Jonathan_Graehl comments on Three consistent positions for computationalists - Less Wrong

5 Post author: dfranke 14 April 2011 01:15PM

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Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 14 April 2011 10:29:31PM *  1 point [-]

Or, to put it another way, failure to offer a coherent refutation of an incoherent hypothesis doesn't represent evidence for incoherence hypothesis.

Could you edit this? I can't decipher it.

[eta: Cyan and Pavitra have come up with nice obviously-true statements that are textually similar to the original bungled sentence and similar in meaning, but I can't be sure of what you meant.]

Comment author: pjeby 15 April 2011 01:40:42AM 3 points [-]

Could you edit this? I can't decipher it

Sorry, that was a messed up edit - I was at first writing "doesn't represent evidence for incoherence" and then messed up the edit to "doesn't represent evidence for the incoherent hypothesis".

More colloquially, if somebody can't coherently answer your incoherent question, it doesn't mean that the viewpoint which created the question is therefore sensible or true.

Comment author: Cyan 14 April 2011 11:13:48PM 2 points [-]

How about, "If I offer a not-even-wrong refutation of your not-even-wrong hypothesis, you can't take the not-even-wrongness of the refutation as evidence for the hypothesis."

Comment author: Pavitra 14 April 2011 11:01:14PM 1 point [-]

I read it to mean that once one has demonstrated a hypothesis to be incoherent, one does not then also need to demonstrate it to be false.