From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Tue Aug 21 2001 - 20:03:17 MDT
lcorbin@tsoft.com (Lee Corbin) writes:
>I see. We are disagreeing about the conditions under which the predicate
>"desires to find the truth about" should be applied to us. I can see
>furthermore that we are not likely to agree. Look, if a creationist
>comes up to me with a great sheaf of papers proving that evolution is
>a lie, and if I tell him to go stuff them in the bodily orafice (if a
>trash can isn't conveniently available) and he says to me in return
>"YOU are not a truth seeker about evolution!", then I say he's wrong.
>
>Are you claiming that indeed, under these conditions where (like Harvey
>Newstrom and Anders Sandberg) I don't want to waste the time with this
>clown, that on this issue I am not truth-seeking?
No, I'm only talking about the conclusions you draw from the evidence
that you do find time to acquire.
>Are we also disagreeing on what "certainty" means? Forgive me if this is
>redundant, but many people hate using the word "certain" without qualifiers.
We are probably using "certainty" in somewhat different ways, but I
doubt that is the only thing we are disagreeing about. Let's replace
that word with numbers indicating probability.
>Ah! Here's what we can do: you say that I shouldn't be *certain* that
>reports of UFO alien contact are erroneous.
I would say there's at least a 5% chance that one or more of those reports
represents actual alien contact. I interpreted your certainty to mean that
you think there's something like a 1 in a million chance of that.
An individual UFO report that is typical of those reported on the front
page of National Enquirer (which selects the most entertaining, not the most
reasonable reports) probably has less than a 1 in a million chance of
representing actual alien contact.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | Free Dmitry Sklyarov! http://www.freesklyarov.org/ http://www.rahul.net/pcm |
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