Fyrius comments on Rationality Quotes July 2012 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: RobertLumley 04 July 2012 12:29AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (466)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Fyrius 04 July 2012 10:13:27AM 1 point [-]

Hm, I thought that reasoning argued against your own non-serious first paragraph rather than what Bill said. If the idea is "if God is real (and won't let snakes bite me), then they won't bite me", then being bitten shows that the first part is false, but not being bitten doesn't say anything about the first part being true or false.

Or if you don't want to get hung up on formal logic, then it's valid but very weak evidence, like a hypothesis not being falsified in a test.

Comment author: Ezekiel 04 July 2012 06:45:01PM 2 points [-]

What Bill Maher said was that if a person claims that ~Bite is significant evidence for God, they must admit that Bite is significant evidence for ~God. I'm saying I don't think that's accurate.

The sentiment that one should update on the evidence is obviously great, but I think we should keep an eye on the maths.

Comment author: Fyrius 05 July 2012 05:00:55PM 0 points [-]

Fair enough, if the premise is that ¬Bite → God exists.