An abbreviated list of references appeared in Agates are Forever, but Nick insists I include the full list here.
“Jonathan Edwards said that to understand nothingness, imagine what the sleeping rocks dream of.”
Nick is paraphrasing Edwards’s Notes on Natural Science: Of Being.
Van Doren, Carl, ed. Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards: Selections from their Writings. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920
“To paraphrase Einstein, a theory can never be proved true, but it can be proved false..”
Nick is paraphrasing Einstein’s article Induction and Deduction in Physics.
“Thus, a theory can very well be found to be incorrect if there is a logical error in its deduction, or found to be off the mark if a fact is not in consonance with one of its conclusions. But the truth of a theory can never be proven. For one never knows if future experience will contradict its conclusion; and furthermore there are always other conceptual systems imaginable which might coordinate the very same facts.”
Einstein, Albert. “Induction and Deduction in Physics.” In Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 7: The Berlin Years: Writings, 1918-1921, Document 28. Edited by Michael Janssen, Robert Schulmann, Jozsef Illy, Christopher Lehner, and Diana Kormos Buchwald. Translated by Albert Engel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002, 108-109. (Essay originally published 25 December 1919 in Berliner Tageblatt.)
Screeds by Alvaro Obregón and Salvador Alvarado against Pancho Villa.
Guzmán, Martin Luis. Memoirs of Pancho Villa. Translated by Virginia H. Taylor. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965. Book 4, Chapter 24.
Polymestor and Pygmalion of Tyre
Doña Cartucho is paraphrasing arguments against mining precious metals found in De Re Metallica by Georgius Agricola.
Agricola, Georgius. De Re Metallica. Translated by Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover. New York: Dover, 1950.
“Blame and praise alike befall when a dauntless man’s spirit is black-and-white-mixed like the magpie’s plumage.”
Nick is quoting Wolfram von Eschenbach.
von Eschenbach, Wolfram. Parzival: A Romance of the Middle Ages. Translated by Helen M. Mustard and Charles E. Passage. New York: Vintage Books, 1961
“quasi pannus menstruatæ”
Pershing is quoting the Vulgate version of Isaiah 64:6, “et facti sumus ut inmundus omnes nos quasi pannus menstruatae universae iustitiae nostrae…” (And we are all become as one unclean, and all our justices like the rag of a menstruous woman…)
“But, as Calvin observes, God sometimes sends avengers of his own choosing.”
Nick is paraphrasing John Calvin’s commentary on Genesis Chapter 9
Calvin, John. Commentaries on the First Book of Moses, Called Genesis. Translated by Rev. John King, M.A., of Queens College, Cambridge. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1948
“It is well that we should be kind to women in the strength of our manhood, for we lie in their hands at both ends of our lives.”
Nick is quoting Frankie’s paraphrase of an aphorism attributed to Chief He-Dog (Lakota Sioux)
“For the Bayesians here, this means that at trial you have a high prior probability of guilt, maybe 90 percent, so if the jury is right only 90 percent of the time, a conviction will be right about 99 percent of the time.”
Nick says this is a trivial application of Bayes’s Theorem using point estimates and is mentioned only to observe that accuracy of guilt determination in the criminal justice system depends on many things, not just the trial process. He cautions that even if, at trial, the overall average of the prior probability of guilt is 90%, you would be a fool to assume that the point estimate is accurate in any particular jurisdiction or case. Subject to those disclaimers, he explains that in the example given, 81% (.9*.9) of guilty people are convicted, and 1% (.1*.1) of innocent people are convicted, meaning that the chance of a convicted person being guilty is 81 / (81 + 1) = 98.78%, or “about 99%.” On the other hand, in the same example, he says the chance of an acquitted person being innocent is only 50%. He also says that in practice, most Bayesian analyses, including this one, are based on unverified or unverifiable assumptions.
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