Math-Based Philosophy

How to Convince A fanboy?

Basic math proves it’s impossible!

Probability of this endeavor = 0 :) (image by the author: Pratick Roy)

Ever spent hours debating with people, refuting their ideas with insurmountable facts, only to hear “Hmm.. But I still believe in <insert idea here>”?

— If so don’t fret. It’s not that you are a bad communicator. It’s just that they are a fanboy, and according to Mr. Thomas Bayes [1], convincing a fanboy otherwise, is not only difficult but mathematically impossible.

Politics, Religion, Mobile OS, K-Pop, Anime, and everything conceived off in this third rock from the sun, including the notion that this rock is flat, has its fanboys, but in this post, I am not going to support or refute any particular idea (though I may take a dig at one 😜), but rather I will attempt to show how Bayes Theorem, a fundamental formula in the mathematics of conditional probabilities, says that

If someone has absolute faith in anything, then no amount of evidence provided, will ever convince them otherwise.

One Clarification: In this post, I won’t dive deep into the maths, but will only prod just enough to prove the above statement. In future posts, I may delve deeper into Bayes Theorem or its ML application Naive Bayes, If I think I can add some…