Morendil comments on Rationality quotes: March 2010 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Morendil 01 March 2010 10:26AM

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Comment author: Morendil 01 March 2010 04:26:02PM 3 points [-]

the world does appear to be flat, so I think it is incumbent on others to prove decisively that it isn't.

I haven't yet tracked down a good quote on this type of "asymmetric intellectual warfare", where one advances some outlandish claim that lays waste to large portions of a consistent belief network, and then insists it's the victim's obligation to repair the damage. I'm pretty sure the idea has been around for a while, perhaps not in terms of that military metaphor. Is that topic covered somewhere in the Sequences?

Comment author: ata 01 March 2010 05:24:13PM *  4 points [-]

It's not presented in terms of information warfare, and it doesn't explicitly cover "insist[ing] it's the victim's obligation to repair the damage", but the original article on Dark Side Epistemology (now known as "anti-epistemology", I hear) sounds similar to what you're getting at. Specifically, the point that to deny one scientific fact, you need to deny a massive network of principles and implications, to the point that your entire epistemology ends up either contradictory or useless.

Comment author: HughRistik 05 March 2010 12:44:19AM 2 points [-]

It's clearly an abuse of the concept of the Burden of Proof. Along with some motivated skepticism.