> present facts
That’s not how this works, anywhere: the burden of proof, of presenting facts, is on those who say “yes”.
In the former case, we have only appeal to authority (some book says) and to personal belief, neither of which are facts. In the latter case, we have a proven medical fraud committed by a person with financial interest in rival treatments, said person having lost their medical license as a result of said fraud.
Your serve.
What? Why? If this were true, you could:
1. Take the claim you want to assert
2. Claim the negation of the claim is false (the "no").
3. If anyone asks for facts, just say the burden of proof is on them to show the negation is true.
For my part, I find the original "no and no" reply perfectly adequate for the smug "I'm only asking questions" assertion-in-disguise that prompted it. Life is too short to debate trolls.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36661671 (Other reply I made just now on the burden-of-proof thing)
You seem like an actually reasonable person (and thanks for the support)....do you think it's possible that there might be more to what it is I'm doing than "trolling"?
A way to think about it: do you think it's possible that framing/perceiving those who are interested in accuracy as being "trolls" (as opposed to realizing that they are correct, and may actually have an important point) might cause long term harm to a culture?
Another way to think about it: mocking Trump supporters and religious fundamentalists is both easy and fun, and therefore popular - but how much value is there in it? Now, contrast this to finding questions that ~everyone will fail on, including highly educated and genuinely smart people. How much value might there be in this (keeping in mind the numerous seemingly intractable problems we have going on on this shitshow of a planet)?
I'm asking you rather than the other guy because I think you can likely actually consider the question.
An interesting followup question maybe: what do you think about people (particularly smart people) who are not able to consider certain things, but seem to be trapped in a cycle of only being able heuristically process certain ideas. I am very suspicious that this is not a 100% naturally emergent aspect of our culture - I speculate that people have been made this way. And if they've been made this way (or even if not), perhaps they can be improved.
I can't know for sure either way. I guessed that you were trolling since you brought up vaccines causing autism; if it was just the question about God, I might not have thought so much of the intent. It seems I misjudged you, though. Please accept my continuation of the discussion as...well, just that, actually.
> but how much value is there in it?
Mere mocking certainly isn't valuable. I think it's more that people believe they are definitely correct and they mock those who they view as definitely wrong because there's nothing to debate, but a lot of people seem too trigger-happy to conclude that they are definitely right and the other person is definitely wrong, without considering nuance. Then the questions they will field in actual debate are already selected by bias to be at least somewhat aligned in their views.
> what do you think about people (particularly smart people) who are not able to consider certain things, but seem to be trapped in a cycle of only being able heuristically process certain ideas.
I'm a proud person and I fancy myself a thinker; along these lines, I don't know if detest is quite the right word, but I don't view them positively in that aspect. I think I'd do fine (generally) not treating them differently because of that, but I do have strong feelings about critical thinking and its deficit in many people. I recognize that I'm not infallible either, yet I don't waver in typing this. I definitely have shown instances of being open-minded, but it's not like I know right now where I stand. Ha, I turned this into talking about me.
> I am very suspicious that this is not a 100% naturally emergent aspect of our culture - I speculate that people have been made this way.
Agree.
> And if they've been made this way (or even if not), perhaps they can be improved.
I wonder about that. I don't think there's necessarily an upper bound of critical thinking/understanding, but in its place there are gaps between every person where understanding can only be achieved by...understanding. It definitely happens at times, but there's no plane that can truly just airlift a person across such a gap.
I revealed my motive though: these two particular questions are guaranteed to invoke errors in normative cognition, and often especially in intelligent people.
>> I am very suspicious that this is not a 100% naturally emergent aspect of our culture - I speculate that people have been made this way.
> Agree.
Well now I'm curious...any theories (wild and speculative is fine by me) on some candidate causes?
> It definitely happens at times, but there's no plane that can truly just airlift a person across such a gap.
Which was more than we could say about actual planes, before a couple of weirdos got off their asses and actually built one.
But it seems there's something about this problem that's different, almost like it doesn't allow itself to be analyzed, or even noticed. "Some day" humanity will reach the oft-discussed but never pursued world of widespread critical thinking seems to be the plan, without having even taken the first step towards it.
Noteworthy: I am far from the first person who has noticed this phenomenon.
