Does the Burden of Proof require a claimant to provide basic education on a topic?

[Stevicus]

So, it's meta-debate day today?
I have seen what you are describing here and elsewhere used in debates, in valid and in disingenuous forms.
I have used some of them, e.g. the rhetorical question for evidence (when I know there is none).
The fact that some of the rhetorical devices (and even some of the "fallacies") have valid uses, makes it so difficult to detect them and defend against, when they are used for trolling.

To your main question, requiring expertise to participate in a debate, it is reasonable, but rude and probably against the site rules. At least RF is open to the public. You won't invite a layman to speak at a science conference, but here you have to deal with the hoi polloi.
It's a bit like your preschooler stating their opinion about politics at your dinner table. Or like the teen at your friends - now you vary. Do they know what they are talking about?

I think you hit upon a good point in that the forum or venue where a debate or discussion occurs can be a factor in how people conduct themselves. There have also been times when I might look at a discussion where people are arguing about something, and it might seem like an intellectual debate on a surface level, but I can sense some sort of subtle, underlying political position held by one or more participants.

A classic example might be evolution vs. creationism. Are people really, truly just having an intellectual debate about the science of evolution? Or is there something else behind the scenes, perhaps some kind of political position being addressed?

Some people can get rather passionate and even angry, yet when pressed, they'll claim that they have no personal feelings on the matter and that they're just doing it for "fun" or some kind of meaningless intellectual exercise.

 

[Stevicus]

Society has always had that share of dishonest people. Unfortunately, honest folk have to suffer such minor inconveniences to keep prices down in stores or to stay safe in the skies. The alternative is stores raising their prices to account for shrink or risking one life every time they board a plane.

There are even more restrictive alternatives, which is where a lot of political hay can be made. Trying to find a balance between security and liberty can be rather tricky.

But aren't you more compelled to respond to the claim when you are engaged directly...when someone quotes your post? Especially when someone asks you a question?

If someone quotes me or asks a direct question, sure. Although I may still decide not to answer. There's no requirement to engage or answer. Although, if it relates to a topic or issue I have a personal interest in, I might engage.

On the other hand, if I do choose to engage, I try to engage in earnest (if I can). It depends on the issue, the forum, and the overall context of the discussion.

 

[Heyo]

A classic example might be evolution vs. creationism. Are people really, truly just having an intellectual debate about the science of evolution?

No. That is the classic example where there is no informed and genuine debate. YEC are either deceived or deceivers. Here on RF, it is usually the former. People who had no or very bad education in the sciences, but some just don't know how little they know, i.e. Dunning-Kruger effect victims.

 

[Stevicus]

No. That is the classic example where there is no informed and genuine debate. YEC are either deceived or deceivers. Here on RF, it is usually the former. People who had no or very bad education in the sciences, but some just don't know how little they know, i.e. Dunning-Kruger effect victims.

That's why the debate, to me, seems like kind of a dead end. It's not a real debate, yet there's still some kind of underlying political dispute which seems to be avoided or talked around.

 

[PureX]

We can't expect someone that has not experienced something to understand our experience of it. How could they?

And anyway, the "burden of proof" platitude is nonsense. It's an empty phrase people who want play 'kangaroo judge' like to throw around to try and create the illusion that they are in charge of determining the truth of things.

They aren't.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

We can't expect someone that has not experienced something to understand our experience of it. How could they?

Depends on what aspect of the experience we're talking about.

It may be hard for someone to communicate how a thing felt, but anyone can evaluate the reasoning involved in deducing a conclusion from an experience.

Also, anyone is equally qualified to compare the experience of two different people to see if it makes sense to attribute them to the same cause.

And anyway, the "burden of proof" platitude is nonsense. It's an empty phrase people who want play 'kangaroo judge' like to throw around to try and create the illusion that they are in charge of determining the truth of things.

They aren't.

I'm trying to decide if this is:

- sour grapes from someone whose arguments fail to measure up so often, or

- bristling ego from someone who can't stand to see people not defer to him and him alone as the arbiter of truth.

Maybe a mix of both?

 

[Heyo]

That's why the debate, to me, seems like kind of a dead end. It's not a real debate, yet there's still some kind of underlying political dispute which seems to be avoided or talked around.

That (hidden) political dispute happens when at least one party has a political agenda. But as we don't know, and it would be rude to accuse them without clear evidence, I default to Hanlon's Razor.

 

[PureX]

Depends on what aspect of the experience we're talking about.

It may be hard for someone to communicate how a thing felt, but anyone can evaluate the reasoning involved in deducing a conclusion from an experience.

