compiling statistics on a narrower scale. The Metanet scale. And to disparage that in any way is to give a big "fuck you" to Raigan and Mare. Would you do that shit? To Mare?

You'll find the Thelma and Louise cliff metaphor is universal in its scope. Also, I'm holding onto Atilla's hand and grinning as we fall, while the credits play and we review out weekend.

So all of that antagonism was supposed to be friendly? You thought that implying that he's incapable of understanding our culture on principle would lead to a conversation about your weekend? And your Thelma & Louise references have never started to make sense here, unless you're about to switch to the more accurate explanation that involves Atilla being the cop locked in the trunk. Atilla comes in and mentions a factoid, and you're immediately up in his grill with "fuck you, foreigner," before demanding that your experience alone outweighs that of the several thousand people surveyed. If I were in Atilla's shoes and in that car, you'd bet I'd be terrified of what the nutjob beside me is going to do next.

Atilla has never been important to this argument. Also, I've never willingly sat alongside an Aussie. They've always been in (at least) the backseat. So it's possible Atilla's in the trunk, no slight against him personally. He's just a boomerang chucker. In the perfect world, I'd have you and SlappyMcGee as my dual Louises. :3

[Atilla]

Atilla's claims fully lack cogency because he's an Aussie. He lives on an island with 2/3 the population of California. California is a culturally bereft place because it considers itself its own nation, subordinate to yet divorced from the US. It's a pompous little vadge-shaped bitch whoring up the Pacific rim. Now, take that exceptional ability to manufacture self-contained culture and multiply it by an impressive 2/3. That's Australia. It's a snobby little lazy hunk of earth filled with criminals mostly too retarded to fully understand lofty American concepts like turning plants that actually taste good (unlike salty, fucking vegetables) into spreads.

Lies! Vegemite is made primarily of yeast extract, not vegetables, meaning it is more accurately described as processed fungus. And if it's not deep-fried and fatty enough for your American sensibilities, try mixing in a few buckets of lard.

[SkyPanda]

Lies! Vegemite is made primarily of yeast extract, not vegetables, meaning it is more accurately described as processed fungus. And if it's not deep-fried and fatty enough for your American sensibilities, try mixing in a few buckets of lard.

Okay i'm a bit biased here, but BAM. Nicely done

[blue_tetris]

Or any 100 people, for that matter. Hell, even 1,000 people might not be the appropriate sample group for that entire nation. I mean, we are talking about the second most populous democracy, here. The one with 300 million dudes in it. It's hard to believe any sample size under 51% of that nation's population could indicate a majority of opinion absolutely. And we're not dealing with values even near to that amount. We're dealing with a collection of people giving an answer on a topic similar to the one we're discussing. And a sample size of 101 is better than a sample of 100, ain't it? I don't see harm in adding yourself as respondent #58 to what is a highly inexhaustive list of Americans.

The accuracy of a poll has nothing to do with the relative sample size, only the absolute number polled. America's size is irrelevant. (1)

Says Terrence Tao. Perhaps it's in his favor that significantly small sample sizes work well for making things credible. Considering that he's 1 dude.

Even so, I think this realization works pretty well in my favor. A sample size that's small but sufficiently applicable to a given group is worth more than a large and inapplicable one. Our Metanet collection of anecdotal evidence creates a smaller sample size than any statistics you could pull up, but there's something worthwhile to it, given its collection process. The reader (in this case, the determinant of the poll) can selectively construct the list of people applicable for the information collection.

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

You can go ahead and reference made-up studies all you like, and each time I'll ask you for sources.

Again, to repeat myself, you didn't in the case of Atilla.

And to repeat myself, I had already done exactly that, and recently, so I already knew that it was substantiated. If I didn't already know the sources, I obviously would have asked for his sources (provided I was struck with the same spontaneous-onset Alzheimers as you and Slaps and forgot that Google exists).
I apply the same standards to you and Atilla ("offer something meaningful"). Atilla didn't give sources, and that was bad of him, but at least he gave something that ended up being useful when examined. You gave nothing useful, even if it was to be examined later and was believed to be true.
If the personal experience you gave was false, then it was not meaningful.
If the personal experience you gave was true, then it was still not meaningful.
If you had given a study that turned out to be your false personal experience, then it wouldn't have been meaningful.
If you had given a study that turned out to be your true personal experience, then it still wouldn't have been meaningful.
The only reason I'm giving a blanket lack of concern to your personal experience is because it would never have mattered; I'm taking out the middle man of finding out if it was true or not because I realize that it doesn't matter one way or the other. But this is otherwise a process that all claims must go through. If you had cited some other source that presumably gave as many personal experiences as Atilla's studies, even if you were making the study up, I would either dutifully have investigated it or asked you to provide sources. But you didn't offer external source; you offered personal experience, so I knew that none of what you were saying could possibly be of consequence.
And the reason I started talking was because you thought that it was of consequence for some reason, and I'm enough of an asshole to point that out to you.

We need to willingly listen to and record each person's experience as they enter the thread. Maybe a poll would conjure a quicker (and less accurate to our specific conversation) respose. But we're collecting shared experiences here anyhow. So that we can divine a specific response to our specific inquiry as it develops.

The population of this forum is not a representative sample of the population of the United States of America. This gathered information would not be applicable to the subject, which was distrust of atheists among the population of the United States of America.

Atilla offered no cat. I also offered no cat.

This is exactly the line of thinking I was describing when I said:
"My whole point is that you were wrong to decide that a Schroedinger's Parachute is exactly equivalent to a parachute that's guaranteed to fail."
Schroedinger's Cat is not the same as a dead cat. Atilla offered you Schroedinger's Cat, and it turned out when observed that the cat was alive. Your dead cat did not compare before you knew it was alive, and it especially doesn't compare now that we see that it is alive.

Whichever cat was more likely to eventually exist was mostly irrelevant. There was no cat. You demanded a cat. From me. Then you went on your thing about how everyone should provide cats. Only I was demanded to kitty up to the challenge. Why?

Atilla brought Scroedinger's Cat, and it wasn't good form of him to do that. He should've either come with a living cat in the first place or opened the box immediately. I, personally, was not interested in the revelation of the cat because I had already peeked in and seen it, so I didn't demand an answer I already knew. You should've demanded the cat.
But instead, you brought an open and empty box that was too small for a cat. It was obvious that there was no cat in it, and neither was it even possible for a cat to be in there. That's the reason I demanded the cat from you and not from Atilla -- I already knew that Atilla has a cat. Again, it was not nice of him not to make that obvious, but he had one. You didn't.
I also think you're unnecessarily discarding the end result, because that's an important consideration for bringing in your own cat. If you knew that Atilla potentially had a cat, you shouldn't be so quick to think you can match it with an empty box. Because if you do, you'd be in the position you're in now: he has a case for his position and you have none for yours, nor any against his. Like I said before, you are wrong. You could have avoided being wrong if you didn't make this stupid assumption.

If some thug springs out at you from an alley with a gun-shaped object in his pocket, obviously he might have a gun. If you think you're justified in your reasoning in this thread, you should feel no qualms whatsoever about laughing at him and passing right on by.
And if you want to draw a parallel to this case, he did have a gun, and he just shot you in the face.

If someone wanted to do that, cool. But if someone wanted to berate the methodology of the group for not seeking out answers established elsewhere in journals of widely-accepted opinion yet, there's a good chance we'd view that someone as an asshole.

That's not what I'm berating you for. I think I must've said this in every post now: I am challenging the reasoning you did give.
Plenty of people didn't even reply to Atilla's post, and I'm not berating them for not Googling for his sources. Obviously your accusation is unreasonable.

It's hard to believe any sample size under 51% of that nation's population could indicate a majority of opinion absolutely. And we're not dealing with values even near to that amount.

That's why organizations like Gallup have such a good rep: they're good at finding representative samples of the nation that do a good job of staying proportionate as you extrapolate to the greater population.

Dude, it's difficult to grasp for you, but: Surveys, and any collection of data for that matter, are actual a collection of comments that people have made.

Unbelievable. This is exactly what I just explained to you. And I felt I had to do this because it wasn't very clear that you realized you were telling us that your solitary experience means more than an ocean of other people's experiences.

You, too, can create a statistic. Just intercept what we're saying and turn it into a number. Moreover, enjoy yourself. Like, take in the conversation and enjoy the process of listening to other humans slowly become numbers in your MS Access document (don't forget to set your key!).

You kidding me? I'm enjoying the shit out of this conversation. It's like one of them Bozo the Clown punching bags that keep springing up because he's apparently incapable of lying down.

It receives human-oriented responses (perhaps of a dubious nature, when taken alone :O) and compiles them to create a number. The numbers come from humans. We are also humans.

