What is Truth?

[uwot]

Skepdick me old mucker, how did you choose your hysterical, Wikipedia splattering method of persuasion, and why do you persist with it, given that it clearly doesn't work?

1. Why do you assume I am in the game of persuasion?

I don't. I think it is entirely possible that you are tilting at windmills for your own personal and unfathomable jollies.

2. How are you measuring the effectiveness of my method (whatever you think it is)?

Well, if anything you have contributed is intended to persuade anyone of anything other than that you are a ranting nutjob, the number of responses that hint at success is very small.

[Skepdick]

I think it is entirely possible that you are tilting at windmills for your own personal and unfathomable jollies.
Well, if anything you have contributed is intended to persuade anyone of anything other than that you are a ranting nutjob

So it seems you have two working hypotheses there, which is a good thing. You haven't quite made up your mind yet.

Do you think the true hypothesis is in the set above?

, the number of responses that hint at success is very small.

And which is your interpretative bias in this regard: absence of evidence is evidence of absence; or absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?

Also, how certain are you that persuasion works the way you believe it works?

[uwot]

I think it is entirely possible that you are tilting at windmills for your own personal and unfathomable jollies.
Well, if anything you have contributed is intended to persuade anyone of anything other than that you are a ranting nutjob

So it seems you have two working hypotheses there, which is a good thing. You haven't quite made up your mind yet.

That's one of them distinctions without a difference you keep banging on about.

Do you think the true hypothesis is in the set above?

I think it may well be a contributing factor, but I'm prepared to believe there is more nuance.

, the number of responses that hint at success is very small.

And which is your interpretative bias in this regard: absence of evidence is evidence of absence; or absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?

Given the number of responses that clearly demonstrate people don't take you seriously, neither.

Also, how certain are you that persuasion works the way you believe it works?

Well now Skepdick, what makes you believe that I believe persuasion works in a particular way?

[Skepdick]

That's one of them distinctions without a difference you keep banging on about.

Of course there is a difference.

If you are testing only one hypothesis you aren't testing anything at all. You are only confirming what you already believe.

If you don't have an alternative hypothesis. A counter-argument to your own argument, you can be sure you are dogmatic.

Given the number of responses that clearly demonstrate people don't take you seriously, neither.

If that's how you measure it - sure.

That's not my metric for success.

Well now Skepdick, what makes you believe that I believe persuasion works in a particular way?

You are asserting that "my way doesn't work", which implies you have a referent for a way that does work.

[uwot]

Given the number of responses that clearly demonstrate people don't take you seriously, neither.

If that's how you measure it - sure.

Well there's a heap of bits of information on the plus side.

That's not my metric for success.

As I implied, how you get your jollies is your business.

Well now Skepdick, what makes you believe that I believe persuasion works in a particular way?

You are asserting that "my way doesn't work", which implies you have a referent for a way that does work.

Dunno how many blades you have on your logical Swiss Army knife but is there really one that works for that?

[Skepdick]

Well there's a heap of bits of information on the plus side.

Of course, but you never did answer me which way your bias sways.

A. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
B. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Dunno how many blades you have on your logical Swiss Army knife but is there really one that works for that?

Of course. To assert that my car is not blue you must know what blue looks like.

You must have a referent for "blueness" at your disposal e.g in memory.

How else would you make the assertion?

[uwot]

...you never did answer me which way your bias sways.

A. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
B. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The thing is I don't base any hypothesis on an absence of evidence.

To assert that my car is not blue you must know what blue looks like.

You must have a referent for "blueness" at your disposal e.g in memory.

How else would you make the assertion?

If it's red. You're in good company at least, even David Hume tripped over the 'missing shade of blue'.

[Skepdick]

The thing is I don't base any hypothesis on an absence of evidence.

But do you dismiss any hypothesis on too little evidence? Even zero evidence.

If it's red. You're in good company at least, even David Hume tripped over the 'missing shade of blue'.

Well, he didn't trip over it. You are tripping over a Fencepost error. Is blue a shade of red? Is red a shade of blue? It's common error when dealing with discretization.

Any color on the light-spectrum (other than blue) would make my car non-blue, so where does blue start and end exactly?

So you must know what color is.
And you must know all the colors which are not blue, in order to assert that my car is not that color.
And lastly, you must have the word "blue" in your vocabulary, and you must be aware that it's not a synonymous word for "red".

For if my car was actually red, saying that it's "not blue" sure is weird. It's not an airplane either. Or a dinosaur. Or a tooth fairy.

[uwot]

...do you dismiss any hypothesis on too little evidence? Even zero evidence.

