Why Proof is Wrong and Good Reason is Right (Rabbi Dovid Gottleib) (Jewish Philosophy)

tonight's top because why proof is wrong and good reason is right i think i'm fighting an uphill battle here there's a certain natural dialogue a natural give and take that takes place someone says he knows something it's fair to ask him how do you know if he's just guessing then he can't really set the know to know it and the natural vocabulary is to say to him prove it if you can prove it so then not only will i credit you that you know it but i'll join you if you can't prove it then you don't really know it you could have an opinion you might believe it but you don't know it because you can't back it up now usually though i'll point out an exception in a little while usually when you use the word proof what you mean is show that it's got to be true nail it down rule out any alternative possibility because if after you've done your investigation and you have compiled all your reasons it's still possible you're wrong then you don't really know you're right so to back up your claim that you know you have to provide a proof the reason i'm against using proof as the standard for knowledge is that strictly speaking if proved means to nail it down and show that it's got to be right strictly speaking nothing can be proved and then if that's your standard if nothing can be proved then nothing is known and if you are a philosophical hero and you're willing to come to support the conclusion that nothing really is known all knowledge that illusion a mistake we'll talk about that in about 10 minutes well let's see i suppose that you think you know who your parents are most people would claim to know who their parents are how do you know they told you and you trusted them how cute couldn't they have been lying to you aren't there cases where parents people adopt a child and don't tell the child has never happened to history certainly it's happened so you say but look my baby pictures look just like them that's because when they went to the orphanage they took their baby pictures along and they picked that up baby they look like they have baby pictures and that's why you look like them you say i did a dna test well first of all you didn't do a dna test i know and second of all if you did a dna test how do you know that your pair well those people didn't pay off the lab to lie to you about the results you don't know that isn't it always possible that they aren't your parents so now what are you going to say oh golly philosophy has taught me that i don't know who my parents are that i'm just guessing you know as i'll flip a coin that doesn't sound right either at least i hope it doesn't sound right suppose uh you're trying to collect the debt you go to the guy and say you bought this money for me i want to be paid pass that time when you're supposed to pay it i want to be paid he says i don't owe you the money you say what are you talking about of course you owe the money look here's a here's a document that you signed and it appended appended to it is your fingerprint and your picture of course you of course you you owe me the money he says when is the document dated this is dated three months ago he says prove to me there was a three months ago he said what what are you talking about prove to me that the universe is three months old i think it's five minutes old i think the whole universe was created five minutes ago show me wrong she said what are you talking about i mean i remember what happened 10 years ago no you were created five minutes ago with those we should call them now pseudo memories programmed into your brain the memories are there but they're not memories of anything real that happened well this is one of merchant russell's puzzles and to this date no one has discovered a way to nail down that the universe is more than five minutes old which means that since the document says that he borrowed the money three months ago it's possible that it wasn't the three months ago at all in which case he didn't borrow the money in which case he doesn't know it to you it's all a mistake so you can't nail it down [Music] you can't eliminate that possibility are you going to give up on the money how do we prejudice now you know if i don't take money it doesn't belong to me and since i can't prove that there was a three months ago so therefore i don't really know that you owe me the money i hope not i hope that's not what your conclusion is descartes started this ball rolling by asking you how do you know that at this very moment you're not dreaming oh this is a dream 10 minutes from now you wake up in the 23rd century and you say to yourself that's what i get for reading history books i jump myself back to this weird place where they're talking about these weird subjects you know i have a space a spaceship for mars the next month and i'm not missing out on that what can you do to prove that you're not dreaming at this moment do you really need to do this is it really correct that in order to back up your claim that you know something you have to prove it beyond any possible doubt it just seems wild and extravagant and if someone says rabbi i thought you were a philosopher you say it seems wild and extravagant that's how you refute it i think we should stick with the criterion of proof proof is the only way to back up knowledge and if we can't prove anything that we ought to just bite the bullet and admit that we don't have any knowledge well one might ask how does one get into discussions like this what is knowledge what kind of backup does it require how many things do we know how many we don't don't we know what what are the rules for the game here we're not defining a new concept we're not inventing a new game we're taking a concept that's used all over the world people talk most of the time they understand one another when they look at cases that they're trying to evaluate and describe most of the time they agree on how to describe them there are disputes true there are disputes around the