To reiterate / clarify: You weren't wrong because you gave one anecdote; you were wrong because you gave one anecdote. Atilla offered thousands of anecdotes from a representative sample of the US. You gave one anecdote. If you had also given thousands of anecdotes from a representative sample (read: a survey), then I would've kept my mouth shut. But you gave an anecdote, which only compares to one anecdote and therefore is guaranteed to be meaningless regardless of whether or not it's true.
Here's another way of looking at it:
You brought one soldier to the battle, and Atilla brought in what turned out to be a centurion. Bitching about how I'm unfairly demanding more from you when both of you brought one of something is a sign that you don't fully understand the circumstances.
Besides which, Atilla mentioned multiple surveys.

It was just me and Atilla. Those 100 dudes didn't matter. We were busy being dudes.

No, I don't believe Atilla was bringing himself in at all. I think he was trying to make his point with all of his thousands of dudes.
We can settle this easily...

Atilla: Were you trying to establish your point with the statistics you gave, or with your anecdote that you tacked on later?

Our Metanet collection of anecdotal evidence creates a smaller sample size than any statistics you could pull up, but there's something worthwhile to it, given its collection process. The reader (in this case, the determinant of the poll) can selectively construct the list of people applicable for the information collection.

The conversation was not about The Real N's currency and status as a religious nation, but about the US's currency and status as a religious nation. The statistics Atilla gave were also relevant to the US, and not specifically to The Real N forums. If you had started a poll on these forums asking the same questions, you would not have provided any input nearly as meaningful or applicable as Atilla's, because the members of The Real N are not a representative sample of the US.

[SlappyMcGee]

Tsukatu, when there is a table of dudes, sitting around discussing something, like, say, Atheism in America, and one of them says something that is absolutely true, like "Skydiving fatalities have been steadily rising since 1904." and the other dude says, "I went skydiving once, and I've never been hurt." That's conversation. It's mild debate, sure. All one dude is trying to establish is that being an atheist skydiver is not universally deadly. But when a third dude flips the table over, and loudly proclaims, "I DIE EVERYTIME I SKYDIVE! BESIDES, SUCCESSFUL SKYDIVER #1, ANYTHING YOU HAVE TO SAY IS INVALID BECAUSE STATISTICS BOY IS TELLING THE TRUTH.", the third dude is universally an asshole. And not even a correct asshole; until he flipped the poker table over, conversation was happening, and nobody was challenging anything else anybody was saying because they didn't have to. It was all probably true, and they had no reason to believe it wasn't. Saying that Dave is wrong for sharing his experiences is fucking stupid. It would be wrong for somebody to base their opinion on American Skydiving based only on Dave's testimony when there is more testimony out there, but all Dave did by adding his story is made the statistic more accurate (assuming he wasn't part of the initial Gallup Poll.)

[Rose]

I couldn't be bothered to read all the pages of this debate, so if this has already been addressed, sorry:

However, it's more of a problem for those of non-Christian faiths. If the money said "In Allah, we trust", or "One nation, under the pantheon of Zeus", I would suspect that a significant proportion of American Christians everywhere would be complaining that every monetary transaction they made was a blasphemous act.

I'm a Christian, and I know many other Christians, and neither I nor most of them would give a shit about what a tiny green paper rectangle said. By the same logic, I think it's ridiculous that anyone cares what's on our money. It isn't hurting anyone. If it's easy to change our currency to not say that, then whatever. It really doesn't matter either way, and I think people make too big a deal out of this :/

[blue_tetris]

Tsukatu, when there is a table of dudes, sitting around discussing something, like, say, Atheism in America, and one of them says something that is absolutely true, like "Skydiving fatalities have been steadily rising since 1904." and the other dude says, "I went skydiving once, and I've never been hurt." That's conversation. It's mild debate, sure. All one dude is trying to establish is that being an atheist skydiver is not universally deadly. But when a third dude flips the table over, and loudly proclaims, "I DIE EVERYTIME I SKYDIVE! BESIDES, SUCCESSFUL SKYDIVER #1, ANYTHING YOU HAVE TO SAY IS INVALID BECAUSE STATISTICS BOY IS TELLING THE TRUTH.", the third dude is universally an asshole. And not even a correct asshole; until he flipped the poker table over, conversation was happening, and nobody was challenging anything else anybody was saying because they didn't have to. It was all probably true, and they had no reason to believe it wasn't. Saying that Dave is wrong for sharing his experiences is fucking stupid. It would be wrong for somebody to base their opinion on American Skydiving based only on Dave's testimony when there is more testimony out there, but all Dave did by adding his story is made the statistic more accurate (assuming he wasn't part of the initial Gallup Poll.)

And this is the bottom line. Like, I've maintained this as long as Suki has because when a dude calls you out and then expands upon every minor issue until it's blown out of proportion, you are obliged to stay along for the ride. But we keep this shit going. Because Suki maintains upturning the table and raging is justifiable here.

If the personal experience you gave was false, then it was not meaningful.
If the personal experience you gave was true, then it was still not meaningful.
If you had given a study that turned out to be your false personal experience, then it wouldn't have been meaningful.
If you had given a study that turned out to be your true personal experience, then it still wouldn't have been meaningful.

Of entry b: Personal experience is meaningful. If it were not, this would not be the kind of thing that Gallup Polls query. If they were entirely meaningless, Gallup would throw out all of the experiential items they get. I find that assigning this "not meaningful" status to certain sources of information is ridiculous. Boiled down to the core, all polling, conversation, and debate stems from individual personal experiences. The purpose of a poll (or, generally, being social) is to develop a shared experience, where the speaker and the listener fundamentally understand what the other thinks.

Importantly though: There's meaing to anything that's said. Anything that's posited towards any of your precious databases of information has a truth value. Some statistics are false or (at the very least) unable to create a shared meaning. (read below)

The population of this forum is not a representative sample of the population of the United States of America. This gathered information would not be applicable to the subject, which was distrust of atheists among the population of the United States of America.

And we'd have to evaluate the methodology of any collection process (polling or otherwise) to truly get to the bottom of what is "meaningful", by your standards. In the end, divining absolute meaning from individual experiences becomes a tasking process, filled with myriad levels of meta-analysis. The methodology of an entire poll can be as difficult to anaylze as the methodology of a single poll entry (again, what we call an experience). Even a poll's sources should be full understood to become perfectly clear.

The degree to which you're tasked to analyze a source of information depends on the gravity and the purpose on the conversation. A conversation on one level might require a few entries from people participating in a thread. A conversation on another level might require 100 likely-reliable entries collected from a poll. A conversation on a grander level still might require several different polls and an analysis on what methods are appropriate to create polls, and whether all the entered polls were established as accurate enough to all readers to create a shared meaning. I was under the impression we were on a significantly lower degree of meta-analysis. Suki thought differently, and was wrong.



Most of Suki's other comments were on this same vein: That an experience is somehow inherently disconnected from a poll.

That's why organizations like Gallup have such a good rep: they're good at finding representative samples of the nation that do a good job of staying proportionate as you extrapolate to the greater population.

They're alright. And at that point in the conversation, largely unnecessary. I was equally interested in sharing personal experiences with my buds from Metanet. But if we're being rigorous, let's analyze Gallup any time we offer up a poll of theirs. Moreover, you should have to do it. Each time you submit a poll. Bring the proof of that poll to the highest possible degree, through every sort of meta-analysis available, until there's no possibility that anyone involved could have a doubt.

If you continue to use a binary sort of logic related to meaningfulness, when it comes to information sources, you'll find yourself worked into a bit of a logical corner. There's a degree of meaning to all information. An polls, while benefitting from a larger base of experiences, have the problem of being second order information. Information that could have selection bias (not necessarily by the pollsters, but by the respondents as well), and plenty of response bias. (I'm sure that the welfare-bound atheist-haters have lots of free time to answer surveys. Shit, I'm getting a phonecall--

"Yes? Sorry. I'm a little busy being a productive, Godless heathen. Hm? No, don't call the Jew next door, he's busy investment banking. Why not call the Mennonite farmer down the street? He's got some free time."

You kidding me? I'm enjoying the shit out of this conversation. It's like one of them Bozo the Clown punching bags that keep springing up because he's apparently incapable of lying down.

Good. Because my biggest fear was your pompy attitude towards the situation and your feigning of its gravity was for srs. Now I realize that's just Internet Suki. Real Suki, if I can sheepishly conjecture here, enjoys himself? Isn't raging? Tell me if I'm getting out of line and stepping on meat-filled realitytoes, here, because that's where I've heard the line's drawn.

To reiterate / clarify: You weren't wrong because you gave one anecdote; you were wrong because you gave one anecdote. Atilla offered thousands of anecdotes from a representative sample of the US. You gave one anecdote. If you had also given thousands of anecdotes from a representative sample (read: a survey), then I would've kept my mouth shut. But you gave an anecdote, which only compares to one anecdote and therefore is guaranteed to be meaningless regardless of whether or not it's true.

Atilla gave 100 opinions, third order. Like, he gave info about info a poll gave about info people gave. For Atilla's content to have been true, we'd have to find credible: Atilla, then the poll Atilla read (but did not indicate), and (generally) the members of the collectorate of the poll. So I had, like, a 10% chance of being a single credible experience. Atilla might have had a 0.1% chance of being 100 credible experiences. There's no valuable figures here. That's why I (either) like to go to directly to the source or not harshly demand sources.

