Meet Vic. Vic enjoys a form of music that features heavily distorted guitars, slow growling vocals, atonality, frequent tempo changes, and what is called “blast beat” drumming in the music business. His favorite death metal bands are Slayer, Leviticus, Dark Tranquility, Arch Enemy, Behemoth, Kreator, Venom, and Necrophagist.
Vic has strong views on theology and cosmology. Which is more likely?
- Vic is a Christian
- Vic is a Satanist
I’ve taught courses on probabilistic risk analysis over the years, and have found that very intelligent engineers, much more experienced than I, often find probability extremely unintuitive. Especially when very large (or very small) numbers are involved. Other aspects of probability and statistics are unintuitive for other interesting reasons. More on those later.
The matter of Vic’s belief system involves several possible biases and unintuitive aspects of statistics. While pondering the issue of Vic’s beliefs, you can enjoy Slayer’s Raining Blood. Then check out my take on judging Vic’s beliefs below the embedded YouTube video – which, by the way, demonstrates all of the attributes of death metal listed above.
.
Vic is almost certainly a Christian. Any other conclusion would involve the so-called base-rate fallacy, where the secondary, specific facts (affinity for death metal) somehow obscure the primary, base-rate relative frequency of Christians versus Satanists. The Vatican claims over one billion Catholics, and most US Christians are not Catholic. Even with papal exaggeration, we can guess that there are well over a billion Christians on earth. I know hundreds if not thousands of them. I don’t know any Satanists personally, and don’t know of any public figures who are (there is conflicting evidence on Marilyn Manson). A quick Google search suggests a range of numbers of Satanists in the world, the largest of which is under 100,000. Further, I don’t ever remember seeing a single Satanist meeting facility, even in San Francisco. A web search also reveals a good number of conspicuously Christian death metal bands, including Leviticus, named above. Without getting into the details of Bayes Theorem, it is probably obvious that the relative frequencies of Christians against Satanists governs the outcome. And judging Vic by his appearance is likely very unreliable.
South Park Community Presbyterian Church
Fairplay, Colorado
The Multidisciplinarian 