edges but the vast environment majority of the time we talk we do agree who knows what someone's going to suggest a definition for a concept which implies that almost everybody who uses the concept of using it wrong almost all the time we'll have to ask him how does one decide what definitions to use whatever is not to use what kind of evidence can we have what makes a proposed definition correct or incorrect other than it makes sense out of the vast majority of what we say otherwise there are no rules to the game you're going to get right at getting it wrong in order to come to the conclusion that almost all the usages are wrong you have to have very strong external evidence and explanation as to what went wrong and why it went wrong and why there's no alternative is that it's not a free play and somebody says what is justice i think justice is butterflies butterflies really that's just not up for grabs justice is a word we use to describe things that people do and things that are right to do and wrong to do and so forth and so on in the vast majority of the time we agree on how it's described butterflies doesn't fit that usage we talk about knowledge we make claims to knowledge we criticize claims to knowledge we change our minds oh i thought i knew but i made a mistake i'm trying to find out something i look it up in encyclopedia i see it encyclopedia somebody asked me i said this is what it is how do you know i saw an encyclopedia really gee i have lots of reason to think it's a mistake can i see your encyclopedia sure here here it is here's the volume here it is where it says he said did you look at the at the copyright date of this encyclopedia are you using is it copyright date no well take a look it's 1946. uh don't you think you have to look at a later edition oh gosh 60 years out of date 70 years out of date you're right i made a mistake i withdraw my claim to knowledge i use something that was out of date we all understand that so you can't suppose that knowledge requires something which will make almost everything we all say about knowledge wrong unless you have a very very powerful reason to think that that's why almost everyone has rejected the idea of proof as the standard for knowledge and almost everyone has agreed that it's such a thing as a good reason even though it isn't the proof i have a room and the floor of this room has been divided into square containers the whole floor is divided with very very thin walls and there are a thousand containers 999 of them are black and one is white and i saw somebody throw uh so i don't know where the white one is just i just happen to know there's nine or nine and they're black and one is white somebody throws the ball to the room bounces around it lands in one of the containers but i can't see it somebody asked me what's the color of the container that the ball is in i say black but there's one white one yeah one out of a thousand it's in a black one and when it turns out that it's a black one because to know something it's got to be true someone says but you could have been wrong i said yeah i could have been wrong but it was overwhelmingly probable that i'm right and i am right that's good enough for knowledge if that doesn't convince you let me push you back to the wall this way maybe you've heard of entropy entropy is that in any closed system this order either remains the same or gets bigger never gets that's the less you know a spontaneous order arising in the system now the standard explanation entropy is very controversial and you find all sorts of ideas but the standard explanation is that the number of ordered states is extremely few and the number of disordered states is extraordinarily large so if you just let things rattle around they're going to go to more and more disorder because there are more and more and more states that they can fall into just like the boxes and i say okay uh you say to the child there's a broken egg on the kitchen floor clean it up and he says how do you know it's there because i saw it there two minutes ago maybe it's spontaneously organized back into the whole egg that's possible isn't it yeah sure it's possible it's a chance of one in uh one with 14 trillion zeros after it but it's possible yeah but there's a mess on the floor go clean it up i don't think i have to apologize and say well i only think the semester i don't really know it because this upon a possibility of it's spontaneously reorganizing into the whole egg and the four being clean no thanks one doesn't have to do that good enough evidence good enough probability is enough to back up knowledge now this is the way i've been doing this for years it's a whole chapter in my book and and i think what i said is correct for americans is another way to do it this was suggested me too to me by a certain rabbi whose name escapes me at the moment um he's the one who founded priority one and he uses the the words that you have in american law proof beyond a reasonable doubt that's not bad that's not the way i was trained to use the word proof but it is a term in in american law when you are trying to convict someone of a crime the prosecutor has to provide enough evidence to give proof beyond a reasonable doubt which means those words say maybe there is a doubt but it's not reasonable so the evidence that i'm offering doesn't nail it down doesn't make it for sure doesn't make it necessary that it's true but any doubt that you're going to raise which will point out a possible way it goes wrong is unreasonable and therefore it's enough to penalize them some cases even two to practice capital punishment so we have a a weapon and we have his footprints and we have his fingerprints and we have and we even have a photograph of him climbing out of the window and some of the so on um and we say guilty and the defense attorney says maybe he has an identical twin who looks just like him and maybe the identical twin was wearing gloves they imprinted with this twins fingerprints that's where the figures come from right um we have