There's no point to evaluating the reasoned conclusion that someone else draws from their experiences. Unless you just like playing 'judge'.

Also, anyone is equally qualified to compare the experience of two different people to see if it makes sense to attribute them to the same cause.

Again, only if we like playing 'judge'. And pretending we can know what we can't.

I'm trying to decide if this is:

- sour grapes from someone whose arguments fail to measure up so often, or

- bristling ego from someone who can't stand to see people not defer to him and him alone as the arbiter of truth.

Maybe a mix of both?

Or maybe you're just not capable of grasping the bigger picture.

Bob takes some LSD and while under it's influence, finds himself having a conversation with Jesus.​

​

Bill ingests some mushrooms and while under their influence has a chat with the God of all gods, who appears to him as the character "Q" from the Next Generation TV Series.​

​

Pete gets trapped alone on the ocean on a life raft with no food or water for days, and begins hearing Satan telling him to give it up, and jump overboard.​

El Judgo, meanwhile, has never experienced any of these things, or anything like them, and is feeling quite uncomfortable with the idea that they may actually have been the extraordinary encounters that Bob, Bill, and Pete experienced them as being. So he needs to think up an excuse that will enable him to dismiss them as 'phony', or 'not real'; to settle his own mind. So of course he blames it all on the altered body chemistry of the claimants because that achieves the goal he wants to achieve. It explains everything ... away. Makes them "false" experiences. Merely hallucinations.

But the truth is that El Judgo's reasoning has a gaping hole in it. And that hole is that the altered body chemistry of the witnesses could just as likely have been the means of opening their minds up so as to receive a very real message from a very real 'divine entity' of some kind. But this is never going to even occur to El Judgo because he isn't looking for validation. He's looking for invalidation. And he's going to stop looking the moment he finds it. Then he's going to tell himself, and anyone that will listen, how logical and open-minded a 'critical thinker' he is. And how sad it is that Bob, Bill, and Pete can't just accept that they were hallucinating all along. Because El Judgo remains oblivious to his own lack of critical thinking skills, and to his own biased conclusions. And as a result, to the glaring flaw in his own logical reasoning.

 

[McBell]

I was reading an online discussion in another forum where a claim was made and someone asked for evidence to support the claim. The claimant believed that his claim was as obvious as a claim that "the sky is blue" and felt that asking for evidence for that was unreasonable. He felt that the person asking for evidence knew nothing about the topic and that he was being presumptuous by jumping into a debate and challenging claims regarding a topic he knew nothing about - as if he was requesting a basic 101 level essay.

So instead of simply providing the evidence that they claim is so obvious, they wasted everyones time complaining about the asking for evidence?

I've seen similar discussions here on RF, where someone might request evidence, and a common retort might be "Google it" or "I'm not here to do your homework for you."

I take this as the person has no evidence and simply dismiss the claim out of hand.
When asked for evidence for a claim I make it is not any ones else's "homework" but mine to support the claim I make.

One might also be accused of Sealioning in which someone repeatedly asks for evidence which has already been provided or makes arguments which have already been answered and refuted.

If the evidence has been presented and hand waved away I see no reason to present any more evidence.
If the evidence was presented and not understood then it is on the one not understanding to do their homework.

Can a request for evidence even be considered insulting? (I'm thinking of times when the Walmart greeter asks to see my receipt upon leaving the store, essentially asking me to prove that I paid for the items I have with me. Some people might be offended by that, viewing it as an implied accusation of theft, while others might be annoyed by the delay itself.)

Yes.
But then, some people are simply looking to be insulted.
So just because they are insulted, does not make the request invalid.

Can some requests for evidence be made disingenuously?

Yes.

That is, someone might make an odd or extraordinary claim, and someone asks for evidence, knowing full well that not a shred of evidence exists to support the odd claim?

Seeing as the common usage definition of "evidence" is "that which convinces" it is difficult to support the claim "not a shred of evidence exists".
There are many many different standards for evidence.

On that note, it is often said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but how does one differentiate between an "extraordinary" claim and an ordinary claim?

Good question

 

[icehorse]

I was reading an online discussion in another forum where a claim was made and someone asked for evidence to support the claim. The claimant believed that his claim was as obvious as a claim that "the sky is blue" and felt that asking for evidence for that was unreasonable. He felt that the person asking for evidence knew nothing about the topic and that he was being presumptuous by jumping into a debate and challenging claims regarding a topic he knew nothing about - as if he was requesting a basic 101 level essay.

