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Strange7 comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
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Comments (1329)
Never say this again. It's a cheap, time-wasting dodge.
If you actually have evidence, simply lay it out as soon as it might be relevant.
I disagree with this. It takes time and energy to gather evidence. I don't care to spend my time and energy digging up evidence unless somebody seriously throws down the gauntlet. Just stating "Claim. Unsupported by evidence" -- without indicating an interest in engaging -- is not enough for me. Besides, it would have been easy enough for the poster to come back and say "yes, show me a quote please."
This seems to imply that you already have the evidence, and are only waiting for confirmation that it's wanted to provide it.
If this is relevant, it implies that you don't have the evidence yet.
Please don't imply that you have evidence when you don't.
I would say that you are presenting what's known as a "false dilemma," i.e. your statement assumes that there are only two possibilities: either (1) I have the evidence in which case it costs me nothing to present it; or (2) I don't in which case it is dishonest for me to offer to present evidence.
Of course there is another possibility, which is that I am reasonably confident I can present the evidence, but it will take me time and energy to gather and present it.
For example, suppose I bought a toaster a month ago; it breaks; I call up the store to get it fixed; and the store manager says "We can't help you since you aren't the original purchaser." Before I spend 20 minutes finding the credit card receipt, I'm going to ask the guy "Would you like to see proof that I bought the toaster?"
If you don't yet have evidence, it's not dishonest to offer to find and present it, but it is dishonest to claim that you already have it, since by making that claim you're claiming something that's not true - namely that you have already confirmed that the evidence exists.
I don't understand your point.
Is it dishonest to offer to present evidence when you are confident you can gather it?
For example, in the toaster scenario, is it dishonest to offer to produce proof that you bought the toaster? (Assume for the sake of argument that you save all of your receipts religiously and you are quite confident that you can produce the receipt if you are willing to take 20 minutes to rummage through your old receipts.)
If you offer it in such a way as to assert that you already have it, yes.
If I know that someone has a certain amount of evidence for a certain thing, then seeing that evidence myself doesn't tell me much - knowing that the evidence exists is almost as good as gathering it myself. (This is what makes scientific studies work, so that people don't have to test every theory by themselves.) But knowing that someone thinks that a certain amount of evidence exists for a certain thing is much weaker, and actually seeing the evidence in this case tells me much more, because it's not particularly unusual for people to be wrong about this kind of thing, even when they claim to be certain. (Ironically, while I remember seeing a post on here that mentioned that when people were asked to give several 90%-likely predictions most of them managed to do no better than 30% correct, I can't find it, so, case in point, I guess.)
I don't think this is an accurate metaphor; human brains don't work well enough for us to be that confident in most situations.
I don't understand what you mean by "already have it." If I know that I can pull the evidence up on my computer screen with about 60 seconds of work, do I "have" it? If the evidence is stored my hard drive, do I "have" it? If the evidence is on a web site which is publicly accessible, do I "have" it?
It sounds like your answer to my question is "no," i.e. it would not be dishonest to offer to produce a receipt but that the example I described is extremely rare and non-representative. Do I understand you correctly?
If you spend more time arguing about definitions than it would take to present your facts and settle the original point, that constitutes evidence that your motive has little or nothing to do with the pursuit of mutual understanding.
Please either present the evidence you originally offered w/r/t the correlation between race and IQ, or desist in your protestations.
Before you go attacking my motives, maybe it would make sense to you to explain why you took us into meta-debate territory. You could have easily said something like this:
And yet you chose not to, instead launching a meta debate (actually a meta-meta debate). If anyone's motives are suspect, it's yours.
Lol, the evidence I offered to produce was that a certain poster was being evasive. Yes, that's right -- you started a meta-meta-debate.
As far as race and IQ goes, I laid out my case on my blog post. You are free read it carefully and then come back if you want evidence or other support for any aspect of it.
http://fortaleza84.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/the-race-and-iq-question/
Irrelevant obfuscation.
If you have already gathered the necessary evidence, present it without this teasing preamble; if not, admit your ignorance and lay out the probable search costs.
I think that when I asked "would you like to see some evidence," the reasonable interpretation is that I can gather and present the evidence with a small but non-zero amount of effort.
However, if you did not understand my comment that way, that's what I meant.
And again, it would have been easy enough for the other poster to say "Yes, I am skeptical of your claim and would like to see the evidence." Since he didn't do it, I infer that he doesn't want to invest any further energy in the interaction. Which is fine, but if he doesn't want to invest further energy, I don't want to either.