no clue that he has any siblings at all right but maybe it's it's possible isn't it she said well that creates a doubt but it's unreasonable now it's not reasonable to take that down into a consideration and we're going to hold them guilty that's what i would call good reason prove beyond a reasonable doubt acknowledging that there could be doubt but that's that they're unreasonable now let me tell you what the difference this makes in practical terms if if you say you know something and someone challenges you and especially if he invites you to prove it then the rules of the game work like this you present your reasons he uses his imagination can i think up any possibility where he could go wrong if he can imagine a possibility where it goes wrong you lose because you didn't rule out that that possibility you haven't nailed it down absolutely you're presenting your research and your evidence and he's using his imagination to think up another possibility i think you should reject that game should reject that challenge what you should say to him is this i'm going to present my evidence that it's true if you want to challenge my position either show me other evidence against me positive evidence against me that's stronger than my evidence or show me some reason that my evidence isn't correct undermine my evidence in some way otherwise agree that i'm right it's not enough just to think up an alternative to imagine alternatives i'm presenting positive reason that i'm right you present positive reason that i'm wrong which again could be one of two ways either there's something wrong with my reasons which will just mean that i've failed to to be convincing or you might do something stronger and present reasons that the opposite is true and that what i'm saying is incorrect either way that would be appropriate response to what i'm doing and that would be a credible challenge to my claim that i know what i'm doing yeah well i was just wondering how we could apply this to say learning tomorrow i'll try to get that before before i get to the end of the year so now sometimes um this comes out in vocabulary and the vocabulary doesn't say word for word what i've said but it implies it let me give you some examples of the kind of vocabulary to look out for so i say i'm taking this position because of a b c and d and somebody says i i say i believe in in a well change the the number i believe in a because of one that's before and somebody says how do you know it's not b maybe it's b now what is he asking me for he's asking me to rule out b what's the claim to fame of b he thought of it what's the claim of frame to be it's possible so i'm saying a is right because of one two three four and he's saying how do you know it's not b he's not offering me any reason why it is b he's not offering me any reason why one twos before our mistake he's simply saying how do you know it's not b implicitly what he's challenging me to do is prove it knock out alternative possibilities this is precisely the interchange that i want to avoid i think what you should say to him is what reason do you think that it is b if you have no reason to think that it's b then you're you're you're raising him your possibility um and a mere possibility i'm not pr i'm not promising to to outlaw to overrule or to eliminate all alternative possibilities i'm telling you i have enough reason to say that this possibility is true not that there aren't other possibilities somebody says isn't such-and-such possible i think the right thing to say always is yes so what you would call that true versus very likely or can you can you call is it the essence of it true even though there's other possibilities or does it just become very very likely well let's see now i i think if we check the recording i didn't use the word true tonight at all it talks about knowledge [Music] and of course the things can be true even if there are other other possibilities and to give me knowledge even for other possibilities um think of for example well maybe that won't be a good example but um you know suppose there's a discriminate about what the weather will be tomorrow one guy says it's going to rain the other guy says it's going to be clear one of them's going to be right and it's possible that the other will be right just won't be right so clearly the fact that something else is possible doesn't stop something from being true and if this fellow looked at the satellite images and he saw the weather patterns in the vicinity and he says it's going to rain and the other guy didn't look at any satellite images he said it's going to be clear well sometimes the satellite images give you a wrong projection that does happen maybe once in 10 times or once in 20 times right if it rains the guy who looked at the satellite images and saw that can say i know because i followed the normal evidence and it is very often correct and in fact it was correct doesn't mean the other was impossible sometimes it isn't correct but it but in this case it was correct and he used the reliable evidence to arrive at his conclusion that he had good enough reason to say that it was correct and in fact was correct he could say that he knew it was correct so i think that the fact there's another alternative doesn't defeat the idea that that was known and the fact that it was true what you don't have is that it's certain but that's precisely what i'm invading against you don't need to be certain it doesn't have to be necessarily correct it just has to be good enough now here's another way it's a little bit more subtle um well let me introduce this with the terminology in this connection there's something called the burden of proof and then there's a fallacy called shifting the burden of proof let's go back to the legal analogy let's say a person's accused of a crime so you have a prosecutor and a defense attorney the job of the prosecutor is to present evidence that beyond a reasonable doubt he's guilty what's the job of the defense attorney the job of the defense attorney is not to