I've seen similar discussions here on RF, where someone might request evidence, and a common retort might be "Google it" or "I'm not here to do your homework for you." One might also be accused of Sealioning in which someone repeatedly asks for evidence which has already been provided or makes arguments which have already been answered and refuted.

Can a request for evidence even be considered insulting? (I'm thinking of times when the Walmart greeter asks to see my receipt upon leaving the store, essentially asking me to prove that I paid for the items I have with me. Some people might be offended by that, viewing it as an implied accusation of theft, while others might be annoyed by the delay itself.)

Can some requests for evidence be made disingenuously? That is, someone might make an odd or extraordinary claim, and someone asks for evidence, knowing full well that not a shred of evidence exists to support the odd claim?

On that note, it is often said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but how does one differentiate between an "extraordinary" claim and an ordinary claim?

Great OP! This is a question I've asked myself a lot.

And I'm also guilty of responding: just use your search engine.

My less-than-generous take is that I often sense that asking for citations is a technique to cloud or obfuscate the thread. If a poster disagrees with a claim but doesn't have a strong counter-argument, requests for citations can be a substitute for a good argument. The citation requestor might want to toss in a "distinction without a difference" or in some other way derail the conversation.

Another problem I see with requests (demands?), for citations is that a common followup will be "oh, your source is biased". To me, this shows an inability (or unwillingness), to separate the message from the messenger. I would hope that we would all agree that an idea or argument should stand or fall on its own merit, regardless of who espouses it? We live in hyper-political times. Even with the best intentions it's hard to find "neutral" sources. Everything we read or hear is subject to "spin".

A more aggressive form of this message vs. messenger response is: "oh, you must support "this type of villain", since "this type of villain" has been known to agree with the argument. Identity politics run amok

Another related argument I see boils down to "it's not happening", this often comes along with a request for citation, or a followup to a citation. It's a HUGE world out there. The claim that "it's not happening" is almost impossible to prove, and when I see that claim I worry that I won't be able to really converse with that poster on that topic. The "it's not happening" claim seems in some ways to be an extremely arrogant claim, as if the poster is somehow on top of ALL of the world's events. And regardless of how thorough or neutral you think your sources are, almost all of our sources have become biased. It's very common for even high quality news sources to NOT report on a topic if it would undermine their bias.

==

When a poster makes a claim that I doubt, my approach is to do even just a few minutes of search engine research before asking for a citation.

I really think this approach assumes good faith. Why is it such a hardship?

 

[Estro Felino]

Can you support this claim?

I don't think there's a one size fits all answer to this. Depends on the topic. Sometimes I think it reasonable for me to ask for support of a statement or claim but then equally I might say to someone asking me for evidence to go away and do their own research.

Well... if I say "the sky is blue" or something as obvious as "the sky is blue"....
I can assure you that sealioners will ask you for evidence.

 

[Estro Felino]

Honestly I think that saying "I plead the fifth" is too humiliating because guilty people plead the fifth...
So sealioning is a way to get away with it, ...nicely.



Well...if sealioners just pleaded the fifth...they would be intellectually honest.

 

[Stevicus]

Great OP! This is a question I've asked myself a lot.

And I'm also guilty of responding: just use your search engine.

My less-than-generous take is that I often sense that asking for citations is a technique to cloud or obfuscate the thread. If a poster disagrees with a claim but doesn't have a strong counter-argument, requests for citations can be a substitute for a good argument. The citation requestor might want to toss in a "distinction without a difference" or in some other way derail the conversation.

I was thinking of the line from Bluto's speech in Animal House: "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?" Nobody stopped to correct him or ask for evidence that the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor. They were like "Forget it, he's rolling." It didn't really matter that he was wrong on that point, considering the context and the purpose of the overall speech. But it was a funny and memorable line.

 

[wellwisher]

I think if a person makes a personal judgment, like why Trump would be a better president than Biden, then there's an obligation to present evidence that supports this conclusion.

But if it's something like a creationist asking for evidence of evolution then it's a flaw of the creationist for not doing their homework on the issue being discussed. In my experience creationists are presented with massive amounts of credible sources but they end up rejecting them anyway.

If a person knows a subject they should be able to summarize it for a layman audience. However, this is not alway easy to do. Often what we know and believe is a product of many years of studying and thinking. There may not be time or attention span to explain the conceptual foundation, from scratch, so the later conclusions make more sense to the layman.

This effect can be explained with the saying, the less you know about something the more you think you know, and the more you know of something, the less you realize you know. This latter can make it harder to summarize.

