Do you agree with this statement?

[Trailblazer]

There is difference between lack of evidence and insufficient evidence.

Also, what is sufficient evidence for some is not sufficient evidence for all.
That does not make the evidence insufficient, it is only insufficient for the person who says it is insufficient.

So instead of saying there is no evidence for God or Messengers of God I wish the atheists would say "there is no evidence that is sufficient for me to believe there is a God or Messengers of God.

 

[Erebus]

"A position unsupported by evidence is no more likely to be true than a random guess."

This ties into the recent discussion about how we should handle a lack of evidence supporting a claim.

Please feel free to post any thoughts or discussion below.

Got to go with disagree on this one.

I have no evidence that you own black socks but I'm going to be bold and claim that you do.

I have no idea how many pairs of socks you own so I consulted a random number generator and got it to pick a number between 1 and 20. It landed on 2 so that's what I'll go with. My random guess is that you have two pairs of black socks.

My unsupported claim that you own black socks is much more likely to be true than the random guess that you own two pairs.

 

[Ponder This]

"A position unsupported by evidence is no more likely to be true than a random guess."

This ties into the recent discussion about how we should handle a lack of evidence supporting a claim.

Please feel free to post any thoughts or discussion below.

How are you defining the probability spaces?

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

I will tentatively agree with the statement.
Tentatively, because it might matter what the exact claim is. Although I'm having a hard time coming up with examples where it wouldn't be true. But admittedly, I haven't tried very hard.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Got to go with disagree on this one.

I have no evidence that you own black socks but I'm going to be bold and claim that you do.

I have no idea how many pairs of socks you own so I consulted a random number generator and got it to pick a number between 1 and 20. It landed on 2 so that's what I'll go with. My random guess is that you have two pairs of black socks.

My unsupported claim that you own black socks is much more likely to be true than the random guess that you own two pairs.

That claim isn't unsupported.

We know that black socks are rather common.
We also know that people will own more then 2 pairs of socks.

Those things are evidence right there that make your statement not qualify as a "random guess".
Instead, they are very much informed, educated guesses.


More then that... they are not even "guesses" imo - educated or otherwise.
They are, in fact, reasonable assumptions.

And they are reasonable due to the evidence of black socks being common AND the vast majority of people owning more then 2 pairs.

So I think you should seriously broaden the claims and probability spaces before it takes effect.


For example...
"Yesterday at 8 pm you were eating a pizza with a side dish of chocolate easter eggs while listening to a cannibal corpse song while at the same time feeding your 5-month old baby".

Now that is a random claim. It could be true. But it's incredibly unlikely.

 

[Ella S.]

I voted "other."

We can demonstrate the truth of claims relative to particular axioms, such as in mathematics. There is no empirical evidence that can support that the square root of a negative number is an imaginary number or that positive integers approach infinity. Nonetheless, it is still a fact that these are true relative to mathematical axioms because they can be demonstrated to follow deductively.

Likewise, some actions can be said to be unethical relative to Hedonic Utilitarianism or unethical relative to Kantian Deontology. These statements, like math, can be logically derived from their axioms.

When we are discussing claims about reality rather than axiomatic abstractions, however, those claims always need supporting evidence to justify them.

 

[Nimos]

"A position unsupported by evidence is no more likely to be true than a random guess."

This ties into the recent discussion about how we should handle a lack of evidence supporting a claim.

Please feel free to post any thoughts or discussion below.

That is a good question, I like that.

Depending on whether I fully understood the question, I would probably say no.

I think we as humans and even some animals to some degree, can make use of instincts and even to some degree common sense, despite being wrong a lot of times, to at least improve the chance of getting something right more often than a random guess would.

 

[Erebus]

That claim isn't unsupported.

We know that black socks are rather common.
We also know that people will own more then 2 pairs of socks.

Those things are evidence right there that make your statement not qualify as a "random guess".
Instead, they are very much informed, educated guesses.


More then that... they are not even "guesses" imo - educated or otherwise.
They are, in fact, reasonable assumptions.

And they are reasonable due to the evidence of black socks being common AND the vast majority of people owning more then 2 pairs.

So I think you should seriously broaden the claims and probability spaces before it takes effect.


For example...
"Yesterday at 8 pm you were eating a pizza with a side dish of chocolate easter eggs while listening to a cannibal corpse song while at the same time feeding your 5-month old baby".

