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Comment by jackyinger | Hacker News Reader

On the meta level, if a statement seems false the burden is on you to prove it. You’re asking your counterpart to do all the work.

On the subject level…

Have you ever seen a troop of monkeys hanging out? They definitely aren’t operating as modern atomic families, and we’re pretty closely related.

Geez, it was only several generations ago that multigenerational family cohabitation was common. And from my personal experience, growing up in a small town and hang out with other kids at will was great.

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> On the meta level, if a statement seems false the burden is on you to prove it. You’re asking your counterpart to do all the work.

This shouldn’t have bothered me so much but, since when the burden of proof is on those who question the validity of a statement?

That would mean everything I say must be taken as valid unless you can prove them wrong. In some cases you would have to prove the absence of things which is impossible. And if I have the loudest megaphone, my “facts” would dominate.

I don’t think you would prefer that to everyone being responsible for providing proof of validity for their statements.

The burden of proof is always on the person making an affirmative claim. It's absolutely not on anyone to disprove every false-seeming statement; there's far too much bullshit in the world for that.

The burden of proof generally lies with the one making the claim. As Hitchens's razor states: "what may be asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence."

Anyway, only because something feels intuitive, it doesn’t make it true. In this instance the original claim seems to contradict the article which states imaginary friends are not the result of loneliness but the process by which children explore the complexities of real relationships… i.e. a form of subconscious thought experiment.

So imaginary friends is a new phenomenon? Anna Seward (18th century poet) wrote about them.

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