I was more of a development person and "need" is what most often drives development; necessity is the mother of invention. My approach, way back when, was to learn, what was not known in science, from the experts who knew the most. I might read the mysteries of physics to see what data and anomalies are not fully explained. This could be based on new or unique data that does not fit the existing conceptual foundation. What they teach in school is already old, but is still a good foundation for the newest stuff.

This to me the tarnish that the unknown creates, on what I thought was a done deal, would create a need; I needed to look outside the box for a better mousetrap. This type of development work is not always easy to back reference, for discussion. since I do my work on the fly, and do not aways document what I read and learn; read and then placed on the back burner. After a few passes, it is harder to go back to step one and retrace all the steps, since I am more interested in the latest version.

My grudge with evolution, is about the use of black box science and math. This actually stemmed from a prominent Bio-Scientist of the 1950's. He was inferring a more rational approach to life. He did not want biology to be sucked into the black box fad. However, this choice was about money and the assembly line needed for life science products. The medical industries saw this model as most profitable.

With the black box approach, there was less that needed to be known and therefore more human tools for the assembly lines. The author was trying to show coherence in life; rational, but casino science was already making bank; house always wins. Somewhere along the line, the useful tool morphed into an oracle and rational life science was replaced by observe; memorize and fuzzy dice theory.

For me this need resulted in me trying to do rational life sciences, by looking for unification variables; hydrogen bonding and then water. This approach is so rational, the life science do not know what to do with it, since it escapes the black box.

 

[joe1776]

Consider the Olympic high-jumper who can easily clear seven-feet but fails at eight. The bar for evidence needed to support a claim can be raised to an impossible level even in science. Supporters of paranormal research argue that biased mainstream scientists have done just that.

It's true that a claimant should have the burden of proof. However, in a forum like this, it's an easy matter for opponents of the argument to raise the bar to an impossible level.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Consider the Olympic high-jumper who can easily clear seven-feet but fails at eight. The bar for evidence needed to support a claim can be raised to an impossible level even in science. Supporters of paranormal research argue that biased mainstream scientists have done just that.

It's true that a claimant should have the burden of proof. However, in a forum like this, it's an easy matter for opponents of the argument to raise the bar to an impossible level.

If the bar is being set in a reasonable way, then the height of the bar is set based on the standard needed to have a reasonable certainty that a claim is true.

If someone - a paranormal "researcher", a pseudoscience practitioner, etc. - consistently fails to clear the bar, this is an issue with them and their evidence. It isn't a sign that the bar is too high.

OTOH, we know that the bar is too low if mutually exclusive claims clear it. For instance, if the conclusion "thing X was caused by an unknown paranormal phenomenon" clears the bar we're using but so does "thing X was caused by an unknown non-paranormal phenomenon," then we know that the paranormal aficionado's claim hasn't been demonstrated to any degree.

 

[F1fan]

I was thinking of the line from Bluto's speech in Animal House: "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?" Nobody stopped to correct him or ask for evidence that the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor. They were like "Forget it, he's rolling." It didn't really matter that he was wrong on that point, considering the context and the purpose of the overall speech. But it was a funny and memorable line.

I’m sure @wellwisher will back me up on the fact that Pearl Harbor was a fake flag operation and mostly staged in Hollywood.

 

[McBell]

I’m sure @wellwisher will back me up on the fact that Pearl Harbor was a fake flag operation and mostly staged in Hollywood.

I never did figure out why the Japanese were so pi**** off about a faked bombing

 

[Stevicus]

Consider the Olympic high-jumper who can easily clear seven-feet but fails at eight. The bar for evidence needed to support a claim can be raised to an impossible level even in science. Supporters of paranormal research argue that biased mainstream scientists have done just that.

It's true that a claimant should have the burden of proof. However, in a forum like this, it's an easy matter for opponents of the argument to raise the bar to an impossible level.

I think sometimes there might be differences in how people might perceive different unproven claims. One might look at a claim, examine the evidence and arguments, and might still consider unproven by their own standards of evidence. Yet it still might be worthy of consideration or further study. Then there are those who might look at a claim and conclude that it's unproven based on the same standard of evidence, yet say "This claim is complete and utter bull****, and you should be ashamed of yourself for even attempting to advance such a claim!"

I see this sometimes whenever a conspiracy theory is advanced. If it's a conspiracy theory involving China or Russia, people tend to uncritically believe it without question, but if it's about the US government, suddenly everyone thinks it's the work of loons.

 

[F1fan]

I never did figure out why the Japanese were so pi**** off about a faked bombing

Because the Germans got credit for it.