Maybe we are an experiment by higher beings to see how well sparks of rationality can develop into an enlightened being or whatever. I wonder how they'd rate us so far.
> But it seems there's something about this problem that's different, almost like it doesn't allow itself to be analyzed, or even noticed. "Some day" humanity will reach the oft-discussed but never pursued world of widespread critical thinking seems to be the plan, without having even taken the first step towards it.
Put all elementary/middle children on Hacker News for fifteen minutes a day until they can demonstrate critical thinking in live debates. /s
Seriously though, I think fostering curiosity and critical thinking, as abstract as they are, is important to improving society as a whole. Parents probably need to be involved in this kind of education, and schools too. I think Hacker News has good examples of both great discussions with critical thinking and...suboptimal discussions. A lot easier said than done though.
Another way to look at it: there is an experiment of sorts underway to see whether humanity can reach some sort of enlightenment before killing itself off - regardless of whether there is a higher power to help us along the way (which doesn't necessarily have to be supernatural btw, though it may appear that way, and thus "be" that way), this may indeed be the situation we are in, but cannot know (or maybe even true to know, so far away are we from the goal).
> Put all elementary/middle children on Hacker News for fifteen minutes a day until they can demonstrate critical thinking in live debates.
An alternative idea I've had: teach junior & high school kids certain skills, and then cherry pick culture war threads from Hacker News (a site well populated by genuinely intelligent adults, though only on a relative scale) and then have the children ruthlessly critique the literal delusions of the adults. I think this is a good idea for many different reasons, the main one being to demonstrate how easily kids could be upgraded to utterly dominate the thinking of smart adults, in specific types of thinking. Considering bad thinking and decisions are the roots of all our problems, and the adults seem utterly helpless to do anything about it, empowering those who can be demonstrated to perform better seems like a no brainer to me.
> Parents probably need to be involved in this kind of education, and schools too.
The parents and adults would first need to be trained in the necessary skills - as we can see here on HN, hardly anyone can do it at a high level, or realize that they cannot (the affliction renders the subject unable to accurately self-diagnose, a phenomenon which can also occur at the culture/species level).
> I think Hacker News has good examples of both great discussions with critical thinking and...suboptimal discussions.
Providing near endless material for running case studies of the limited quality of high level 21st century human cognition: even our best and brightest are dumb on an absolute scale.
The second misunderstanding requires fewer words to describe: Russell's teapot.
I absolutely love this comment, because it is literally and necessarily an opinion, but it explicitly claims that it is a fact.
This is what I was anticipating when I said: "The effect these questions have on even the very best minds is amazing, I wonder what will happen here..."
> The rest of the comment, i.e. the non-question parts, reveals the true nature of those "questions".
This one's great too - let me guess, you believe that in "the non-question parts, reveals the true nature" it is solely the words themselves doing the "revealing", am I right? Or, would you prefer to maybe not discuss that topic in detail? :)
> Implying that "even the very best minds" are somehow unable to discuss these questions is a cheap rhetorical device.
It is also true, and some might even say mean.
> It's what the Internet clumsily, but accurately, calls "debate me, bro".
Yup, and this is what keeps your culture permanently locked into Maya: the world as dream (like above where you literally can't distinguish between the necessarily subjective and objective - and this is under asynchronous conditions, imagine how you'd perform in realtime).
> The second misunderstanding requires fewer words to describe: Russell's teapot.
lol, what does this even mean?
By the way: Russell's Teapot is not a proof, but it certainly may appear as such to those afflicted by Normative Cognition.
If we all accept foo no proof is required for foo
If all reasonable (in the judgement of the particular discussion forum) parties in a discussion about foo would accept foo dissenters may be entertained or ignored.
If you look up the definition on Wikipedia, you may notice that your articulation of it here is slightly off. You may also not be able to notice it, which is what makes "reality" so tricky.
> If we all accept foo no proof is required for foo
And Mother Nature will reward you accordingly for the quality of your thinking/delusion/indoctrination.
> If all reasonable (in the judgement of the particular discussion forum) parties in a discussion about foo would accept foo dissenters may be entertained or ignored.
Yep, you can literally do pretty much whatever you like, but don't whine when unintended consequences show up later ("Ooooooh no, climate change, why doesn't some do something!!!!!).