show that he's innocent that's not his job he might and if he does he'll be a hero but that's not his job the prosecutor is supposed to present evidence of proof beyond the reasonable doubt and the defense attorney is supposed to raise a reasonable doubt if he raises a reasonable doubt then the prosecutor has failed because muslim beyond reason a reasonable doubt so the prosecutor has a big job he has to establish guilt by the way i think i haven't looked this up in the law but i think that's why when you ask of a a jury for its verdict the two possible verdicts are guilty or non-guilty not guilty there's no verdict of innocent there's no verdict of innocent if there is proof of innocence a second not guilty means you didn't prove him guilty he might be guilty you didn't prove him guilty and therefore he's not going to jail so the defense attorney is just poking holes in the argument of the prosecutor to show the prosecutor has not fulfilled his responsibility to nail to to present enough evidence to be correct beyond the reasonable doubt and he's presenting reasonable doubts now when you have a discussion and one side has a burden of proof all the other side has to do is raise reasonable doubts sometimes as the discussion goes this guy has the burden of proof he's presenting his reasons and at a certain point he becomes a little uncomfortable it's getting tough you know he keeps raising these doubts and i have to keep answering these doubts and i'm not doing so well and it's really getting difficult what he does is well if you think you're right prove that you're right at that point you throw down the red flag and you say that's a foul that wasn't the discussion his job is not to prove that he's right indeed in this discussion he hasn't got a position he's not taking the opposite position he's simply saying you say you know i want to hear your reasons and i want to see whether you can nail it down beyond a reasonable doubt all he's doing is raising reasonable doubts but when the guy gets pushed into a corner he shifts the burden of proof and one of the ways he shifts the burden of proof is by using the word possible he's trying to show that a is correct he says he's one two and three and four they all support a the support is very strong and the other guy says listen one is hearsay and two comes from that old encyclopedia right which would be degrees you shouldn't choose remember that okay so you can clearly about two you know and at three uh if you're right then people should have seen it and uh and nobody saw it right and he says maybe they were all distracted that's why they didn't see it now something very subtle it's going on now maybe they're all distracted well it's possible isn't it it's possible they were distracted but by saying maybe they're all distracted what he's offering is a possibility in support of his position a possibility that's a foul i don't ask you what you believe on the basis of it's being possible i ask you what you believe on the basis of it being true if you have to retreat to the to the idea that it's possible you've given up the ship show me they were distracted show me there was a satellite in the sky and they thought it was a ufo they were all looking up that's why they didn't see the guy in the white horse ride down fifth avenue okay that's positive evidence but here's a retreat to possibility this happens in evolution it happens in discussions and absolute values it happens all the time when you talk to people and evolution about the fossil record and there are all sorts of holes in the fossil record lots and lots and they say listen we have this goes back to the 70s with elders and gould we have a mechanism that could produce these changes in such a way that if our mechanism works you won't find it our mechanism is invisible it's an invisible mechanism so evolution could have could have progressed that way who says not punctuated equilibria speciation tiny isolated groups over a very short period of time in evolution two hundred thousand years it's a short period of time could have changed this animal into that animal and since it's in a very local piece of context you're not gonna find it you're not gonna be lucky enough to jewel down to that particular one and then the number of levels in that short period of time geologically is is very small you're not going to find it but look what's happened i asked him why should i believe you he says i've got the fossils here are all the fossils say but there's a big hole right there well it could be it could be that it happened even though there's a hole yeah sure there could be leprechauns also there could be pixies also lots of things could be you believe it's true because it could be you better go back to school could be is not a reason to believe that it is true when you say it could be what you're doing is inviting the other guy to prove you're wrong that wasn't the project the project was for you to present your reasons thinking that it's right and presented in such a way that there's enough evidence to establish it beyond a reasonable level so you have you have to be very very careful not to allow the shifting of burden of proof and it happens almost i would say it's almost um i'm not saying that this is a premeditated uh fallacious move on the part of some charlatans who are trying to trick you no it's it's it's almost instinctive where you shift from presenting positive evidence as you're right to defending yourself against an attack and pointing out that the attack doesn't succeed you still might be right the minute you do that you've given up the ship i give you you might be right i give you that anything is possible as long as it's not self-contradictory it's possible but i'm not interested in what's possible i mean she said what's true in order to convince me what's true you've got to give me positive evidence that is in fact the case you want to ask a question um according to evolution things have to change very slowly because the bigger the change the bigger the probability