Especially when we're all still being chill and chatty.

However, it's more of a problem for those of non-Christian faiths. If the money said "In Allah, we trust", or "One nation, under the pantheon of Zeus", I would suspect that a significant proportion of American Christians everywhere would be complaining that every monetary transaction they made was a blasphemous act.

I'm a Christian, and I know many other Christians, and neither I nor most of them would give a shit about what a tiny green paper rectangle said. By the same logic, I think it's ridiculous that anyone cares what's on our money. It isn't hurting anyone. If it's easy to change our currency to not say that, then whatever. It really doesn't matter either way, and I think people make too big a deal out of this :/

Woah, woah, woah. Don't offer your opinion here! This thread isn't for your opinions. It's for establishing the utter credibility of enough individual experiences from the American population to be absolutely certain on a matter. We need to be listing a variety of different polls, list their methodology and applicants, and then contact respondants such that they can personally establish some credibility.

There's a lot of work to be done to create utter truth out of human experiences. We've no time for your opinions, bro.

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

Tsukatu, when there is a table of dudes, sitting around discussing something, like, say, Atheism in America, and one of them says something that is absolutely true, like "Skydiving fatalities have been steadily rising since 1904." and the other dude says, "I went skydiving once, and I've never been hurt." That's conversation. It's mild debate, sure.

If the subject of the conversation started off as personal skydiving experiences, then sure, this example would be applicable.
That is, if the conversation was something like this...
A: "So I went skydiving yesterday."
B: "I don't think that was a good idea; skydiving fatalities have been steadily rising since 1904."
C: "I went skydiving once, and I've never been hurt."
...then I wouldn't have a problem, because it's in the scope of personal interaction. If anything, it might even be a little weird of Person B to bring up a statistic like that, and should also try to avoid the gambler's fallacy. In the scope of personal interaction, the narrower of statistics are actually better -- it would be more helpful to know the individual company's track record instead of an average combining likelihoods of injuring oneself in, say, Cambodian skydiving events. It's the same reason you shouldn't be convinced to go for a walk because of some quoted figure on the number of people hippos kill each year; it's not relevant, even though it might appear on first glance that it could be. Depending on where the data came from, Person B's input may very well have been meaningless to the conversation.

But in this case, the conversation started with religious phrases on our currency, which naturally led to the nation's feelings about freedom of religion. At no point were we talking about a specific person, or even a specific locale, which would be solely responsible for changing the phrase on the currency. We were talking about the entire nation, and adding an individual personal experience at this scope, or even hundreds of personal experiences, will not be at all significant in the face of large, professionally conducted, national surveys.

The conversation you made would be applicable if it was never about individual skydiving trips to begin with, until the dude who just said he's never been hurt while skydiving decided for some reason that that information was useful when talking about national skydiving safety. The expected response from the rest of the table would be closer to, "er, okay, thanks for that. So why do you think that is, anyway? Sports have usually seen an increase in safety measures over time, so what do you figure makes skydiving an exception?"

All one dude is trying to establish is that being an atheist skydiver is not universally deadly.

That wouldn't be a useful contribution to the conversation. The first dude didn't say anything about anything being universally anything. Atilla said, "lookit, some people don't trust atheists."

But when a third dude flips the table over, and loudly proclaims, "I DIE EVERYTIME I SKYDIVE! BESIDES, SUCCESSFUL SKYDIVER #1, ANYTHING YOU HAVE TO SAY IS INVALID BECAUSE STATISTICS BOY IS TELLING THE TRUTH.", the third dude is universally an asshole.

See, I don't even think I was the first to be an asshole. Dave didn't courteously offer an anecdote for make betterment to accuracy of survey; he leapt up onto the table screaming "what the hell do you know about skydiving? Ever been skydiving, faggot? Didn't fucking think so! You can read all the statistics you want, but you'll never know shit 'til you go skydiving and figure it out for yourself. I've been skydiving, cuz I, unlike you, am not a bitch. So I know what I'm talking about. And I've never been hurt, cuz only pussies get injured skydiving. It's a fucking man's sport, so I actually wouldn't recommend it to a limp-wristed nerd like you. WHOO! GO AMERICUUUUH!! *chugs beer*"
And now you're telling me that I should have been more passive in dealing with that? You're calling me the asshole? No, no, I'm the dick. And there's a difference between dicks and assholes. See Team America for details.

Saying that Dave is wrong for sharing his experiences is fucking stupid.

I'm saying Dave's wrong for thinking his experiences are grounds to dismiss the survey entirely. That post he made was a disagreement with Atilla, specifically because what he said conflicted with Dave's experiences.
At least, that's what I started off calling him on. Now my bigger issue with him is that he still thinks it's reasonable to challenge a trustworthy survey with personal experience. He's still saying that unverified statistical data is equivalent to all other forms of "sourceless information" (where he extends "sourceless" to cover "things that haven't been immediately sourced") such as personal experience in a context that's outside the scope of personal interaction. He was also trying to make an argument at some point about why it's okay to disregard the potential results of looking into a survey, but I think he realized that that boiled down to an argument for information never being valid ever again after it failed to be immediately sourced and dropped it.

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

Most of Suki's other comments were on this same vein: That an experience is somehow inherently disconnected from a poll.

Do we just completely not remember me saying all of this here:
"Here's another way of looking at it: a survey is a collection of thousands of personal experiences, and so trying to overthrow the thousands with your own experience is like trying to knock down a brick wall with a grain of sand (or whatever the hell bricks are made of). It's not equivalent, nor could it hope to be. It was a counter-argument incapable of being effective."
This was, like, a page ago.

Personal experience is meaningful. If it were not, this would not be the kind of thing that Gallup Polls query. If they were entirely meaningless, Gallup would throw out all of the experiential items they get.

That has never been what I was saying. Any personal experience an individual offers in the context of a scope outside of personal interaction is never meaningful, was what I have been saying. There's a reason I've been making pains to include that disclaimer all along, y'know. I fully grant that personal experience is totally valid in many other circumstances.

But I also don't feel you quite get how statistics work.
Not too long ago, I was securing for myself the title of "irredeemable nerd" by making a chart of the expected outcomes of various dice rolls (in fact, here it is). Each of those expected values was calculated using one million dice rolls. As you can see, I rolled a total of 65 million dice. If you were to comment on how this chart is possibly inaccurate because you just rolled a d12 and didn't hit TN 7, I would be giving you the same schpiel about an individual roll being not at all significant. You could take the SlappyMcGee I-don't-understand-magnitudes route and argue that your roll just contributed to the accuracy of my chart, but that would obviously be laughable.

Like I said before, I'm not arguing because you offered one anecdote, but because you offered one anecdote. I've also called this "your personal experience" in this thread. Yes, a survey is a massive collection of personal experiences (also, stop acting like you were the one who introduced that fact into this thread), but what makes it meaningful is the fact that there's a shit-ton of them. My chart up there was also constructed with individual die rolls, but obviously I didn't throw out each individual roll because it was just one individual roll. I wouldn't throw out your one d12 roll because it was one d12 roll, but because it was one d12 roll.
What is a society, really? It's the collective experience of lots and lots of individuals. What is better suited to describe some aspect of that society: a description based on the collective experiences of lots and lots of individuals, or the experience of a single individual? The point is, it's meaningless because it's only one unit compared to the many, many more units it's supposed to stand against. Offering one unit against overwhelmingly more will not be meaningful in a conversation about masses of units, regardless of whether or not that unit is valid.
This is why I didn't care about whether or not your story was true, and why I've been saying that it's not meaningful. If your story checks out, it's still one story, and therefore not meaningful in the face of a large, representative sample. If your story doesn't check out, then it's not meaningful for an extra reason besides. Either way, it wasn't meaningful in the conversation I totally just derailed.

And to be clear, let me say yet again that what set me off was the fact that you were so cocky about it. You paying attention, Slaps? Cuz I've said this before. Hilarious as it was that you tried to make Dave out to be a well-intentioned contributor to a conversation he was eager to see through to a meaningful, mutually beneficial end, you've really got to stop forgetting major details about the history of this thread. It's getting annoying. No, actually, it already became annoying, and now it's just becoming more so.

Importantly though: There's meaing to anything that's said. Anything that's posited towards any of your precious databases of information has a truth value.

Sure, it exists. But in many cases, e.g. this one, it's quite possible to say something that's not at all significant. For all intents and purposes, we can say that it has no meaning whatsoever.

And we'd have to evaluate the methodology of any collection process (polling or otherwise) to truly get to the bottom of what is "meaningful", by your standards. In the end, divining absolute meaning from individual experiences becomes a tasking process, filled with myriad levels of meta-analysis. The methodology of an entire poll can be as difficult to anaylze as the methodology of a single poll entry (again, what we call an experience). Even a poll's sources should be full understood to become perfectly clear.

