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Comment by rendall | Hacker News Reader

> ...Christian Laes, a classicist at the University of Manchester. “But absence of evidence does not mean the phenomenon itself was absent.”

I also see at least one comment here making this same argument.

The article covers the evidence against, including, that disabled ancient Greeks lived to adulthood.

The evidence cited in favor is Plutarch's assertion, and that "other societies" do it.

That last is particularly weak. Plutarch's assertion wasn't that parents who couldn't afford children would leave them exposed, but that the Ancients would by policy submit the babies to an examining council who would order that disabled babies be exposed.

So all we have in favor, really, is Plutarch's say-so. Given that he wrote this 700 years later, this evidence is pretty weak, too.

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Table four from the Twelve Tables [1]:

> A father has the right to kill his deformed child.

These were laws in ancient Rome, not Greece, but the societies shared many beliefs and customs. Not that this is proof one way or the other about what was common practice, but people thought it was important enough to lay down in law. [[the father also had the right to kill any of his kids, so it's interesting they spell this case out explicitly]]

[1] https://historycooperative.org/the-twelve-tables/

In the Roman empire you had Pater Familias, doesn't mean those 'rights' were exercised.

> In theory at least, he held powers of life and death over every member of his extended familia through ancient right. In practice, the extreme form of this right was seldom exercised. It was eventually limited by law.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pater_familias

Tacitus writes of the Jews that

"Still they provide for the increase of their numbers. It is a crime among them to kill any newly-born infant."

(http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...)

Were it otherwise in the peoples around them, would Tacitus have thought this worth of mention?

I also found the evidence against the killing to be pretty weak. It certainly doesn't establish what percentage of disabled babies would be killed.

Intuitively, to me, given how dangerous birthing was for the mother, I imagine only seriously disabled babies - that would never be autonomous as an adult - would be killed.

But I guess we'll never know.

From Plato's Republic:

"The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the pen or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who dwell in a separate quarter; but the offspring of the inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be."

This was just a hypothetical, but Plato was thought to be influenced by Sparta. He's very explicit about the eugenic principles behind this idea.

> “But absence of evidence does not mean the phenomenon itself was absent.”

If you believe things for which you have no evidence, you're liable to believe everything.

There's always inference.

I've seen this form of argument a lot lately. It's epistemologically unsound.

Both the claim "Spartans did this" and "Spartans did not do this" are affirmative claims that require evidence. Insufficient evidence leads solely to the conclusion "We do not know with any confidence whether Spartans did this or not." You cannot just assume that one of the affirmative positions is true because the other one lacks sufficient evidence.

That's true but as you see, whether or not the other party argues from that understanding is difficult to identify from a single sentence. I understand that it being convinced of something or not is a false dichotomy. However, there's a difference between objective reality and knowledge: Either the phenomenon was absent or not -- that's a fact. Whether or not we are convinced of it being absent or not is the other question.

> Both the claim "Spartans did this" and "Spartans did not do this" are affirmative claims that require evidence.

Hmm. That is an interesting perspective, but I do not agree.

Isn't "Spartans did not do this" actually a negative claim? And aren't negative claims notoriously difficult to prove?

What if this were consorted with extraterrestrials or some other random claim? Then it's easy to dismiss lack of evidence with "does not mean the phenomenon itself was absent".

Do we really need to find evidence that Spartans did not do this for every claim? Or rather, perhaps we should insist on proving the negative only of claims for which the evidence is strong in the first place.

Shouldn't we take as the null hypothesis "Spartans did not do this" and then evaluate evidence that they did?

In this specific instance, because of 2000 years of tradition, the unchallenged null hypothesis has been "Spartans suffered only healthy, well-formed children to live". This is the only reason people are saying anything like "We need more evidence they did not" despite the weakness of the evidence for its being true.

Null hypothesis should be: we don't know!

Well, sure, we don't know for sure that they did not kill deformed newborns, but we also don't know for sure that Spartans were not magical invisible goats, either. After all, there's no proof they weren't, am I right?

Confidence is a scale, not binary. What does "sure" mean for you and how much of it do you need to be convinced? Does it depend on the situation? For example, how sure do you need/want to be when you cross the street?

Before I consider that, you'd have to show that magical invisible goats (can) exist.

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