JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Yep, we're back to that mode of begging. "X isn't evidence of H, but X is 'supportive' of H."
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Proof of Immortality, the IV league
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Yep, we're back to that mode of begging. "X isn't evidence of H, but X is 'supportive' of H."
Belz...
Fiend God
Remember that time when he started using himself as a proxy for someone else's arguments?
John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
Everyone here knows what your position is. You hope for immortality, but you can't provide any evidence nor any logical explanation for it.
It's been 4+ years, and you've got nothing.
John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
Jesus H Christ on a pogo stick! How many times are you going to pull this obvious time-wasting stunt?
John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
No. Let's don't! Let's try some logical discussion for the first time in 4 years.
You can go first.
godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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Actually we got to where we are now because you tried to use a value of 7.5 billion over infinity for P(E|H). When challenged on the infinity denominator you explained that H is based on immaterial, but mortal, souls. Then we asked you to explain why H, the model where humans have one finite life, should include immaterial selves.
Jabba
Philosopher
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LL,
- Very interesting.
- It would appear that anecdotes are officially not "scientific evidence." My claim would be -- however -- that anecdotes can still support, or counter, a scientific hypothesis and consequently still be evidence regarding the truth of a scientific hypothesis.
- So my question to you: Can anecdotes support, or counter, a scientific hypothesis?
Hokulele
Deleterious Slab of Damnation
(My bolding.)
No. They may agree or disagree with certain hypotheses, but they will never be considered evidence. Stop trying to dilute the meaning of evidence. Seriously, stop it.
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JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
How rude. You acknowledged the rebuttal and then blithely ignored it in favor of doubling down on your equivocation.
NO.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Hogwash. You're trying every trick up your sleeve to get people to agree that anecdotes and speculation should be considered evidence, just as you did in the Shroud thread. It didn't work there and it won't work here.
You've been asked to state your position in terms of a testable, falsifiable definition for the thing you say you can prove exists. You cannot and will not. You even went so far, a few days go, as to tell us you didn't need to supply a definition in order to proceed with a proof. Don't now tell me that you're "waiting" to come to some understanding of what your position is. You're simply obfuscating and obstructing from day to day in order to keep the thread in play, changing your approach to suit whatever means you don't have to actually provide anything.
No. I hope that helps.
Not one anecdote, not a million anecdotes. The plural of anecdotes will never be data, no matter how many posters you ignore.
Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
NO.
Anecdotes are not evidence of anything because they do not make a hypothesis more or less likely. Agatha, for example, had had two classic NDE/OBEs. But do her anecdotes make it more likely she has a soul? They do not. Both are easily explained by the fact that she was under stress and high - purely physical.
Take two: Are they evidence that an immaterial afterlife doesn't exist? No. She didn't die.
The anecdotes have no evidentiary value.
Only falsifiable testing provides evidence.
Stop begging for some exception. Demonstrate repeatable, falsifiable evidence of non-physical perception.
If you have no such evidence, just admit it and enjoy your religious beliefs.
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jond
Illuminator
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No.
Jabba
Philosopher
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LL,
- Well, at least, we seem to have isolated/identified a basic disagreement (we agree that we disagree regarding a particular statement) -- I think that anecdotes can support, or counter, a scientific hypothesis, but you don't. I'll see if I can convince you that they can.
- Say that a new virus is thought to be transmitted only through physical contact with a carrier. Researchers cannot guarantee this hypothesis, but they give it a 90% chance of being correct.
- But then, they begin finding credible victims who claim that no such contact has occurred. Wouldn't these claims be anecdotes that weigh against the previous hypothesis?
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JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
They cannot.
No. Just, no. Don't pretend that you can convince science not to be science. Stop trying to be "brilliant." Stop trying to be the exception. You are not "special," Jabba. You are not a brilliant debater. You are not a deep thinker. You are a fringe claimant using the same stupid tricks every other fringe claimant uses.
Absolutely not. The hypothesis can be challenged, according to the scientific method, only with testable, falsifiable evidence. Anecdotes are not that.
Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
That's not a "basic disagreement." That's me saying two plus two equals four and you saying it equals seven.
No. No, they would not. They might interest scientists in testing the virus. On their own, they would lack any evidentiary quality.
There are actually plenty of real-life examples. Let's pick the Boston smallpox outbreak of 1821. At the time, the elders of Boston believed that sin caused disease. They organized days of prayer. One doctor, Boylston, had heard of a method of inoculation in a couple letters to European medical journals. Were those anecdotes enough to cause Bostonians to adopt immunization?
They absolutely were not. Boylston was threatened, pilloried in the local paper, and called before the government. He kept working, though, slowly developing a pool of immunized individuals who resisted smallpox in statistically significant numbers while living amongst those who died. His experiments were repeatable (literally anyone could try it), and they were falsifiable - If his patients had not developed immunity through vaccination, they would have died at the same rate as the unvaccinated members of their families.
The anecdotes had no evidentiary weight. Repeatable, falsifiable experimentation did. Meanwhile, was it even possible to test whether smallpox affected people because of impiety? How would one's devotion to God be measured beforehand? Cotton Mather, one of the most religious of Boston's inhabitants, lost so many children to smallpox that he thought himself to be cursed. it's unfalsifiable nonsense.
If you insist on abandoning the need for evidence, please call your beliefs religious and move on.
Hokulele
Deleterious Slab of Damnation
Absolutely not. How can you be sure those people making the claim weren't simply wrong?
For all you know, those people may very well have had contact with a carrier who displayed no symptoms at all, and then you would risk doing something silly like spending 4+ years chasing after something that turns out was never even real.
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
Once again Jabba: all anecdotes can do is suggest possibly fruitful avenues of scientific research. You have to do the research in order to determine the validity of the anecdotes. You can't assign any value to that validity before you have done the research.
Given the vast amount of anecdotes "supporting" homeopathy and dowsing you would doubtless have argued that it was reasonable to assign a high probability to their validity ahead of their scientific testing. How would that have worked out for you?
Given the vast amount of anecdotes "supporting" homeopathy and dowsing you would doubtless have argued that it was reasonable to assign a high probability to their validity ahead of their scientific testing. How would that have worked out for you?
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