Best of luck with guessing your way through life, humans!
I used to think this way but lately recognize this isn't intellectually honest. Even w/o religion we have to acknowledge that our ability to perceive and understand is very limited compared to what must be the totality of truths in the universe.
This seems obvious - eg if you believe in evolution, you recognize that you evolved to be fit in your environment (eat and avoid being eaten) - why would you expect this process to grant you machinery to understand fundamental universal truths?
Once I recognized this limitation, I recognized the intellectual dishonestly of what I previously considered rigor: "I can't see/understand it so it doesn't exist" is as ridiculous an assertion as anything.
If you tell me the moon is made of cheese my rebuttal isn't going to be to launch a manned mission I'm going to tightly flip it on you.
This isn't intellectually dishonest. The fact for instance that our ability to understand the underlying reality if any may be limited doesn't mean that every proposition is equally valid. You entire life has been built on picking the most likely explanation for a set of inputs received. It's how your ancestors didn't get eaten by animals.
If you are wandering around an orchard and find what looks like a smelly pile of dung do feel free not to put it in your mouth to find out if it's actually an apple.
The upstream topic has to do with religion which deals with things that don't have that property (by definition, I would say.) One religious argument can go like this:
Religion: all things that we know about, have a creator. Why wouldn't the universe have a creator? Why would the most sophisticated thing of all be random? Atheism replies: I am unable to see the creator therefore he doesn't exist. It's random.
There's a difference between saying "I know what an apple is and I've seen thousands of apples, and this pile of shit isn't an apple" and saying "I assume I would be able to perceive and understand the creation/creator of the universe with my monkey meat-brain, so the fact that I don't see it means for sure there's not one"
I feel like the logical approach is to say "I am a limited monkey meat-brain, I have no reason to expect to recognize the creator. But I can chose to use probability to expect that there might be a creator of the universe - since all else has a creator, and not get too hung up on my own limitation"
Hope this elaboration makes sense, this is what I was trying to convey.
The fact that the concept is probably without merit is a probabilistic statement like most of the "facts" you know. There are no tigers in my house and there is no creator of the universe.
I'm an atheist not because I have absolute proof of a negative but because surety crossed a threshold from probably not to definitely not because that is how human beings work. Most statements that you "know" work exactly the same.
There is nothing in the natural world that has a creator in the sense that you mean. A star, a slime mold and you are a natural consequence of the configuration of matter that preceded the existence of matter we are labeling our sun, that ugly stain on the wall, and you. There is no reason to believe that your mom has conscious control over individual cells that became you for instance any more than the lose clump of dust consciously created the sun.
As we move to the moment where the inception of our universe this of course breaks down not because we need to paper over our lack of understanding with a symbol we invented but because as you noted reality has no need to conform to our intuition or ability to understand.
// There is nothing in the natural world that has a creator in the sense that you mean...
I believe you're expressing a faith here. As you and I both agreed "reality has no need to conform to our intuition or ability to understand" - the implications of this is that on questions like "where did the laws of physics come from" we have no hope of observation / understanding that can lead to an answer.
Perhaps the only honest answer would be "as a human being, I am too limited to engage with this topic at all."
But both religious people and atheists make a stronger assertion than that. An atheist says "I can never understand this, but I believe it came about randomly." A religious person says "I can never understand this, but I believe it came about purposefully."
They are both equally (un)justified in their belief, but one or the other resonates with them deeply enough to operate as a matter of faith.
In the colloquial sense, for sure. However, if someone bothers to engage in a discussion by providing an answer to a question, I think it is perfectly fair to say that the burden of proof lies on the answerer. If someone responds in kind, then they should provide evidence and reasoning for their claim. A holier-than-thou attitude to the point of providing one word as an answer and refusing to elaborate isn't remotely conducive to discussion.
The question of whether vaccines cause autism isn't a question that can reasonably be dismissed immediately like "the moon is made of cheese" can. You probably put your trust in the scientists who say vaccines don't cause autism. You may very well be right. But if you choose to engage in a discussion, don't act like your argument is untouchable. That's a disservice to the spirit of scientific inquiry. Perhaps there's a new study that should be considered. If it's the same old debunked studies, feel free to end the discussion there. But you don't know that ahead of time. If you're going to continue a discussion, do so in good faith.