The degree to which you're tasked to analyze a source of information depends on the gravity and the purpose on the conversation. A conversation on one level might require a few entries from people participating in a thread. A conversation on another level might require 100 likely-reliable entries collected from a poll. A conversation on a grander level still might require several different polls and an analysis on what methods are appropriate to create polls, and whether all the entered polls were established as accurate enough to all readers to create a shared meaning. I was under the impression we were on a significantly lower degree of meta-analysis. Suki thought differently, and was wrong.

Firstly, the suggestion that polling is ultimately doomed to futility because it's never more trustworthy than an individual's opinion made me giggle. Thanks for that.
Secondly, this issue really doesn't require that much analysis. When it comes right down to it, a whole bunch of people are better at giving the opinion of a whole bunch of people than you, alone, are. That's really as far as you need to look into this mess.

But if we're being rigorous, let's analyze Gallup any time we offer up a poll of theirs. Moreover, you should have to do it. Each time you submit a poll. Bring the proof of that poll to the highest possible degree, through every sort of meta-analysis available, until there's no possibility that anyone involved could have a doubt.
If you continue to use a binary sort of logic related to meaningfulness, when it comes to information sources, you'll find yourself worked into a bit of a logical corner.

Wow, all I did was tell you that lots of people telling me something means more than you alone telling me something, and that's all it takes for you to caricature me as a fascist and absolutist machine that demands some impossible, objective standards for meaning? Did I hit a nerve or something? If you really feel this way, you're one of the last people I'd want to talk to about political elections...
And what's all this about a "binary logic related to meaningfulness"? I'm not calling it binary at all; my whole point is related to the fact that your opinion divided by the number of opinions given is a tiny, tiny number. There's no absolutist decision for what passes some minimum bar of "acceptable," but a completely reasonable understanding that you are one drop in an ocean.
Also, a floating point approximation like that requires at least 32 binary bits, and I ain't doing that shit in my head.

Good. Because my biggest fear was your pompy attitude towards the situation and your feigning of its gravity was for srs. Now I realize that's just Internet Suki. Real Suki, if I can sheepishly conjecture here, enjoys himself? Isn't raging? Tell me if I'm getting out of line and stepping on meat-filled realitytoes, here, because that's where I've heard the line's drawn.

Rrrg. This is infuriating (for internet Suki). How many times do I have to tell you this? Happy-time IRL Suki should under no circumstances be mixed up with light-hearted IRL Suki. They are different creatures entirely, and I have worked very fucking hard to enforce that sharp contrast in my personalities. I'm going to have the diagram up soon, but like I've spent hours explaining to you in Vent, happy-time IRL Suki only conditionally translates to apparently-angry-but-actually-humored online Suki. Actually-angry online Suki will never come from distressed-from-external-IRL-circumstances IRL Suki, and you should know this by now.
Fucking hell, Da-- I mean blue_tetris. Sorry, almost referred to you by your IRL name. Online-debate Suki (a superset of some of the previously mentioned Suki's) prefers not to do that. Catch me in a different thread, though, and I can.

Atilla gave 100 opinions, third order. Like, he gave info about info a poll gave about info people gave. For Atilla's content to have been true, we'd have to find credible: Atilla, then the poll Atilla read (but did not indicate), and (generally) the members of the collectorate of the poll. So I had, like, a 10% chance of being a single credible experience. Atilla might have had a 0.1% chance of being 100 credible experiences. There's no valuable figures here. That's why I (either) like to go to directly to the source or not harshly demand sources.

Heh, yeah, it's a wonder Gallup isn't completely out of business by now. Cuz obviously, someone using figures from a Gallup poll is already... what was this order system you made? "Third-order?" Yeah, that shit is so third-order. You go (presumably) to fourth and fifth order once anyone actually uses the result of the usage of those figures, too. What a waste. Why doesn't Gallup realize that they can't hope but provide untrustworthy, and therefore unrepresentative and meaningless information? Why is everyone besides you and me so stupid?

Especially when we're all still being chill and chatty.

Leave it to an Aussie to regurgitate the media perception of the people from a different nation, and assume it's true. Silly tiny island peoples and their backwards beliefs.

Atilla's claims fully lack cogency because he's an Aussie... [Australia is] a snobby little lazy hunk of earth filled with criminals mostly too retarded to fully understand lofty American concepts

Yeah, man, you were totally just sitting in a cafe, having a completely respectable conversation that you and Atilla were sure to mutually enjoy. That's totally what was going on. I'm sorry I was such a dick and interrupted your considerate and agreeable banter.


Your reply to maxson was also pretty weird. You're mixing up all the subjects of conversation in this thread, again. See, it started out being about the forumer's opinions about a phrase on their money, and that's what maxson was replying to. You and I are talking, among other things, about the validity of polls. Don't be lashing out at non-participants in our conversation, especially when they're talking about something unrelated. Bad form; respect -50, Dave. :\

[SlappyMcGee]

You say that you wouldn't want to talk to Dave around an election, which is hilarious, because your entire argument hinges around the idea that a single opinion does not matter in comparison to a larger sample of opinions. Do you not vote? I mean, it definitely makes sense that you wouldn't. It also makes sense that Happy-Time-IRL-Tsukatu with Kung-FU Grip comes to the internet to express his opinions on atheism; in a world that is, by your own victim complex' admission, filled with religious folk who think that Atheism is wrong, you must be completely stifled in expressing your opinion since in real life, you know that you're wrong. Conformist bitch.

[blue_tetris]

Personal experience is meaningful. If it were not, this would not be the kind of thing that Gallup Polls query. If they were entirely meaningless, Gallup would throw out all of the experiential items they get.

That has never been what I was saying. Any personal experience an individual offers in the context of a scope outside of personal interaction is never meaningful, was what I have been saying. There's a reason I've been making pains to include that disclaimer all along, y'know. I fully grant that personal experience is totally valid in many other circumstances.

But I also don't feel you quite get how statistics work.
Not too long ago, I was securing for myself the title of "irredeemable nerd" by making a chart of the expected outcomes of various dice rolls (in fact, here it is). Each of those expected values was calculated using one million dice rolls. As you can see, I rolled a total of 65 million dice. If you were to comment on how this chart is possibly inaccurate because you just rolled a d12 and didn't hit TN 7, I would be giving you the same schpiel about an individual roll being not at all significant. You could take the SlappyMcGee I-don't-understand-magnitudes route and argue that your roll just contributed to the accuracy of my chart, but that would obviously be laughable.

Dude. You made a chart of all this? The average roll on a given die is half the maximum, plus 0.5, multiplied by the number of dice rolled. From there, you could just discern the standard deviation based on the number of dice rolled, rather than their value, and compose a formula.

This is an awful metaphor. Did you roll a thousand dice to get this answer? Because I would do it without rolling a thousand dice. You don't have to roll a thousand dice and attain a reputation for supplying credible dice rolls. You only need one dude to front the correct answer. Which I've done. :/

Like I said before, I'm not arguing because you offered one anecdote, but because you offered one anecdote.

And I'm arguing that you shouldn't argue and be upset when people offer their anecdotes occasionally. If you get up in arms every time someone offers an anecdote because it's one and not a thousand anecdotes, you're gonna come off as a giant dick. This will lose you points in a job interview Internet conversation.

I've also called this "your personal experience" in this thread. Yes, a survey is a massive collection of personal experiences (also, stop acting like you were the one who introduced that fact into this thread),

I did.

but what makes it meaningful is the fact that there's a shit-ton of them. My chart up there was also constructed with individual die rolls, but obviously I didn't throw out each individual roll because it was just one individual roll. I wouldn't throw out your one d12 roll because it was one d12 roll, but because it was one d12 roll.

Anyhow, you didn't give me or anyone a chance to toss out another d12. In fact, you were so upset at the rolling of dice once that you demanded no one pick up and toss the dice around playfully between turns at the table. Yeah, maybe when it was mine or someone else's turn to fight the Steampunk Scorpion Horror, we'd have the right to pick up all the dice we could find to resolve our barrage of Mecha-Colt .45 fire against the abomination and bring temporary respite to the lonely gulch of Westreach. But it makes you a weird GM when you don't let anyone else play with the dice or pick up pencils until there's something to record. That, and no one asked you to GM Deadlands for us. :/

And to be clear, let me say yet again that what set me off was the fact that you were so cocky about it. You paying attention, Slaps? Cuz I've said this before. Hilarious as it was that you tried to make Dave out to be a well-intentioned contributor to a conversation he was eager to see through to a meaningful, mutually beneficial end, you've really got to stop forgetting major details about the history of this thread. It's getting annoying. No, actually, it already became annoying, and now it's just becoming more so.

I don't see what all that old stuff has to do with our new conversation, anyhow. You're living in the past. Erm. You're Internet living in the Internet past. :/

Firstly, the suggestion that polling is ultimately doomed to futility because it's never more trustworthy than an individual's opinion made me giggle. Thanks for that.
Secondly, this issue really doesn't require that much analysis. When it comes right down to it, a whole bunch of people are better at giving the opinion of a whole bunch of people than you, alone, are. That's really as far as you need to look into this mess.