Now that is a random claim. It could be true. But it's incredibly unlikely.

Fair enough. Are you're happy to accept that the random claim you provided also isn't supported by evidence? If so, do you think it would be possible to make it even less likely to be true by adding a little more randomness?

For example, rather than guessing that I ate pizza, perhaps you could create a roulette wheel containing every type of food ever eaten and spin it. Considering the wide range of things that have been eaten over the millennia, I would say that this extra dose of randomness would help to make your statement less likely to be true.

It's actually pretty difficult (perhaps impossible) to make a claim entirely unsupported by evidence if we go by the concept of evidence you're using here. You may not have been consciously thinking about the fact that I was more likely to eat pizza than witchetty grubs for example but you nonetheless had that information somewhere in your head. Even so, the more randomness we add, the less likely a claim is to be true don't you think?

The claim that, "A position unsupported by evidence is no more likely to be true than a random guess." could perhaps apply to things that we can't possibly know are true. For all practical purposes though, I'm sticking with my vote of disagree.

 

[Mock Turtle]

I'm kind of unconvinced. If everyone were to take an intuition test, I suspect results would be more similar for children vs. older folks, than if they were to take an IQ test.

It might depend upon the age of the children, given that some animals seem to do better than humans at things which seem obvious to us, and children seem to change at some point as to such. How does one assess what we have taken in over our lives and as to such being truthful or not? Might explain why we seem to divide into left and right political persuasions, amongst other differences.

 

[Mock Turtle]

We're probably agreeing. It may well be based on prior "evidence" but what that is may not be psychologically accessible to us. Or there may actuall be none - just a "gut feeling."

Yeah, thinking further, I guessed were saying much the same.

 

[LuisDantas]

"A position unsupported by evidence is no more likely to be true than a random guess."

Sometimes it is far less likely to be true. There are influential groups that go out of their way to convince themselves of incredibly unhinged things. Wishful thinking can be very toxic indeed.

On the other hand, there are situations where educated guesses are the best opinions available.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Fair enough. Are you're happy to accept that the random claim you provided also isn't supported by evidence?

Yes.
Each element are things known to happen, but the combination of them all is not. And adding in a specific time for it makes matters even more unlikely.
I have no reason whatsoever to think it is any kind of true in any sense of the word.

But it could be. As in: no laws of nature need to be suspended or violated for it to be true. So it is certainly possible. Just not plausible.

If so, do you think it would be possible to make it even less likely to be true by adding a little more randomness?

I would have to say yes to that.
Every time another element is added, it becomes more and more unlikely.
And the new elements sure can be mundane things. Like "...and your phone was fully charged" or "...and The Mask was playing on the TV."

It's actually pretty difficult (perhaps impossible) to make a claim entirely unsupported by evidence if we go by the concept of evidence you're using here.

I agree.
It's quite hard.

For things to be totally unsupported, I guess we would have to go into aspects of stuff that has actually never been done or experienced before, or at least not in documented ways.

Like "...and then an extra-dimensional alien materialized before you and stole your pizza".

You may not have been consciously thinking about the fact that I was more likely to eat pizza than witchetty grubs for example but you nonetheless had that information somewhere in your head. Even so, the more randomness we add, the less likely a claim is to be true don't you think?

My head is starting to spin to be honest LOL

Because now I'm second guessing the entire concept of what "random" really means here.
The way you are using it, and perhaps me also, is that we are taking a set of actions known to happen or have happened, and then randomly pick one of them. But then, how likely it is to be true, would depend on which of the set we pick. Not all things in the set are equally likely.

You are for example far more likely to have a hamburger for dinner as opposed to, say, haggis.
You are more likely to eat chicken then kangaroo or crockodile.
Yet I assume that all of them would be in the set of "meat to eat" from which we would be randomly picking types of meat, right?

I went ahead and confused myself lol

The claim that, "A position unsupported by evidence is no more likely to be true than a random guess." could perhaps apply to things that we can't possibly know are true. For all practical purposes though, I'm sticking with my vote of disagree.

I'm going to stick with my "tentatively agree" before my brain melts. LOL

"tentatively" precisely for the weirdness in this post and the many angles we could look at it.
In the end, I would have to have a specific claim to make any kind of assessment of it.

And perhaps also a clarification of what a "random guess" really is or what would qualify as "random".

Because if say a cookie is missing from my kitchen...
I could claim without evidence that a cat broke in and ate it.
I could also make the "random guess" that extra dimensional aliens materialized in my kitchen and took it.

