Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjk166 | Hacker News Reader

It's a logical standard. You can't prove a negative (ie that you didn't do something and thus are innocent), so the burden of proof must always be on those making a claim to show that it is true. While it might not be as dangerous for the gossip column to employ fallacious reasoning as it would be for a court of law, that doesn't stop it from being wrong.

View on HN

It's not a logical standard, and you can prove a negative. For example, I can prove that I'm not dead, that there's no elephant in the room with me as I type this, and that my wife is not having sex with someone else right now because I can see her on the couch.

I wish people would stop saying you can't prove a negative. You can prove that you didn't do something by proving something else that logically excludes you doing it--such as being somewhere else at the time.

What about people who can’t prove a negative but truly are innocent? If you can’t guarantee that 100% can prove a negative, then innocent people would be convicted.

Innocent people do get convicted. Some negatives can't be proven, just like some positive assertions can't be proven.

What about people who can't prove a positive but truly are guilty?

In this fuzzy form of what "positive" and "negative" are, there is a symmetry that allows all arguments you have for one "side" to be easily flipped. Each positive is somebody elses negative. Not guilty? Not innocent? With that line of reasong you could not ever prove anything since it's "the negative" of something else.

Mathematical logic has a solution to this though. You may want to check out constructive logic. That's where the statement "you can't prove a negative" is reasonable but has very specific meaning.

In Aristotelian Logic, is said that you can't prove an Universal Negative statement. I guess at some point someone forgot the Universal part and ran with it, creating that misconception.

That's not what I'm talking about. You can't prove an arbitrary negative. Or even more rigorously, just because you can't prove a negative doesn't make the positive true.

You could have programmed a script to make this comment. The elephant might be invisible. That might be your wife's identical twin sister. You can always come up with a more elaborate explanation. You haven't proved your negatives, you've just made it harder to prove the inverse. And while specific examples might be easy, in general this is hard if not impossible to do.

It would be absurd to assume your wife is cheating at every moment where you can't see with your own eyes that she isn't - no the default assumption must be that the claim is false and evidence must be presented to the contrary.

You're confusing logic with epistemology in the context of legal proceedings and life in general. Epistemically, I prove there's no elephant in my room now because elephants can't be invisible, because I would feel it or hear it or smell it, etc. You can posit an endless number of additional premises to show that there may still be an elephant in the room, but you end up in logical paradox where any evidence of the elephant being present is inaccessible. At that point, what does it mean to say "there's an elephant in here with me that is completely undetectable, so lack of detection is not evidence of absence?"

In terms of epistemology, "proof" means reaching sufficient justification for considering a belief to be true, not validity according to an axiomatic system.

Outside the courtroom everybody makes judgements based on the balance of evidence, because we can’t possibly know enough facts to pass the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard.

"Beyond a reasonable doubt" isn't even the only standard of proof in a courtroom! That's only for criminal cases.

You mean like people judging others on Twitter based on gossip and quotes out of context? Society could do a lot better by imitating the justice system standards a bit more. The system was created that way for important ethical reasons.

It was created that way because of the extreme consequences of criminal conviction. Civil suits, which deal in money or injunctive relief, have a much lower standard of proof. Social opprobrium rightly has a standard lower than that.

It's no longer mere "opprobrium". These days it's losing your career (or at least your current job) and getting incessantly harassed. The calculus has very much changed.

(I'm not claiming that I have a solution for the problem, besides people individually waking up and realizing that it's a bad idea to rush to judgement. No amount of censorship or similar tactics could possibly solve this problem even if our benevolent tech overlords wanted to)

I'd say the standard in civil suits is the lowest ethically possible in judging people. It merely requires the claim to be more likely to be true that not. Below that, you're saying the claim is most likely false based on the evidence, but for reasons of extreme caution you will presume it is true. I certainly agree that happens in social media where the outcome of letting a "guilty" person get away with something is judged to be more unacceptable than the outcome of destroying an innocent person.

1) Lower than preponderance of evidence?

I believe you about it having such a standard (we can call it presence of evidence or presence of suspicion), but not on it being right.

2) Preponderance of evidence makes sense on civil suits because they are kinda inherently simmetrical. Either A loses or B loses. We would probably do better in using the standard of evidence for, say, a traffic violation, in the case of social "lets get this guy fired and try to make sure he never gets a job again" -- might not be enough of a standard, but better

The only standard mentioned in this thread was "beyond a reasonable doubt", to which someone replied that it should absolutely be the standard.

Did you mean to say "social opprobium" (aka, lets get this guy fired and kicked out of places) should have a lower standard of proof than "beyond a reasonable doubt"? Because reading your post I understood that it should be lower then the civil standard (i.e.: "preponderance of evidence")

Which I believe it *has*, but absolutely should not have

To clarify:

What do you think the highest and lowest standards of evidence should be for "social opprobium"?

And what is the maximum damage to ones life that "social opprobium" should ideally entail?

Nothing I said relates to the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard

Reply on news.ycombinator.com