It's been a long time since I said it, and who knows if there'll be a chance to do so in the future. So here goes:
I've learned more by being on Twitter than I could have imagined, and it was possible only because so many excellent people say so many amazing things. So thank you

Survivorship Bias 101

History is written by the victors. But if we exclusively focus on these successes, we allow survivorship bias to distort our understanding of the world.

But what is "survivorship bias" and how does it work?

Here's Survivorship Bias 101!

👇👇👇

1/ First, a few definitions.

Survivorship bias is the logical error of concentrating on survivors (successes) and ignoring casualties (failures).

When we do so, we miss the true "base rates" of survival (the actual probability of success) and arrive at flawed conclusions.

2/ When we completely ignore failures, we lose our ability to correctly identify the differences between successes and failures.

Put simply, exclusively focusing on successes may actually inhibit our ability to identify (and replicate) the actions that led to such success.

3/ Cicero wrote on the topic over 2,000 years ago.

An atheist named Diagoras is shown portraits of people who prayed and were saved from death at sea as proof of God's existence.

Diagoras replies, "I see those who were saved, but where are those painted who were shipwrecked?"

4/ Cicero cuts right to the point - we cannot conclude that prayer led to being saved from the sea if we ignore those who prayed and then drowned.

Survivorship bias can lead to a deeply-flawed understanding of cause-and-effect relationships.

Let's look at some examples.

There's a particular kind of romantic partnership, with a certain sort of person, that I've wanted since I became a self-aware, directed agent at around age 15.

Empirically, this kind of relationship has been hard to achieve. It hasn't worked out yet, at least.

And this sometimes leaves me wondering if my standards are unreasonable.

In years past that desire was often very alive.

These days, I'm rarely directly or viscerally in contact with it.

I sometimes contemplate aiming for some other kind of romantic and/or sexual relationship instead. In part because I might be more effective if I...I don't know, got laid more? But that's not really the thing. More like, if I had someone around whom I could regularly relax.

But mostly, I don't pursue those alternative relationship-setups out of a sense of something like loyalty to myself + a vague sense of wrongness and/or sadness about it. It often feels like giving up or giving in.

[I might elaborate on the wrongness sometime.]

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Thread of decodes for the day. Make sure you check out the [SUB] threads too!

The Misrepresentation of the Levites

[A Bonus Smallanyana Thread]

Disclaimer:

This thread is not part of the Angelology Threads we are focusing on this month of February but it is a response to what uNkulunkulu laid on my heart when I was finishing up Part 3 of the main threads.

This thread is also not an attack but a personal observation.

Let's Begin 📖

The Levites or the Tribe of Levi was/ is one of the original 12 tribes of Israel. Descended from Levi the son of Jacob. Descendants of Aaron, the first high priest of Israel. The Levites were designated as the priestly class, also known as the Kohanim.

Principal roles:

Singing Psalms during temple services
Teachers of the Word
Judges (Politics)
Construction and Maintenance of the Temple
Serving as Guards

The Levites were known to stand for truth, at all cost. Some considered them an army set apart by and for uNkulunkulu.

Numbers 18:6

And behold, I have taken your brothers the Levites from among the people of Israel. They are a gift to you, given to the Lord, to do the service of the tent of meeting.

the strange reality of strict calvinism is that it makes a mockery of God's claims to hate, abhort, or even be theoretically opposed to evil

the calvinist solution to the problem of evil, which I have *literally heard from the lips of a faithful well-catechized Presbyterian* is, "well, all that happens is God's will, and to do His will is to manifest goodness, and goodness gives God joy, so God must rejoice in evil"

The hypothetical I gave was, "Suppose that there was a city of Christians, and a bomber flew over the city, and the guy at the controls tripped and accidentally armed and dropped a bomb, and wiped out the city: is that God's will? What does God think of that?"

His answer in addition to the above cited the Flood, Soddom, and Nineveh.

Because we all know that God's response to the Flood was, "I REALLY liked that, it was AWESOME, it satisfied my will and purposes to obliterate my creation!"

Once you have drunk the "but muh sovrintee" Kool-Aid you cannot escape the argument that literally everything that happens is not just God's will in some philosophical sense, but His will in the sense of "things that bring him pleasure."