that it will just disrupt the organism and it won't be able to live and darwin said this and he said over and over again if it would be impossible to get to achieve this particular structure by slow gradual changes then my theory would be wrong okay you have cases in the fossil record many where things come into existence full-blown there's no nothing before it you know or changes take place in in lineages which which are substantial with nothing in between right so they say according you said it's got to be gradual and it isn't gradual so here's what they answer it is gradual but it's gradual in a place which you won't find because let's say you're talking about the wildebeest on the plains of of central africa and you've got a thousand miles in this direction and 500 miles in that direction you've got a long and you have millions and millions of these things and they got them all in the fossil record and what you find in the fossil record is they look the same for about two million years and then they after after that they look substantially different and they're those fine gradations so the thought is this i'm burlesque in this but this is this is this was the thought of elijah and gould imagine that there's a terribly frightening storm or an earthquake or something like that and the the wild which is stampeding in all different directions wildly and there's a mountain pass which they usually don't go over but now they're all scattering and scrambling for their lives and about 500 of them go over this mountain pass and go down to the to the valley and they're in such shock and confusion they don't remember how they got there and so on and some are males and some are females and it's a small valley which could support about a wilderpies living there you know on the vegetation and so forth and so on and now when the storm clears they don't remember how to get back so they're stuck in the valley in the valley with a very small population changes can take place and spread throughout the population quickly again quickly could be 200 000 years instead of 2 million so for a hundred thousand years they're in the valley and they're breeding away and the hooves get sharper and then the teeth get sharper and the balance gets better and the lengths get longer and so forth and so on and then there's an earthquake and a mountain pass splits and the valley is reunited with the planes and out onto the planes come 500 of the new improved wildebeest wow this is you know model a the model z they come out and they out compete the all the new the old wildebeest and after uh some years they've repopulated the whole plane with the new ones right in the old ones and then when you dig down you're not gonna find that one little valley you're gonna dig down in the plains so you come down first to the new and proved wild of the beast and then and they're the same for about two million years and then you go down all of a sudden you get the old the old version of wild the beast which are considerably different and that's saying this is what they call punctuated equilibrium when you look at the at the fossil record you find equilibrium that means no change for a long period of time if a punctuation punctuation means some kind of rapid major transition and then again stasis right equilibrium so here's the answer the answer is it's happening where you can't see it that's why you don't find it no is that evidence or is that a possibility it's just a possibility otherwise you'd have to have evidence that really happened that way now steven j gould was one of the two who concocted this idea realized that and his magnum opus the structure of evolutionary theory 1400 pages which 1400 pages which i read he says i know that you'll ask me what evidence do i have that it actually happened that way and he said listen if you study the genes you could see this marker or this marker perhaps this marker would supplement he has all speculation there as to how you could actually put together positive evidence that that happened that way because otherwise he's a good enough logician to realize all he's done is appeal to a possibility you can't support the truth of a theory on the basis of it's being possible to overcome this objection that's no way to support the truth of a theory but that's that's what happens when you talk about objective values somebody said mags are objective some says they aren't objective so i like to put the burden of proof on the relativist who says there aren't objective values and i ask him for his arguments i've done this it's recorded and the arguments are terrible they're really very very very poor at some point or other he says well if you think that they're objective you'd prove their objective now here's listen to what he's saying what he's saying is i believe that they're called subject of a relative i don't care i believe there's let's say relative you think they're objective show me their objective and if you don't i win i win then they're really relative that's completely irrational he's supposed to be showing that they're relative he fails now i suppose he invites the guy who thinks they're they're absolute to present his reasons he presents his reasons that they're absolute and he fails what's the conclusion the conclusion is both have failed that we don't know the truth not that the relativist wins why should he win he can't back up what he says then he doesn't win he can't back up with jesus so he doesn't win so neither one of them wins so they should shake hands and agree that they're both they're both ignorant of the truth and go off and drink a beer together and the same thing is true in discussions of religion right i put my the burden on the atheist but suppose he says to you prove to me there's a god so the first thing you should say is no no sorry another by the way i want to point out something else listen to the words prove to me that there's a god that makes his response to judge of whether you succeeded or not all he has to say at the end is well i don't believe