> You entire life has been built on picking the most likely explanation for a set of inputs received. It's how your ancestors didn't get eaten by animals.
That is...confident. I think animals are a lot easier to avoid dying to than trying to understand the universe and everything about it, whether that's physics, epidemiology, or philosophy. Natural selection isn't "survival of the perfect beings" but rather "survival of the fittest and then some mediocre ones who haven't died off".
Can you cite any authoritative source on this, or are you able to only claim that it is correct (and perhaps, expect me to disprove)?
> In the former case, we have only appeal to authority (some book says)
You are incorrect - we also have epistemology, logic, ontology, neuroscience/psychology/anthropology and various other fields which contain discoveries that are relevant to the psychological phenomenon (~"reality") you are currently experiencing.
> and to personal belief, neither of which are facts.
If you and your epistemology-ignorant and denying crew can treat your beliefs as facts (as is regularly done in these conversations), why can religious people not do the same? I mean come on man, double standards are bad, no?
> In the latter case, we have a proven medical fraud committed by a person with financial interest in rival treatments, said person having lost their medical license as a result of said fraud.
Which proves nothing.
I am genuinely curious: do you believe that Wakefield being discovered to be a fraud PROVES there is ZERO causal association between vaccines and autism? Because there sure are a lot of people who believe that, including a lot of people right here on HN.
What if the number of pirates in the world is in fact linked to the increase in mean global temperature?
Can you present any evidence it isn't?
Possibly relevant:
That's not a good argument. If someone believes in anything then it should either be a moral axiom or they should have some kind of reasoning for it. Now, is this reasoning based on Wakefield and co. or something else that hasn't been discussed much? There is overwhelming scientific evidence that vaccines don't cause autism, so while that isn't a proof, it's the only reasonable starting point for a discussion. Science is the only tool for applying reason to reality. Not all scientists are correct, of course, but your own reasoning is flimsy if you don't acknowledge the corpus of studies which strongly favor the theory that vaccines don't cause autism. Epistemology is appropriate for your question about God but not really for this topic. If there was more reasonable division in the scientific consensus, then you would have a point.
Oh ya? Well whath this: it's an excellent argument.
Wow, that was easy, I guess that's why it's so popular??
> If someone believes in anything then it should either be a moral axiom or they should have some kind of reasoning for it.
Agreed - that's why it's so funny that science (and its fan base) which sells itself as being the paragon of reason has to resort to unture, misinformative rhetoric to "win" arguments where their proposition is not technically true. Reality is complicated, if they are so smart why can they not understand simple logic and epistemology?
Ironically, science itself has provided many answers to this sort of question, but like religious folk, they tend to not be able to extensively read &/or live up to their scriptures, or realize that they have that problem.
> Now, is this reasoning based on Wakefield and co. or something else that hasn't been discussed much? There is overwhelming scientific evidence that vaccines don't cause autism, so while that isn't a proof, it's the only reasonable starting point for a discussion.
Sure, no problem. And I will simply point out it's not a proof, and then record the intuitive, meme-based reactions to store in my files. Scientists and scientific thinkers sure do love their memes when push comes to shove!
> Science is the only tool for applying reason to reality.
What's funny is you have no proof for this, making it a faith based belief, but you (presumably) perceive it as rational.
I'm curious: as the person who it is happening to, what's your take on this phenomenon?
> Not all scientists are correct, of course, but your own reasoning is flimsy if you don't acknowledge the corpus of studies which strongly favor the theory that vaccines don't cause autism.
Agreed - I fully acknowledge it. And thanks for explicitly noting that it is not known whether vaccines cause autism.
Do you think it is funny that so many otherwise intelligent people right here on HN are unable to realize this? I think it is hilarious.
> Epistemology is appropriate for your question about God but not really for this topic.
You are not able to objectively prove this subjective opinion - I predict you are unable to even try.
> If there was more reasonable division in the scientific consensus, then you would have a point.
That there is no division is a huge part of my point. Institutionalized delusion & deceit, which is then used as a basis of a propaganda campaign on the citizens of the entire planet, yielding what we see all around us.