ike comments on Non-communicable Evidence - LessWrong

9 Post author: adamzerner 17 November 2015 03:46AM

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Comment author: ike 17 November 2015 04:31:24AM 2 points [-]

You shouldn't say, "Well, if you can't provide any evidence, you shouldn't believe what you do."

There are at least two justifications I can think of for this.

  1. A reductio: basically saying "since you do believe X, you must have some evidence, so see if you can figure out what it is". This can start a discussion on how not all evidence is definite/based on statistics etc.
  2. If they don't have a good track record, then you're trying to influence them to drop the belief because of lack of evidence (this rarely works, unfortunately).
Comment author: adamzerner 17 November 2015 05:13:10AM *  0 points [-]

I agree with your second point. If your intuition has proven to be false more than true (in a given context), then the intuition your brain produces would be evidence that the intuition is wrong (sorry if that was poorly worded).

As for the first point, I agree that it'd be nice to make an attempt to figure out what it is, but if the attempt fails, I don't think the observation that "Person X reports an intuitive belief that Y is true" should be ignored as evidence.

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