But obviously the unevidenced claim of the cat would be very much more likely, although both claims will likely be wrong.

 

[Erebus]

Yes.
Each element are things known to happen, but the combination of them all is not. And adding in a specific time for it makes matters even more unlikely.
I have no reason whatsoever to think it is any kind of true in any sense of the word.

But it could be. As in: no laws of nature need to be suspended or violated for it to be true. So it is certainly possible. Just not plausible.



I would have to say yes to that.
Every time another element is added, it becomes more and more unlikely.
And the new elements sure can be mundane things. Like "...and your phone was fully charged" or "...and The Mask was playing on the TV."



I agree.
It's quite hard.

For things to be totally unsupported, I guess we would have to go into aspects of stuff that has actually never been done or experienced before, or at least not in documented ways.

Like "...and then an extra-dimensional alien materialized before you and stole your pizza".



My head is starting to spin to be honest LOL

Because now I'm second guessing the entire concept of what "random" really means here.
The way you are using it, and perhaps me also, is that we are taking a set of actions known to happen or have happened, and then randomly pick one of them. But then, how likely it is to be true, would depend on which of the set we pick. Not all things in the set are equally likely.

You are for example far more likely to have a hamburger for dinner as opposed to, say, haggis.
You are more likely to eat chicken then kangaroo or crockodile.
Yet I assume that all of them would be in the set of "meat to eat" from which we would be randomly picking types of meat, right?

I went ahead and confused myself lol




I'm going to stick with my "tentatively agree" before my brain melts. LOL

"tentatively" precisely for the weirdness in this post and the many angles we could look at it.
In the end, I would have to have a specific claim to make any kind of assessment of it.

And perhaps also a clarification of what a "random guess" really is or what would qualify as "random".

Because if say a cookie is missing from my kitchen...
I could claim without evidence that a cat broke in and ate it.
I could also make the "random guess" that extra dimensional aliens materialized in my kitchen and took it.

But obviously the unevidenced claim of the cat would be very much more likely, although both claims will likely be wrong.

Don't worry, I've confused myself too! It probably doesn't help that I wrote those posts after a few drinks and not much sleep

Yes, the more I think about the OP's statement, the more I would say that it needs extra qualifiers. There are a few ways you could interpret it. I'll keep my answer as disagree out of laziness but I could also justify changing it to other.

 

[robocop (actually)]

"A position unsupported by evidence is no more likely to be true than a random guess."

This ties into the recent discussion about how we should handle a lack of evidence supporting a claim.

Please feel free to post any thoughts or discussion below.

A position unsupported by evidence is no more likely to be true than a random guess, but a statement need not be true to convey information.

 

[PureX]

"I think therefor I am".

But where is the "evidence" of this?

The "evidence" is the logic of the claim. Yet there are many here that refuse to accept this because they think all truth must be materially evident.

They are fools.

 

[Heyo]

"I think therefor I am".

But where is the "evidence" of this?

The "evidence" is the logic of the claim. Yet there are many here that refuse to accept this because they think all truth must be materially evident.

They are fools.

That would be true - if someone refuses to accept philosophical truth and think all truth must be materially evident.
But I think you may build a straw man for most of those who demand material evidence for assertions about the physical world.

 

[PureX]

That would be true - if someone refuses to accept philosophical truth and think all truth must be materially evident.

There are quite a few of those folks around here.

But I think you may build a straw man for most of those who demand material evidence for assertions about the physical world.

Ah, but that's the rub. Most of these people don't recognize any world but the physical world, so every proposition, to them, is about the physical world. There is no other world, in their opinion. "I think therefor I am" is just "word salad", or "naval gazing", to them. Everything is either physically evident or it's meaningless gibberish, in their minds.

 

[Heyo]

There are quite a few of those folks around here.

I question that but as RF doesn't like when people are called out, I won't ask you to substantiate your claim. We'll have to agree to disagree.

 

[syo]

Huh?

 

[soulsurvivor]

"A position unsupported by evidence is no more likely to be true than a random guess."

This ties into the recent discussion about how we should handle a lack of evidence supporting a claim.

Please feel free to post any thoughts or discussion below.

If I scored 1600 in my SAT, the likelihood that I cheated is pretty high even though there may be no evidence to support that claim. You don't need to be making a random guess to claim that I cheated.