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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 5526103" data-attributes="member: 18280">No, but he's made an excellent argument that has not, AFAICT and IMHO, been adequately answered.  And he raises some interesting questions that he, himself, makes no real attempt to answer.Perhaps I worded that badly.Let me try that again:(1)  From a purely logical standpoint, the likelihood of both occurring is equal.  Our observations can only show us what has occurred; they cannot show us what will occur.  Our models can only look to the past; they cannot confirm the future.  (2)  From an experiential standpoint, we believe that the likelihood is not equal.(3)  Despite the logical problems of accepting (2) as valid, we nonetheless do strongly accept (2) as valid, and, in the vast majority of cases, accepting (2) as valid works.(It is the interplay between 1 and 3 that is actually of interest in Hume's work, and that Hume suggests is worthy of further inquiry....And it is also this interplay that is of interest, to me anyway, in the intersection of the scientific/rational models and quasi-magical thinking models.)So, even if your statement of odds is correct (and we will certainly accept that it is correct in the past, and, using principle 3, that we believe without knowledge that it will be so in the future....say, tomorrow), the odds that your explaination of why those odds are correct is no better than that of the pilgrim going to Lourdes if and only if both match the available observed data.IOW, it is rational to say that Occam's Razor is of value when creating a model, but there is no rational way to determine that Occam's Razor reflects the reality that the model attempts to predict.Also, you need to specify what is meant by "get healed" before you make a bet like that; I feel quite certain that some of those visitors would argue that you owed them money had they taken it.  Even if you or I wouldn't accept that there was an actual causative relationship between the flu coming to an end.....or that any causative effect was not due to, say, the placebo effect.There is enough fuzziness in "getting healed" that the pilgrim can create a model that matches his observation, which is the gist of my point:  The pilgrim is not stupid to believe as he does.  He is, rather, using a different set of observations, mental tools, and/or base assumptions to draw his conculsions than you or I are.  Understanding why the pilgrim believes as he does is useful in an rpg context when describing NPCs in any milieu, and, in particular, the sets of beliefs that might arise in a world in which this healing might well be confirmed fact.RC</blockquote>

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