pnrjulius comments on Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence - Less Wrong

54 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 August 2007 08:34PM

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

Comments (108)

Sort By: Old

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

Comment author: pnrjulius 26 June 2012 10:31:38PM -1 points [-]

There is another way: Look really really hard with tools that would be expected to work. If you find something? Yay, your hypothesis is confirmed. If you don't? You'd better start doubting your hypothesis.

You already do this in many situations I'm sure. If someone said, "You have a million dollars!" and you looked in your pockets, your bank accounts, your stock accounts (if any), etc. and didn't find a million dollars in them (or collectively in all of them put together), you would be pretty well convinced that the million dollars you allegedly have doesn't exist. (In fact, depending on your current economic status you might have a very low prior in the first place; I know I would.)