it so you didn't prove it to me that convicts you of failing that's one reason why you should you should reject the project you should say to him first of all i don't believe in proof i present reasons and second of all if i present reasons and you can't refute them and you're still not convinced that's not my problem my my project is to present reasons that's my responsibility if you can undermine my reasons or present opposing reasons of of good enough value then i'll admit that i haven't succeeded but if i present reasons and you just announce yourself unconvinced you have a problem you're not convinced by reasons well i think that's something you should think about you know where your employment chances and your marriage chances if you're the kind of person who isn't convinced by reasons you may have some handicaps and prove to me that it's that there's a god but what happens is that the the same the same the same attitude is expressed he's saying prove to me there's a god and the implication is if you can't then i'm right to remain an atheist but that's a mistake that's a mistake to be an atheist and be justified to claim to know that atheism is correct would be to give positive reason that atheism is correct not just to have the opposition fail because if the believer fails and the atheist fails then they both fail they should just both admit um as both just admit ignorance here there's a supplementary thought that some people offer have you seen people i thought were responsible writers i cannot i can't dream where they're coming from when you're talking about a discussion whether something exists or not the default position is always that it that it doesn't exist that means the burden of proof is only on the part of the person who says it exists if he can't meet that burden of proof if he can't give us good enough reason to believe that exists then it's appropriate to say that it doesn't exist i don't know those are the words that they say but they are absolute capability the the thief who committed murder and running for his life ran into your neighborhood he ran into the backyards of the of the houses and he disappeared is he in your house or not i don't know you don't know either right you didn't see him going to my house did you no so there's no proof he went into my house right so he's not there really [Music] because there's no proof he went into your house he's not there that's the conclusion that you draw because you put the burden of proof on the one who says it is and the default position he said it isn't so you're adopting the default position since no one can prove he's in my house it's perfectly appropriate for me to believe he isn't there i hope you know don't take that attitude the rest of your life how about how about infected uh food food that's been exposed to uh bacteria or something so he believes in the presence of bacteria and he believes in the absence of bacteria the burden of proof is on the guy who says there's bacteria there let him prove this bacteria he can't so then you're perfectly justified in believing that it's pure i don't think so because it might be infected right you know how about positive reason that it's not infected you know that's been sealed and vacuum sealed and and there are no infections in the areas of the no no if you can't prove it's in there then you have to believe it's not there absolutely not just the bottom line is you took a position give reason for it you want to claim you know that something's true whether it's positive or negative makes absolutely no difference makes absolutely no difference you want to claim that you know that it's true so then give good good reason for uh for it's being so whether it's positive or negative okay so now um the question will be how much reason is good enough reason now this is i can't give a general answer for it depends a lot on the kind of question it is and what the consequences are is was it right to demote pluto into it into a into a uh demoted from being a planet some astronomers says hey yes i'm saying no and so most times don't really care you know nothing hangs on it nothing practical is is is important about it when you're dealing with something that has practical effects that's another matter then the standard of proof is dictated in large part by what are the practical effects and what do you expect and here i also have a chapter that's my book and here certain issues come in which i'll discuss a couple of them which uh there's more there's more in the book than i can tell you now um suppose somebody said this look i'm trying to look at my mind what to do let's say i'm working with probability rough probability um how much probability do i need to make up my mind well let's say 50 plus one item somebody said 51 it's not strictly speaking great 50 percent politically planned plus so somebody says look that depends upon what the stakes are if it's winning or losing a thousand dollars you know or something that's you know reasonable yeah but if it's a big steak you know my job or five years of health or something if it's a big steak i want a big a bigger probability than just 50 plus i want to have good reason to think i'm doing the right thing that idea put that way is dead wrong it's dead wrong uh i'll give you an example somebody has a complex of symptoms he goes to the doctor and the doctor says well i've got good news and bad news the good news is that these symptoms are characteristic of two different diseases a and b could be a could be b and we have a surefire cure for a and we sure fire cure for b that's the good news bad news is that if you have disease a and you take the cure for b you're dead in six months and if you have disease b and you take the cure for a you're dead in six months so um there's a certain question as to what you should do and the the the patient says well doctor you you've left that one important piece of information what's the probability that i have a what's the probability that i have b he says that's my last piece of bad news