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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

It's really more of a philosophical position, isn't it? That isn't to say it's correct, but what would "evidence" even mean in this context?

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Philosophical positions that you can't defend are mental masterbation without a payoff at the end. They aren't worth the time required to post them on this site.

Ok, but what about philosophical positions that CAN be defended? For example, your statement is a philosophical position in itself, no? A position, I assume, you believe to be "defensible?"

The answer to 2+2 has an infinite number of wrong answers. Finding the correct way to answer the question gives us a tool in our tool box that we can use to add any 2 numbers.

Through defensible positions even if we ultimately believe the conclusion is wrong we learn new ways to reason about life and the world around us. New tools to inform our interaction with the world or at least new thought processes to communicate with our fellow humans.

The bald statement that 2+2 = 17 or even that 2+2=4 is worth nothing if you can't explain why you think its correct.

Well evidence would be something like "over time these countries have had reduced quality of life over the past decade, because of population growth".

But it seems like the opposite is true. Quality of life is still massively improving basically everywhere.

We are not running out of resources.

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