Alright, since you put this much effort into summarizing your point of view I will do the same.
While I enjoyed your long and detailed 'rant' about Bayesian logic I'm probably going to disappoint you when I yet again point out I tried multiple times to explain I was not debating it directly. Yes, you started the thread with an argument based on Bayesian logic but what I took issue with was your entire crusade against imagined Swedish socks without any real evidence. My argument not only takes that years-long history into account, it's basically the gist of what I'm arguing against. All the reasons you've ever thrown out as "evidence" for Swedes not being on the forum and/or being my socks is a part of it. It culminated in that list of yours, which I wanted to use as a way to show you were woefully under-educated about basic SC facts and that until you took that specific body of SC knowledge seriously it'd continue to be an easily dismissed low-effort troll on your part. That's why bringing up Bayesian logic is almost pointless to me in this context. The prior knowledge we'd have to staff your model with is absolutely vital here and without it your method is pretty much worthless.
In my view, the discussion wasn't so much about discovering swedes as it was about comparing two epistemic frameworks. Inquirer's, and the Bayesian framework. The ideas I put forth were not my own; every argument I used rooted itself in rudimentary Bayesian logic.
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The main problem with this debate, from my perspective, was that Inquirer was moving the goalpost at every turn. This is why I later had to confirm what he meant every time before presenting my arguments, so he could not post-hoc re-define what he meant.
I can see how you (and TC) thought I moved goalposts and stubbornly refused to acknowledge basic logical facts, but I think this happened because both of you refused to actually listen to what I said. Both of you went into the debate with a very clear idea of what it was about and never cared to listen when I repeatedly explained my point was slimmer and simpler. I also conceded or redefined numerous definitions to make my argument fit more in line with your idea of our debate, so you would understand it, but that seemingly just backfired and made you think I was moving goalposts.
In very simple terms I was merely arguing that your claims (ie. your list) was unreasonable given the collective knowledge of people (past and present) on this site, while my list was much more reasonable by the same criteria. That is naturally not a scientific or mathematically sound level of evidence and I never argued it was. It is however the best we can do given our limited resources (time, effort, knowledge etc.) and the fact it's necessary to collect prior knowledge to come up with a reasonable answer. Your proposed alternative is not a viable substitute as is. I can boil it down even further to one simple question: Which one of our proposed methods would you use if someone held a gun to your head, threatened to kill you if you guessed the number of Swedes on SC wrong and gave you a day to come up with an answer? Bayesian logic without priming it with SC data or my "Inquirer evidence" (which is basically collecting as much reasonable anecdotal data as possible)?
For example, one of Inquirer's main points is that one could plausibly trust claims based on the prior knowledge and probability [...] None of this contradicts Bayesian logic. The issue is that I've never contested the existence of prior knowledge or probabilities, like Inquirer's strawmen comments made it out to sound like.
But you did contest the very idea of how important specific prior knowledge was by refusing to come to an agreement on what's reasonable for us to find. My whole point was about the clear necessity to defer to "reasonableness" as a standard as the only way to actually gather enough knowledge to come to a conclusion. Whether we use Bayesian logic on top of that data or not is pretty irrelevant if you won't even concede how to get it, let alone its necessity. I understood your argument to neglect proper prior knowledge and thus be in direct conflict with mine. If false, then perhaps this is a key point that lead to mutual misunderstanding?
To clarify, I neither accepted nor rejected any subjective standard. Instead, I only contested their universal applicability as per Bayesian logic. I defended my reasoning within the bubble of my own framework, and criticized Inquirer's reasoning within the bubble of his own framework. Meanwhile, Inquirer didn't understand that there are two bubbles to start off with, and only attempted to criticize my reasoning within his own framework, which is nonsensical as I never accepted his framework in the first place.
I did understand we were operating within different 'bubbles'. What I was trying to do for most of the thread was a) explain my framework and b) argue it to be superior to yours given our constraints. So from my point of view it was you who were stubbornly refusing to acknowledge basic reason, not I. You launched this argument to a much higher theoretical level than I ever took part in and you continuously saw my refusal to drop my context for yours to mean I was intellectually dishonest. The thread became a tug of war between what we thought it was about, and it became increasingly difficult for me to win that when you had TC cheerleading you on.
What I will say is that since it was your thread and you started it with your Bayesian logic it was reasonable for you to expect us both to operate within that framework going forward. I tried to make it clear I jumped into this thread with the intention to skip your logic due to my method being superior and/or preceding yours but it's something I clearly failed to communicate well enough. I should also have been more consistent with my definitions, though that is sometimes difficult when the nature of the debate changes and words take on a different meaning than intended.
