The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

... you haven’t managed to convince the masses yet, and that would make me suspicious ... so many others are anything but convinced. Are they all stupid?

Of course not.  Bayes explains.  They are all so convinced that the language must be European (or gibberish, or some non-linguistic code) that they will dismiss any evidence to the contrary -- for any nit they can find, or even without looking at the evidence at all.

Which has long been my own reaction to, for example, claims that "the VMS is gibberish".  Even since before I found the SBJ.

That atttude is quite sensible and justifiable.  Someone may say that, ideally, a Scientist should never dismiss a claim without understanding and checking the evidence that is presented with it.  But in practice one must always estimate (even just unconsciously) the expected cost/benefit of doing that.  Namely Prob(claim is true) x (benefit)  - Prob(claim is false) x (cost). The cost being the time wasted checking the evidence, the benefit is correcting one's mistaken belief, and Prob(X) is your probability that X holds.   If your first Prob() is small enough, that formula will yield a net cost.

The biggest problem with people is that they’re all so incredibly convinced of their convictions.

Indeed...

All the best, --stolfi