Alright, then. I've conducted a survey. Americans think that Dave is generally the coolest dude whatever was and that Picard is the better captain. Don't ask about my methodology. All you really need to look into this mess is that I've conducted a poll. Trust my poll and the depth of its preparation. Your mother trusts my poll and how deep it goes.

And what's all this about a "binary logic related to meaningfulness"? I'm not calling it binary at all; my whole point is related to the fact that your opinion divided by the number of opinions given is a tiny, tiny number. There's no absolutist decision for what passes some minimum bar of "acceptable," but a completely reasonable understanding that you are one drop in an ocean.
Also, a floating point approximation like that requires at least 32 binary bits, and I ain't doing that shit in my head.

Atilla gave 100 opinions, third order. Like, he gave info about info a poll gave about info people gave. For Atilla's content to have been true, we'd have to find credible: Atilla, then the poll Atilla read (but did not indicate), and (generally) the members of the collectorate of the poll. So I had, like, a 10% chance of being a single credible experience. Atilla might have had a 0.1% chance of being 100 credible experiences. There's no valuable figures here. That's why I (either) like to go to directly to the source or not harshly demand sources.

Heh, yeah, it's a wonder Gallup isn't completely out of business by now. Cuz obviously, someone using figures from a Gallup poll is already... what was this order system you made? "Third-order?" Yeah, that shit is so third-order. You go (presumably) to fourth and fifth order once anyone actually uses the result of the usage of those figures, too. What a waste. Why doesn't Gallup realize that they can't hope but provide untrustworthy, and therefore unrepresentative and meaningless information? Why is everyone besides you and me so stupid?

There was a bunch generally suggesting that Atilla's comments about a poll had firmer truth value than mine. Let's fully assess, giving out the likelihood, at each step, of each source supplying credible information:

Atilla said that some unindentified poll said that some people said that Americans dislike atheists.
Dave said that Americans don't kill atheists.

Atilla and Dave are pretty trustworthy. Dave is an American and the well-respected leader of an online community (and myriad associated projects) and is extraordinarily good at medic. Ordinarily, we'd give this guy a higher credibility rating than Atilla. But to give Suki the benefit of the doubt here, let's say that Atilla and Dave have credibility ratings of 0.1. They are both telling something from their experience which has a chance to be true. The average person should immediately view the likelihood of their sentiments being equally true. If they wanted to establish more truth value, they should have said it when they opened their mouths.

Atilla is currently at credibility 0.1. Dave is at credibility 0.1.

Atilla did not cite the poll he used. This could be any polling center or association. Because he cited no source, the source could be extraordinarily shoddy. People make a living being pollsters for interest groups, politicians, and the corporations that evil America-hating sorts like yourself despise. We don't know if the information he says he got his information from is credible. Let's assign his poll's credibility at 0.1 because we don't know what poll he actually viewed.

Atilla is currently at credibility 0.01. Dave is still at an impressive 0.1.

Atilla's unknown poll's applicants are those who chose to take part in a poll, weren't busy at the time, and filled with all sorts of personal biases as to how polls should turn out. They are faceless and personalityless, therefore far less credible than the well-established Atilla and Dave. Let's give them an average credibility of 0.01.

Atilla is currently at credibility 0.0001. Dave is at 0.1.

Now, if all of the factors put together still amount to the fact that Atilla is correct, he supplies 1000 experiences to the conversation. That's a lofty x1000 multiplier he receives. And rightfully so. If his hearsay ends up being truthful, he's got the better argument. However, at that point in the conversation, he didn't. :/ He just had an experience related to a pollster's experience of collection a thousand experiences.

Dave will only be supplying one experience, Dave's experience, which is worth at least 47 experiences all put together. However, we'll be assigning him only a multiplier of x1 for this example.

Well, I don't think I have to tell you which number multiplied by which number equals which other number. But I intend to:

Dave's potentiality for credible experiences is 0.1. Atilla's is the exact same with his more-likely-to-be-junk-hearsay 1000 experiences: On average, he'll still have only applied one tenth of a credible experience. Moreover, what he has said is slightly more boring and predictable than what Dave said and does not benefit the reader on a purely entertainment value.

Dave's entertainment value is a sizable 0.4, (a 40% chance per target of amusement) with Atilla's and Tsukatu's combined score being something under 0.1. :/

Q.E.D. bro.

(And before you say "Dave, you're just making these numbers up.", take a step back and realize: So did Atilla. OH SNAP.)

Especially when we're all still being chill and chatty.

Leave it to an Aussie to regurgitate the media perception of the people from a different nation, and assume it's true. Silly tiny island peoples and their backwards beliefs.

Atilla's claims fully lack cogency because he's an Aussie... [Australia is] a snobby little lazy hunk of earth filled with criminals mostly too retarded to fully understand lofty American concepts

Yeah, man, you were totally just sitting in a cafe, having a completely respectable conversation that you and Atilla were sure to mutually enjoy. That's totally what was going on. I'm sorry I was such a dick and interrupted your considerate and agreeable banter.

You're forgiven.

Your reply to maxson was also pretty weird. You're mixing up all the subjects of conversation in this thread, again. See, it started out being about the forumer's opinions about a phrase on their money, and that's what maxson was replying to. You and I are talking, among other things, about the validity of polls. Don't be lashing out at non-participants in our conversation, especially when they're talking about something unrelated. Bad form; respect -50, Dave. :\

And see, I thought the conversation had become our personal opinions about a manner in which atheists are systematically subjected to chemical castration to appease the Mother Faith. max is perfectly entitled to his opinions on how he views the phrase on money. Am I entitled to my opinions on how I view the widespreadness of atheist's internment into deathcamps?

Not if Suki has anything to do with it, apparently.

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

You say that you wouldn't want to talk to Dave around an election, which is hilarious, because your entire argument hinges around the idea that a single opinion does not matter in comparison to a larger sample of opinions. Do you not vote? I mean, it definitely makes sense that you wouldn't.

Yes, a survey is a massive collection of personal experiences... but what makes it meaningful is the fact that there's a shit-ton of them. My chart up there was also constructed with individual die rolls, but obviously I didn't throw out each individual roll because it was just one individual roll. I wouldn't throw out your one d12 roll because it was one d12 roll, but because it was one d12 roll.

That addresses the point you attempted to make. You shouldn't have used voting, though, because a vote is not asserted evidence to determine truth about something that is voted on, in opposition to a collection of other votes that have already been tallied and presented. The voting process can be better compared to the making of the survey (what Dave decided to pretend he was doing all along at one point, but later dropped), not the challenge of election results after the fact with my own, solitary vote (which is what Dave originally did). (And for clarification, I don't mean "challenging election results" as in "that didn't go the way I wanted it to," but rather, "no, my guy won, and everyone else in the US who disagrees is wrong".)
If you insist on making one about elections, the proper parallel would be asking me who won the election and having me reply with the wrong candidate. But I obviously didn't do that.

Dude. You made a chart of all this? The average roll on a given die is half the maximum, plus 0.5, multiplied by the number of dice rolled. From there, you could just discern the standard deviation based on the number of dice rolled, rather than their value, and compose a formula.

This is an awful metaphor. Did you roll a thousand dice to get this answer? Because I would do it without rolling a thousand dice. You don't have to roll a thousand dice and attain a reputation for supplying credible dice rolls. You only need one dude to front the correct answer. Which I've done. :/

Deadlands, loser. Maximum value explodes. Changes dice rolling statistics completely. For one thing, the "average" roll of any given die becomes useless information. I mean, if you roll 5d10 against a TN of 11 (Deadlands is a keep-one system, too), clearly there's going to be a 5 * (1 in 10) chance that you'll make the TN (one in ten per die to get a 10, and then any roll after than will beat the 11). If you're ready to claim that on average, each of the dice will come up as 5.5, and therefore the average TN that 5d10 will hit is 5, you'd be completely wrong.
Also, it was one million dice. Per xdy.
If you're so certain that you could've done it that quickly, I should very much like to see what you come up with, though. And since we have what is extremely likely the "correct answer," we'll see how well you do. Or do you just like running your mouth, and backing off when it gets ugly?

And I'm arguing that you shouldn't argue and be upset when people offer their anecdotes occasionally. If you get up in arms every time someone offers an anecdote because it's one and not a thousand anecdotes, you're gonna come off as a giant dick.

I got up in arms because it wasn't a polite conversation to begin with. Atilla was being all repectable-like, and you went apeshit for some reason. I saw this as an excuse to go apeshit as well, so I did. Like I said, I probably wouldn't have said anything if you weren't so antagonistic.

Yes, a survey is a massive collection of personal experiences (also, stop acting like you were the one who introduced that fact into this thread)

I did.

First time you mentioned the composition of poll results was:
Post #88353 : "Dude, it's difficult to grasp for you, but: Surveys, and any collection of data for that matter, are actual a collection of comments that people have made."