probability that you have a is 48 oh you have b is 52 [Music] difference of 4 percent this is life and death hard to get stakes bigger than those should he say life and death i can't decide a life and death question of four percent i i i what should i do take neither of them that doesn't sound right you know and i'm for sure gonna die uh i'll flip a coin because how can i decide isn't that the wrong answer isn't the right answer to take b because he has a four percent higher chance of living so the size of the stakes doesn't determine how big the probability has to be if the outcomes are balanced so then get the extra probability wherever you can get it whatever size it is you have somewhat better chance of living so having said that some people say um well rabbi you've left out one important question how much do the cures cost maybe the cure for a is free and the queue of a b costs ten thousand dollars a hundred thousand dollars a million dollars whatever it is isn't there a limit of how much money you would pay to get the extra four percent probability now here i find people's intuitions divide some people say what good will the million dollars be for me if i'm dead i'm dead i can't do anything with it so i go why shouldn't i spend a million dollars other people say no so i i don't know here how to establish what's right what's wrong i think i don't think it's anything clearly irrational about saying there's a certain cut-off point that i would like but if we are talking about religion as i am and about judaism as i am in my book i think that people who exaggerate the price of living a religious lifestyle are guilty of exaggeration when you are first acquainted with the way the jews live and you compare it with your present lifestyle you might find it it inhibits some things that you otherwise would like to do like running guns to the palestinians you know scuba diving on saturday and cheeseburgers and other interesting activities [Music] but when you take account of the statistics of the social and psychological that you risk by living a non-religious lifestyle like divorce like drug addiction and or alcoholism like [Music] having very dysfunctional relationships with your children um like the lack of community support when you're in trouble and you need help whereas the community support in religious communities is exquisite um you ask yourself what's the probability that living a non-religious lifestyle will be happier healthier and longer than living with this lifestyle if anything the probability is the opposite you know they did a study here in israel some years some years ago and they discovered that the haredi population that's the super fanatic religious population lives longer healthier and happier lives than the general population they were astounded we have the largest percentage below the poverty line shouldn't poverty mean all the social ills drug addiction and suicide and all the rest somehow in this population doesn't work that way so i think that although philosophically if a person takes a position that is a certain amount i would pay for extra probability of being true but not but it's not unlimited i can't convict a person on that like that of making a philosophical mistake but the proposition that in our case there's a sizable a sizable price to pay i think is is greatly exaggerated and i would i would suggest i would strongly strongly recommend that you not draw any conclusions about this on your own judgment on what you heard or what you read but go and ask an expert we had a fellow here in osamaya over 40 years ago i didn't deal with him a friend of mine did he told me the story he was here for about three months he felt like he's in his 40s and then one day he comes in the sister rabbi well that's right that's it rabbi i'm out of here you know it's over he said well really i mean i thought you were getting interested yeah but it's not for me why not you have a lawyer that i can't keep i'm not capable of keeping you then i'm not you know what's that law coalition listening to the voices of women singing so cool elisha listen to the women singing that's why you're not going to become a religious jew little rabbi i didn't tell you my profession i'm an opera critic that's my job to go to opera performances and listen to them and then write up an evaluation of the performance i'm not giving up my job rabbi so the rabbi said listen let's go to an expert no i know you're going to get me an excuse you're going to get me compromised i don't do things that way i either do it right or don't do it right i'm out of here so he finally convinced him to go he went to liberty and i explained the the question to him and joshua turned on my friend and said dope ignoramus you know my friend only wanted to die crawling to the table and die he said you didn't hear the gemura says umanashani can a jewish man be a doctor and treat women come on i ask the question the word says yes because when you're engaged in your profession your mind is on your profession he's sitting there with his laptop listening to the music and writing tomorrow's column that's what he's doing so don't draw any conclusions on your own as to what can and cannot be done find out from an expert whether it can be done or not there are cases where people have had to make substantial sacrifices um one fellow who was going to become a concert pianist and he did and he does travel the world but he doesn't play in chavez and that definitely costs him so he decided to pay that cost so but i wouldn't say it never happens but it doesn't happen nearly as much as people imagine and they don't take out of the adequate account of the probability on the other side that they're compensating factors that make it worthwhile so hope this encourages you to think in terms of good reason rather than proof not only here but in life generally and the demand for proof is a mistake when somebody says to me uh when somebody says to you prove it to me i think you should offer to buy him a tea and have a nice afternoon okay