Bible stat follow up
ams314 pointed me to this interview with the statistician who did the calculations for the Jesus's tomb claim. He says:
Then what you can try to do, and it may require approximations, you have to try to list all the possible things that oculd have happened and in each case assess how surprising it is - and then take all of those that are at least as surprising as what you've got, and then just add up all of their probabilities together to get a kind of a p value.
This p value basically speaks to one thing-it speaks to the likelihood that there would have been another family alive at that time whose tomb this could reasonably have been; whose cluster of names was such that this could have been their tomb.
In doing the math you have to take into account that there were more than one tomb that has been looked into. I think at least 100 tombs have been looked into. So we're seeing the best of 100 observations, and there are at least 1000 tomb sites that are actually known to be in existence, and there may in fact be more of them-I've been told that there could be as many as 2,000 tomb sites all together. So we have to factor in the fact that what we've seen is possibly the best observation out of 1000 or 2000.
Depending on how you do the calculation you're going to get some range of numbers, and every statistician will have a different range of numbers. And you're going to get numbers on the order of 1 in 100 to perhaps as much as 1 in 1000 - that being the odds against there being another family with that particular combination of names.
which at least explains some of what he did. I'm still unimpressed, but not as totally appalled as I was based on the NYTimes article.
Then what you can try to do, and it may require approximations, you have to try to list all the possible things that oculd have happened and in each case assess how surprising it is - and then take all of those that are at least as surprising as what you've got, and then just add up all of their probabilities together to get a kind of a p value.
This p value basically speaks to one thing-it speaks to the likelihood that there would have been another family alive at that time whose tomb this could reasonably have been; whose cluster of names was such that this could have been their tomb.
In doing the math you have to take into account that there were more than one tomb that has been looked into. I think at least 100 tombs have been looked into. So we're seeing the best of 100 observations, and there are at least 1000 tomb sites that are actually known to be in existence, and there may in fact be more of them-I've been told that there could be as many as 2,000 tomb sites all together. So we have to factor in the fact that what we've seen is possibly the best observation out of 1000 or 2000.
Depending on how you do the calculation you're going to get some range of numbers, and every statistician will have a different range of numbers. And you're going to get numbers on the order of 1 in 100 to perhaps as much as 1 in 1000 - that being the odds against there being another family with that particular combination of names.
which at least explains some of what he did. I'm still unimpressed, but not as totally appalled as I was based on the NYTimes article.