The first time I did was:
Post #88308: "Here's another way of looking at it: a survey is a collection of thousands of personal experiences, and so trying to overthrow the thousands with your own experience is like trying to knock down a brick wall with a grain of sand (or whatever the hell bricks are made of). It's not equivalent, nor could it hope to be. It was a counter-argument incapable of being effective."

Anyhow, you didn't give me or anyone a chance to toss out another d12. In fact, you were so upset at the rolling of dice once that you demanded no one pick up and toss the dice around playfully between turns at the table.

Wwwwwwwhat?
Anyone can come in and contribute something. I'm not stopping them. You just tried to stop maxson, not me, if you want a case in point.
And you weren't just playing with your dice; you started throwing them at Atilla.
And we weren't in a game, but in a discussion about dice rolling statistics. But it was awfully strange of you to pull out dice and start rolling as though we were playing, contesting millions of die rolls with your single roll, and throwing another at Atilla every time he spoke.
And you talk a whole lot about what the conversation started out to be even though there's a very clear, written history of it that shows that your memory of the conversation is inaccurate.
I...
Fuck it. This is starting to not be worth it anymore. You keep trying to change the past, changing the subject to anything besides what the conversation has only ever been about, and have started making some pretty radical statements about the institution of polling. Are you trolling me now? Is that what's going on? Are you just seeing how long I keep arguing against a position that only gets less and less reasonable, and squirms more and more, becoming harder to pin down? Am I being punk'd right now?

That'd be a shame, cuz I was actually hoping that you'd actually end up replying to this:

A: "Some hermit crabs are using man-made trash as shells."
B: "I saw this hermit crab this one time, and it was using a normal shell."
A: "TOUCHE INDEED, MY GOOD SIR. I CEDE MY POINT ENTIRELY."
I'm trying to be the Person C who says, "maybe you saw one besides the 'some'," but I get the impression that you actually expected your conversation with Atilla to go the above route.

Alright, then. I've conducted a survey. Americans think that Dave is generally the coolest dude whatever was and that Picard is the better captain. Don't ask about my methodology. All you really need to look into this mess is that I've conducted a poll. Trust my poll and the depth of its preparation. Your mother trusts my poll and how deep it goes.

How many people did you ask? Gallup asked 2,000. It says that in the first Google search. I dredged that up just now.

(And before you say "Dave, you're just making these numbers up.", take a step back and realize: So did Atilla. OH SNAP.)

No, he didn't. He got it from this thing he read this one time. If he had made up the numbers, we would've found out immediately. Turns out he didn't, though, so in your own wording, "Atilla's comments about a poll had firmer truth value than [yours]."

I thought the conversation had become our personal opinions about a manner in which atheists are systematically subjected to chemical castration to appease the Mother Faith.

Haha, that's quite alright. Apology accepted. Can we get back on topic, then, or were you going to bitch and moan some more?

Am I entitled to my opinions on how I view the widespreadness of atheist's internment into deathcamps?

Not if Suki has anything to do with it, apparently.

Saying that Dave is wrong for sharing his experiences is fucking stupid.

I'm saying Dave's wrong for thinking his experiences are grounds to dismiss the survey entirely. That post he made was a disagreement with Atilla, specifically because what he said conflicted with Dave's experiences.

[SlappyMcGee]

The difference between the hermit crabs and what actually happened is, once again, what I've said for pages, and that's that offering a different opinion, even if it is against compounded statistics, does not mean you intend to prove Atilla wrong. Atilla's post, through it's lack of numbers in statistics as well as the anecdote phoned in on the end paints a relatively bad picture for being an atheist in America. I believe that that generally is not the case, so Dave said, "Well, you've never been to America, and I live here, and it really isn't that bad." He said it in a Dave way, which I guess you think is loaded with hostility, but I don't know about that.

Point being, you don't throw away one dice roll because that's just bad polling. Dave isn't necessarily right in saying his information is more accurate than the statistics, but we really can't make character judgments on anyone polled. We do, on the other hand, know Dave and we know he is a relatively reliable source. Hey, I don't throw away your contribution to the thread either. I would say that since me and Dave's experiences are both positive, and since yours is a negative experience, adding our anecdotes to the poll decrease the percentage of mistreated atheists marginally.

Except wait. Nobody has offered a poll about mistreating atheists. It's almost as if the only reason that came up was because of Atilla's anecdote. But that can't be true, because that's such a relatively minor part of the rich, delicious post.

[Atilla]

I think Atilla's post represents the inhumanity of man to man by placing his suppressed homosexual urges in counterpoint to the rich flavour of the toffee eaten in the third chapter. This theme is further underlined by the symbolism of the basket of kittens, which was cast into darkness by the robot at the beginning of the post, thus calling into question the dichotomy of gender as it is enforced by the populist but morally bankrupt culture of the day.

[otters]

I think Atilla's post represents the inhumanity of man to man by placing his suppressed homosexual urges in counterpoint to the rich flavour of the toffee eaten in the third chapter. This theme is further underlined by the symbolism of the basket of kittens, which was cast into darkness by the robot at the beginning of the post, thus calling into question the dichotomy of gender as it is enforced by the populist but morally bankrupt culture of the day.

I believe that the basket of kittens symbolizes the long dark night of the haddock through which the robot is going at which point it symbolically turns off the symbolic lightbulb, therefore symbolically plunging the symbolic room into symbolic darkness.

[SlappyMcGee]

I think Atilla's post represents the inhumanity of man to man by placing his suppressed homosexual urges in counterpoint to the rich flavour of the toffee eaten in the third chapter. This theme is further underlined by the symbolism of the basket of kittens, which was cast into darkness by the robot at the beginning of the post, thus calling into question the dichotomy of gender as it is enforced by the populist but morally bankrupt culture of the day.

I believe that the basket of kittens symbolizes the long dark night of the haddock through which the robot is going at which point it symbolically turns off the symbolic lightbulb, therefore symbolically plunging the symbolic room into symbolic darkness.

So's your face.

[blue_tetris]

Deadlands, loser. Maximum value explodes. Changes dice rolling statistics completely. For one thing, the "average" roll of any given die becomes useless information. I mean, if you roll 5d10 against a TN of 11 (Deadlands is a keep-one system, too), clearly there's going to be a 5 * (1 in 10) chance that you'll make the TN (one in ten per die to get a 10, and then any roll after than will beat the 11). If you're ready to claim that on average, each of the dice will come up as 5.5, and therefore the average TN that 5d10 will hit is 5, you'd be completely wrong.
Also, it was one million dice. Per xdy.
If you're so certain that you could've done it that quickly, I should very much like to see what you come up with, though. And since we have what is extremely likely the "correct answer," we'll see how well you do. Or do you just like running your mouth, and backing off when it gets ugly?

I'm in it for the long haul, to see how hilarious ugly it can possibly get.

I don't play Deadlands, nor does anyone. It's a shitty mechanic for what could be an otherwise cool setting (if not for the unnecessary injection of Lovecraftian horror). To believe that the likely result of a roll couldn't be determined mathematically, however, is a bit much, though. I'd have attempted to discern the math behind how the probabilities worked before I ever picked up dice to roll them. And exploding dice does make the rolls unknowable. WoD v2 has dice that succeed on 8s and 9s, and succeed and explode on 10s. That's 0.3 successes per die rolled, plus a 0.1 chance of doing it again (for 0.03, then 0.003, and so on). It comes out to exactly 1 success per 3 dice rolled.

It's also a superior mechanic to the original Vampire: The Masquerade, with a number of roleplay-related problems ingrained right into the mechanic. Like the inclusion of "Resolve" and "Composure" as two different Attributes. I mean, what the hell. It sucks when you see a roleplay dynamic befouled by a mechanic that necessitates some element of flavor needlessly.

You should look into the mechanic sometime, though.

And I'm arguing that you shouldn't argue and be upset when people offer their anecdotes occasionally. If you get up in arms every time someone offers an anecdote because it's one and not a thousand anecdotes, you're gonna come off as a giant dick.

I got up in arms because it wasn't a polite conversation to begin with. Atilla was being all repectable-like, and you went apeshit for some reason. I saw this as an excuse to go apeshit as well, so I did. Like I said, I probably wouldn't have said anything if you weren't so antagonistic.

I wasn't even being antagonistic to you. It was between me and Atilla. It had nothing to do with you at all, bro. You intervened in our conversation to be antagonistic to me. And if you're gonna nobly barge into other people's conversations to save them, you should also bear with you other "holier-than-thou" modus operandi. Like "two wrongs don't make a right".

But, see, I don't see Suki as that guy. You intervened not because you disagreed with my antagonism, but because you wanted to contest the content I added to the conversation.

Wwwwwwwhat?
Anyone can come in and contribute something. I'm not stopping them. You just tried to stop maxson, not me, if you want a case in point.

I was being ironic, bro. You had already established that adding opinion to the topic was totally uncalled for. I was holding max to the same rigors that you held me to.

