Hacker News Reader

Comment by arisAlexis | Hacker News Reader

Actually all of his claims are facts unless proven otherwise. Do you have proof that these facts (Wuhan playing with these viruses, funding etc) are not true or you would like them to not be true?

View on HN

'Claims are facts until proven otherwise' is quite the take, I think Karl Popper would take issue with that.

I linked a thorough thread from a domain expert explaining in detail why the claims are false. These things have been addressed/debunked many, many times but still get repeated because the untruths get amplified and the rebuttals not.

This is sophistry. The OP is stating facts. You are being "vague" by saying that these have been "debunked" relying on the long term "no conspiracy" theory which does really not apply in this case. This is a very clear Bayesian probability problem.

No, you literally said 'all his claims are facts until proven otherwise'.

I am not being vague, I literally posted a link to a rebuttal thread.

This is why I don't post on hacker news any more.

You guys are missing the point. Either you believe some unknown variable has zero probability or even if it is small you think ifs not worth discovering, for an event that is the most important since ww2. Is there proof of zero probability? No.

The "all claims are facts unless proven otherwise" is a wrong way to think about. You must prove a claim, not the other way around. What is perhaps better to say is that he makes no arguments but just lists observations (nitpick: therefore can be no such thing as rebuttal). As the commentary tweets don't call them wrong, we can assume they're indeed correct (thus nothing was debunked). That said, I'ld have preferred if he had correct citations such as the link to the Nature article.

I wonder if you take an "all claims are facts until proven otherwise" approach to religion as well, and if so, how do you reconcile the mutually-exclusive (but non-falsifiable) claims that various religions make counter to one another?

It’s a fact that I had coffee with someone who grew up a thousand miles away from me yesterday. If I were to infer from that fact that there was something unusual about that, I would be wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com