Yup, if someone presents me with an hypothesis for which there is zero evidence I do dismiss it, for the simple reason that in the absence of evidence there is nothing to have an hypothesis about.

Any color on the light-spectrum (other than blue) would make my car non-blue, so where does blue start and end exactly?

Take your pick. There are two words in Russian that most speakers of other European languages call blue. The ancient Egyptians didn't discriminate between green and blue, in Homeric Greek, pretty much everything was bronze coloured. Then there's yer Nelson Goodman 'grue'. Call any band of the visible spectrum what you will, but colours as perceived are not the same.

...you must know all the colors which are not blue, in order to assert that my car is not that colour.

One is plenty if your car happens to be that colour.

[Skepdick]

Yup, if someone presents me with an hypothesis for which there is zero evidence I do dismiss it, for the simple reason that in the absence of evidence there is nothing to have an hypothesis about.

Well, that's a contradiction!

IF the synthesis of hypotheses requires evidence, and if the absence of evidence prevents the synthesis of a hypothesis, how can there ever be such a thing as a hypothesis without evidence? What would you even call such a beast if you ever encountered one?

Surely the correct inference to make for ANY hypothesis presented to you is to ask "Cool! How did you synthesize that?"

Take your pick. There are two words in Russian that most speakers of other European languages call blue. The ancient Egyptians didn't discriminate between green and blue, in Homeric Greek, pretty much everything was bronze coloured. Then there's yer Nelson Goodman 'grue'. Call any band of the visible spectrum what you will, but colours as perceived are not the same.

That's hardly my objection. You are referring to an entity by negation, but negation is unconstrained.

What is the negation of 1 in the domain of natural numbers?

One is plenty if your car happens to be that colour.

Q.E.D

To negate the set of [1] is to present me with all of the integers, except 1.

[uwot]

Yup, if someone presents me with an hypothesis for which there is zero evidence I do dismiss it, for the simple reason that in the absence of evidence there is nothing to have an hypothesis about.

Well, that's a contradiction!

IF the synthesis of hypotheses requires evidence, and if the absence of evidence prevents the synthesis of a hypothesis, how can there ever be such a thing as a hypothesis without evidence? What would you even call such a beast if you ever encountered one?

As I said, how come you are so fucked up that you have to disagree with someone who is agreeing with you?

[Skepdick]

As I said, how come you are so fucked up that you have to disagree with someone who is agreeing with you?

Because you are not "agreeing" with me! You are ignoring causal order, the existential dependencies behind the thing and arriving at some incoherent narrative.

IF the causal order is Evidence -> Synthesis-> Hypothesis -> Uwot's eyeballs, THEN every Hypothesis that reaches your eyeballs should lead you to infer the entire dependency graph in reverse!

Hypothesis -> Synthesis-> Evidence.

There can't NOT evidence, and there can't NOT be synthesis IF there is a hypothesis before your eyeballs.

[uwot]

To negate the set of [1] is to present me with all of the integers, except 1.

Skepdick, I do not have to negate the set of [1]. Even if my aim was to show that it doesn't contain the full set of integers, I wouldn't have to present you with all of them, 2 will do the job. Likewise I do not have to tell you every colour your car isn't to demonstrate it isn't blue, any one but blue is dandy. There's inconsistent Skepdick, and then there's complete bollocks.

[Skepdick]

Skepdick, I do not have to negate the set of [1]. Even if my aim was to show that it doesn't contain the full set of integers, I wouldn't have to present you with all of them, 2 will do the job. Likewise I do not have to tell you every colour your car isn't to demonstrate it isn't blue, any one but blue is dandy. There's inconsistent Skepdick, and then there's complete bollocks.

Non-sequitur.

The argument never was what you have to show. The argument was about the contents of your memory prior to describing anything in terms of a negation.

In order to describe ANYTHING as NOT [1], you have to know what [1] is. The entity [1] exists in your head prior to you negating it.

You can't utter words/concepts for which you have no in-memory representation.

[RCSaunders]

Yup, if someone presents me with an hypothesis for which there is zero evidence I do dismiss it, for the simple reason that in the absence of evidence there is nothing to have an hypothesis about.

Well, that's a contradiction!

IF the synthesis of hypotheses requires evidence, and if the absence of evidence prevents the synthesis of a hypothesis, how can there ever be such a thing as a hypothesis without evidence? What would you even call such a beast if you ever encountered one?

I think he's saying there is no such beast.

He's right, too. Unless you believe hypotheses can be synthesized ex nihilo, with no evidence whatsoever, there is nothing to synthesize a hypotheses with or about.