And you talk a whole lot about what the conversation started out to be even though there's a very clear, written history of it that shows that your memory of the conversation is inaccurate.
I...
Fuck it. This is starting to not be worth it anymore.

That sounds to me like the voice of someone who's giving up. Like a babby. Of course, forfeiture would be perfectly in-standing with your previous unAmerican diatribes and hypocritical and situational analysis of when to apply your logic. Y'know, when shit inherently agrees with you. That's when. You're entitled to give up at any stage and I won't think any less of you. I won't dock your respect points. But you will have lost.

That'd be a shame, cuz I was actually hoping that you'd actually end up replying to this:

A: "Some hermit crabs are using man-made trash as shells."
B: "I saw this hermit crab this one time, and it was using a normal shell."
A: "TOUCHE INDEED, MY GOOD SIR. I CEDE MY POINT ENTIRELY."
I'm trying to be the Person C who says, "maybe you saw one besides the 'some'," but I get the impression that you actually expected your conversation with Atilla to go the above route.

I never expected Atilla to agree with me wholeheartedly. He said: "I heard somewhere unknown that some hermit crabs are whipped and beaten for their use of atypical shells." I replied with: "I've never experienced hermit crabs treated in that way". After that, I had no expectations of what he'd say. I had no goals oriented in my mind. I didn't seek some final resolution. I was making banter. I make banter like an asshole, but I make it nonetheless. And when dudes wanna make banter about how I banter, I'll indulge them in conversation instead.

Some social situations aren't goal-oriented, bro. They're casual. Had the conversation gone somewhere better, maybe I'd have spelled out goals.

Alright, then. I've conducted a survey. Americans think that Dave is generally the coolest dude whatever was and that Picard is the better captain. Don't ask about my methodology. All you really need to look into this mess is that I've conducted a poll. Trust my poll and the depth of its preparation. Your mother trusts my poll and how deep it goes.

How many people did you ask? Gallup asked 2,000. It says that in the first Google search. I dredged that up just now.

See, you've suddenly held my poll to higher rigors than Atilla's. I thought we wouldn't have to look into this mess. I thought we could just presume that a poll is more reliable.

I thought the conversation had become our personal opinions about a manner in which atheists are systematically subjected to chemical castration to appease the Mother Faith.

Haha, that's quite alright. Apology accepted. Can we get back on topic, then, or were you going to bitch and moan some more?

Which topic, the one about God and money and whatever-the-fuck-it-was? We've had that conversation before plenty of times. Every couple months. And, should we get back onto that topic eventually, you can expect that I won't bitch and moan anymore about the manner in which individual forumers decide to offer up their opinions and anecdotes. I don't know why someone would derail an entire conversation to bitch about the humble offering of an anecdote to a conversation. :/

I'm saying Dave's wrong for thinking his experiences are grounds to dismiss the survey entirely. That post he made was a disagreement with Atilla, specifically because what he said conflicted with Dave's experiences.

I never said my opinions were grounds for the survey's dismissal. I continue to say that my sourceless tale was as good as Atilla's. And we should both have been allowed to posit them. You were even fine to front your silly statistics later on.

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

First of all:

I thought the conversation had become our personal opinions about a manner in which atheists are systematically subjected to chemical castration to appease the Mother Faith.

See:

Except wait. Nobody has offered a poll about mistreating atheists.

The difference between the hermit crabs and what actually happened is... that offering a different opinion, even if it is against compounded statistics, does not mean you intend to prove Atilla wrong.

But like I've said, this is besides the point for me now. I'm more interested in Dave's insistence that his personal experience was at all applicable to the issue.

Atilla's post, through it's lack of numbers in statistics as well as the anecdote phoned in on the end paints a relatively bad picture for being an atheist in America. I believe that that generally is not the case,

Wait, so you also threw out the possibility a description of national opinion like that being accurate because it conflicted with your personal experience?

See, this is specifically the issue I have with the way you two are looking at evidence offered to you. Issues of backing up the evidence completely aside, I think it's a terrible idea to dismiss something simply because it doesn't agree with personal experience, especially in the case where your personal experience cannot possibly cover the charge, e.g. something like the opinion of the entire nation.
I'd be fine if you were incredulous, or even if you were so offended by hearing that that you simply stopped following the thread, but active disagreement because of evidence that couldn't possibly be evidence is unreasonable. And you two seem to think it is reasonable, which is why I'm talking now.

Imagine any other conversation in which one doubter categorically denies the validity of something he hears, even if unsubstantiated, even if it's vague in the extreme, and even if it seems ridiculous to him, simply and only because he personally disagrees with it.
A: "There's a lot of rape in Africa."
B: "Whaaaaat? I can't remember the last time I picked up a paper and read that someone in Africa had been raped. There's no way that that is generally the case."
What do you say to someone like person B? Clearly his personal experience is necessarily relatively limited, besides being completely inapplicable because he does not spend his life traveling throughout Africa (presumably). Person A gave extremely vague, unsourced information, that in this case even came across as though it might be a personal musing or something, but it was still a stupid thing to do to dismiss that information in principle for disagreeing with irrelevant evidence. It would be fine to call it unreliable, but disagreement with your personal experience is not reason to "believe that that is generally not the case".
How is this line of thinking different from a savage dismissing an accurate explanation of medicine, the sciences, or even historical events, on the grounds that he's never seen those things? Of him "believing that [those descriptions] are generally not the case"? I would actually have a good deal of respect for the savage if he said he wasn't convinced, but believing that they couldn't be right because he's never experienced them would be unreasonable.
And so are you, for denying the claim because it hasn't been your personal experience.

More importantly, and more frustrating for me, actually, is that you remained resolute when there was a clear case-in-point in this thread about why it is unreasonable to think this way. It turned out that the claim was correct and well-supported, consistently, from multiple trustworthy sources. You shouldn't dismiss a claim for half-assed reasons because the claim could very well be true, just like what happened in this thread.

Saying that it's a conversational context doesn't help things because this isn't some technicality in unstated rules of debate; it's simple cognitive failure. It's a stupid thing to do in a debate context because it's a stupid thing to do in general, including in casual conversation.

Boiling it down to "he said something unsubstantiated, and so did I, therefore we're on the same level" will not help the fact that that's an oversimplification of the issue, no matter how many times Dave repeats it. This is for the same reason that saying "he said some words, and so did I, therefore we're on the same level" wouldn't, either.
"Why are you so caught up with me punching him? He moved some parts of his body, and so did I. I'm no more guilty than he was for talking."

Point being, you don't throw away one dice roll because that's just bad polling.

Sure, you can. If you're all done compiling the numbers when your neighbor tells you what he thinks, his solitary opinion would be useless for any practical purpose; it wouldn't affect the results by any significant amount, and due to rounding error, his input would very probably just be ignored anyway. You'd have the benefit of knowing what your neighbor thinks, but you shouldn't append in your report, "also, an additional sample of size 1 says that 'them atheists is just a bunch of no-gooders', so please adjust all figures by 0.0005."

The thing is, that's not even what's going on here. This wasn't a contribution to those numbers, but an attempt at invalidation of those numbers with one roll of the die. It's a completely different, yet similarly unreasonable, story.

Dave isn't necessarily right in saying his information is more accurate than the statistics, but we really can't make character judgments on anyone polled.

The relevant character judgment was being explicitly asked in the poll. I fail to see the problem. The poll is about current public opinion, regardless of whether or not its at all grounded in reality or based on misunderstanding. If my fiance's parents are included in the 50% who don't want their child to marry an atheist, that will affect me regardless of whether they have (what they think are) reasons for this judgment, or whether they even understand what an atheist is at all. There's a solid case for the poll being more accurate because the results weren't filtered based on reasons for holding their opinions.

I would say that since me and Dave's experiences are both positive, and since yours is a negative experience, adding our anecdotes to the poll decrease the percentage of mistreated atheists marginally.

Except wait. Nobody has offered a p--
Oh wait, hold on, you already said this.

Except wait. Nobody has offered a poll about mistreating atheists.

Therein lies some unconscious understanding that your anecdotes about being mistreated are irrelevant to the poll. Holy shit.



Irrelevant things:

To believe that the likely result of a roll couldn't be determined mathematically, however, is a bit much, though.

I said the average was useless. The well-known half-plus-point-five rule you mentioned, while useful in games not based on a TN system, was useless for Deadlands.
Didn't you just see me determine the likely result of a roll mathematically? How the hell are you accusing me of saying it can't be?
Of course the answer can be determined through pure math, but it takes the computer less time to make 65 million rolls than it does for me to work the math. So I just had the computer make 65 million rolls. I would've done it anyway to check my work if I had gone the pure math route. I would've done this if I was interested in knowing how the math behind it worked, rather than simply knowing what the answer was.

WoD v2 has dice that succeed on 8s and 9s, and succeed and explode on 10s. That's 0.3 successes per die rolled, plus a 0.1 chance of doing it again (for 0.03, then 0.003, and so on). It comes out to exactly 1 success per 3 dice rolled.

Did they get rid of difficulties or something?
Or do they do the Exalted thing where difficulty is now expressed by the number of successes required?

