Emperor's Soul Theory Discussions

[Phantom Monstrosity]

In other words, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

 

 

The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.

Edited June 20, 2013 by Phantom Monstrosity

[Kurkistan he/him]

Yeah, or that. 

 

I come here to wax poetic about relatively unique topics, so I tend to forget when there are pre-existing saying or arguments I can just reference instead. 

[Thought]

Phantom, I see that you quoted me. Allow me to draw your attention to the phrase "the person making the claim," as it appears you missed some of the importance of that part.

 

If someone says they have a drug that cures cancer, then the burden of proof is on them, as they are the one making the claim. If they do not provide proof, the rational actor will not consider their claim. But also the rational actor will not believe the opposite, as that is a logical fallacy (the aforementioned argumentum ad logicam). So, the end result would be that the public has neither burden of proof nor disproof.

 

If, however, the public wishes to make the claim that the mentioned drug doesn't cure cancer, then yes, the burden of proof is on the public as they are now the ones now making a claim. They don't have the burden of disproving the original speaker's claim, but they do have the burden of proving their own claims.

 

To sum up, a logical actor will neither believe nor disbelieve an unproven claim. If disbelief in a claim is desired, then belief in a counter claim, not disbelief in that original claim, must be fostered and proven

 

EDIT: Also, extraordinary claims require ordinary proof. If I claim that I have a drug that cures cancer, how do I prove it? The exact same way as if I had a drug that I said cures mild headaches. Clinical trials, biznatchos.

Edited June 20, 2013 by Thought

[Pechvarry]

There was plenty of evidence that anthracite is magical: it has a weird name, and it's mentioned in the same infodump as another rock that is magical. In fiction, that's good enough evidence a lot of the time. It just happened to be misleading in this case.

 

(Actually, anthracite is real)

 

Woops.  Reading Comprehension fail.  Carry on, good posters.

Edited June 21, 2013 by Pechvarry

[happyman he/him]

I think this disagreement boils down, in many ways, to the difference between theoretical proofs and Bayesian statistics.

 

Theoretical proofs are statements made about an idealized formal system, which are generally branches of mathematics.  Because they are logically self-contained, it is possible to completely control them and make logical statements about them.  This is very useful when we find a formal system which describes the world pretty well, because then we can get even very complicated results from them and know that as long as the world keeps obeying that system, we are doing the right thing.

 

In the real world, however, strict proofs are impossible because we don't actually have the formal system which drives reality. Rather, we have formal systems which do a good job of describing reality, and we use them because they keep on working.  Working really, really well, I should add.  But they are not complete and they do not describe the whole world; this is known. In addition, there are many cases where even when the theory is known well enough in principle, no single person or group of people has enough information to use them to their full potential (weather prediction comes to mind.)  Of such systems, I would include "people," at least so far.

 

Thus when it comes to predicting the content of future books and how they relate to old ones, we are pretty much stuck with Bayesian statistics for the moment.  Because Bayesian statistics depends on priors, it is very common for them to rely on our intuitive notion of how likely some things are.  This is where the "gut" comes in.  In a complex world like ours, there really isn't a way around it.  It will be wrong sometimes.  Hopefully we don't put too much money or life at stake in cases like that.

 

Added, in defense of Chaos' statement:  I believe Chaos' basic intuition was correct, that Hemalurgy wasn't about stealing Allomancy.  It was about stealing souls, which had, as one possible very useful effect, stealing Allomancy and Feruchemy.  It is about so much more, though, as repeated speculation on this board shows very clearly.