Lootman wrote:torata wrote:Lootman wrote:Since you cannot prove the fidelity of ERNIE than you should at least retain an open mind.
As for being a "waste of time", given the inevitably of you always replying, I sense you have plenty of it to waste.
You, however, can prove to yourself the fidelity (or lack of) of ERNIE.
No, I never said that. I merely stated that nobody can prove anything so we just have to trust.
That sort of epistemological nihilism is fine for post-modern pseudo-intellectual onanism.
We do know that there is no post-fact check that can “confirm” that a finite set of numbers is random. The sequence 123456789 may well be random. In fact with a large enough sample of such numbers it will come up.
Sensible folk apply Occam’s razor. If for many years, fully transparent and published tests for randomness carried out by an apparently independent body show that Ernie’s output is 99.999% or whatever random, that’s good enough for us and we move on with our lives.
Then we can focus our efforts on skeptically testing presumptions which are perhaps only 90% likely to be true and where there is an obvious incentive for someone to cheat.