I wasn't even being antagonistic to you. It was between me and Atilla. It had nothing to do with you at all, bro. You intervened in our conversation to be antagonistic to me.

Dude, we're on a forum. It wasn't an exhibition, a one-on-one debate, or a private conversation at a diner. In a forum, anyone who wants to be part of the conversation is part of the conversation.

And if you're gonna nobly barge into other people's conversations to save them, you should also bear with you other "holier-than-thou" modus operandi. Like "two wrongs don't make a right".

Out of curiosity, how is "two wrongs don't make a right" relevant to being holier-than-thou? If I'm wronged by someone and I think I'm holier than he, it's a completely different code of conduct that would prevent me from wronging them right back as a way of settling a perceived difference.

See, you've suddenly held my poll to higher rigors than Atilla's. I thought we wouldn't have to look into this mess

Not at all! It's good to know some of the details of a poll, and those details are already known for those Atilla gave, at the very least by me. By insisting you don't need to provide those same details, you're treating your own poll as special.

I don't know why someone would derail an entire conversation to bitch about the humble offering of an anecdote to a conversation. :/

Me neither. I've seen some pretty haughty and overtly hostile offerings of anecdotes derailing a conversation, but never humble ones.

You're entitled to give up at any stage and I won't think any less of you. I won't dock your respect points. But you will have lost.

What if I see it as coming to an understanding that this is a waste of time and discarding something that's holding me back? I know I'm right, don't actually care that you end up convinced, and could be doing something useful in this time, instead. I went down this road for entertainment because I like arguing, and that well is quickly drying. Now that this thread has been thoroughly raped, I think I can happily move on to the next one without feeling that I'm missing out on the scraps remaining.

[SlappyMcGee]

It's at least remarkable that at this point in the conversation you still don't have a clear grasp on what was being argued at the beginning. In the fashion of the thread:

Person A: I have read a poll that says atheists are unelectable. Also, here is an anecdote that shows Americans being mistreated.

Before we go on to Person B, let me try and demonstrate to you what went on here. By posting these things together, Atilla inherently added correlation between the two parts. The second is a rather ferocious story of Atheist discrimination and, I believe, is surely not representative of the Atheist experience. The first is accurate; I don't remember saying "Atilla, your poll is wrong. Here are examples of atheists being elected in America." In fact, almost all of our replies were about the mistreatment of Atheists. Yours included.

Person B: Atheists are not that poorly mistreated. Here is some personal experience which leads me to believe one of three things; 1) I have somehow not encountered fifty percent of the country. 2) Your poll is flat-out inaccurate; 100% of Americans do not mistreat Atheists. or 3) Your post makes it seem like a poll about electing atheists and the mistreatment of atheists are somehow related when in fact, in spite of those numbers, very few Americans actually mistreat Atheists.

Point being, I don't know what you're arguing anymore. Are you trying to say that we should believe the poll actually represents the kind of mistreatment of Atheists that Atilla represented at the end of his post? If 90% of people are covered in orange fur, and I've never met anybody covered in fur, is my personal experience irrelevant, or interesting? Try and be concise and represent exactly what has been done that's wrong here.

[blue_tetris]

WoD v2 has dice that succeed on 8s and 9s, and succeed and explode on 10s. That's 0.3 successes per die rolled, plus a 0.1 chance of doing it again (for 0.03, then 0.003, and so on). It comes out to exactly 1 success per 3 dice rolled.

Did they get rid of difficulties or something?
Or do they do the Exalted thing where difficulty is now expressed by the number of successes required?

Number of successes is the difficulty, yeah. I don't fully understand that need to have both to-hit values per die and successes rolled as different ways of measuring skill. Like, in V:tM, there was shit you had to get multiple successes to win at and there was other shit you had to reach a higher difficulty to get successes. It was mostly arbitrary and the meaning of the two different systems was not really well ingrained in the flavor of the system. Margins of success are better gauged by the degree to which you exceed the roll's base value to succeed.

About Deadlands, like: Wouldn't it have been good, in its own right, to determine the formula instead of using a graph for all the rolls? With the formula, you could quickly plug in the dice and get the answer you want. I mean, no offense, but that chart was at least a little confusing and the overlapping bits were pretty tough to read. Even if 65 million rolls were quicker, the answer to how it's done would have been better output. Clear and concise.

I wasn't even being antagonistic to you. It was between me and Atilla. It had nothing to do with you at all, bro. You intervened in our conversation to be antagonistic to me.

Dude, we're on a forum. It wasn't an exhibition, a one-on-one debate, or a private conversation at a diner. In a forum, anyone who wants to be part of the conversation is part of the conversation.

I use this same principle whenever I go to a large party. Any conversation that I'm not currently in, I put myself in. I mean, like, I'm there. So every conversation is mine.

See, you've suddenly held my poll to higher rigors than Atilla's. I thought we wouldn't have to look into this mess

Not at all! It's good to know some of the details of a poll, and those details are already known for those Atilla gave, at the very least by me. By insisting you don't need to provide those same details, you're treating your own poll as special.

When it comes right down to it, a whole bunch of people are better at giving the opinion of a whole bunch of people than you, alone, are. That's really as far as you need to look into this mess.

Atilla said he heard of a poll. No reason to look into this mess. Dave said he heard of a poll (which disagrees with me). Let's look into this mess.

I don't know why someone would derail an entire conversation to bitch about the humble offering of an anecdote to a conversation. :/

Me neither. I've seen some pretty haughty and overtly hostile offerings of anecdotes derailing a conversation, but never humble ones.

I don't know why you viewed me as hostile at any juncture. Especially when there were periods where I was obvie jokin' 'round and you raged. You raged and intervened in our conversation at the cocktail party. Yes, you were invited to the cocktail party. That doesn't mean it's not a little odd when you stumble in, mouth filled with pinwheels, and act like it's your place to interject.

You're entitled to give up at any stage and I won't think any less of you. I won't dock your respect points. But you will have lost.

What if I see it as coming to an understanding that this is a waste of time and discarding something that's holding me back? I know I'm right, don't actually care that you end up convinced, and could be doing something useful in this time, instead. I went down this road for entertainment because I like arguing, and that well is quickly drying. Now that this thread has been thoroughly raped, I think I can happily move on to the next one without feeling that I'm missing out on the scraps remaining.

You're so blase and aloof. How hep. You is a hep cat. I patently believe you see these things through to the end under the auspices that you've convinced someone something. Like, that's mostly the intent of being communicative. To persuade, develop shared meaning, or entertain. And you've not entertained. I like to think you're aloof and disconnected from it all, but it's difficult. Especially considering how aspects of this conversation have inexorably bled into things you've said elsewhere; that you might have lost chunks of respect (e-spect, at any rate) for dudes because of your behaviors and theirs in the Debate forum; that aspects of some mirror-shard life contained solely in one circumstance would even be loosely tied with things you take away. If you want Real Suki to be divorced from Internet Suki, you may want to word things with a little less superfluous gravity in your e-nteractions with dudes.

It's also interesting how much time you'll waste before you consider the possibility of having wasted time. Like, I'm intrigued that you'd just realized that this is holding you back. That's the kind of thing that would either be immediately knowable--if you had any vested interests in doing something else somewhere else at the time instead of posting in Debate--or would only sink in once you'd lost entirely. I'm thinking you lost entirely. That's why a forfeiture at this point on your part would save us both time and energy. Because I can be continually amusing to myself (and certainly SlappyMcGee) and you ran out of material three pages back.

Perhaps, on a connected note, Debate ran out material three years back. It's miraculous you face each "new" topic with the passion and verve you had year one. The real blase, aloof hep cat wouldn't trifle with this nonsense. He'd have considered Debate thoroughly raped and happily moved on to being coffee-sipping Ennui, only cutting into line now and again to say ridiculous shit to Atilla and recede back into novel and interesting things.

I "know I'm right, don't actually care if people are convinced of things I believe, and could do better things with my time" and, as such, I don't worry too much about testing the waters for every small point I believe in, I take my time convincing people of things I disbelieve for larks, and spend a majority of my time playing medic (and rounding off my demo skills). If Internet Suki is to appear disconcerned (even if it's just in this instance), you may want to make sure Internet Suki's behavior reflects that so the avatar seems internally consistent to our readership.

[jinxed_07]

Umm. Considering this country offers freedom of religon, I think it is *absolutely ridiculous* that we are required to recite 'under god' in the pledge.

Where? I don't recall any jobs forcing you to 'pledge to god',and,at least in my school(which likely means state), the handbook says you are not required in any way to say the US pledge,you only have to observe the 1 min of silence...

[t̷s͢uk̕a͡t͜ư]

Umm. Considering this country offers freedom of religon, I think it is *absolutely ridiculous* that we are required to recite 'under god' in the pledge.

Where? I don't recall any jobs forcing you to 'pledge to god'

In a number of Southern states, belief in a creator deity is an explicitly stated requirement in the state's Constitution for holding political office.