100 million year transition from ape to man
Metspitzer
Andre Lieven
> This guy claims 100 million year transition from ape to man.
>
So ? Does he have any *evidence* ? Uh huh...
"What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
Christopher Hitchens.
Andre
Garamond Lethe
Did Hitchens offer any evidence for that?
>
> Andre
>
J. J. Lodder
Why would any be needed?
It is a heuristic principle,
like Occam's razor,
Jan
All-seeing-I
"Yab a Dab A Doo" --Fredrick Flintstone said that. So What?
I wonder though. Does Hitchens have evidence for that assertion?
_______________________________________
Some other quotes to consider:
Since Hitchens evidently does not take what he is writing seriously,
there is no reason for anyone else to do so. --Noam Chomsky
Hitchens is also a militant atheist, or as he prefers to term it "anti-
theist." --Dinesh D'souza
VoiceOfReason
>
Another lying creationist. How unoriginal. Yawn...
Burkhard
> Garamond Lethe <cartographi...@gFNORDmail.com> wrote:
> > On 2009-11-14, Andre Lieven <andrelie...@yahoo.ca> wrote:
> > > On Nov 13, 9:10 pm, Metspitzer <kilow...@charter.net> wrote:
> > >> This guy claims 100 million year transition from ape to man.
>
> > >>http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6528125899828681800&ei=WhD-St...
>
> > > So ? Does he have any *evidence* ? Uh huh...
>
> > > "What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
> > > Christopher Hitchens.
>
> > Did Hitchens offer any evidence for that?
>
> Why would any be needed?
> It is a heuristic principle,
> like Occam's razor,
>
> Jan
heuristics are still evidence based - success rate e.g.
Garamond Lethe
Ah, so Hitchen's meant to say "What is asserted without evidence and is not
a heuristic principle can be dismissed without evidence"?
Probably not.
> like Occam's razor,
Ah, but Occam's razor was formulated by someone who both thought and wrote
far more carefully than Hitchens. It is not that "externalities are not
to be multiplied", but that they are not to be multiplied "unnecessarily",
and 200 years of science can be fit underneath that "unnecessarily".
Hitchens's writing (and perhaps his thinking) fails in two place here.
First, "can" is very, very weak. Contrast this with Occam: "entia non sunt",
"entities *must* not" (wikipedia's translation). I expect Hitchens considered
"should be dismissed" or even "must be dismissed", but backed away, leaving
the rhetorical flourish but empyting it of most of its meaning.
The reason for this is the second failure: lack of evidence is insufficient
to dismiss an assertion. There is very little evidence in science, usually
because nature hands it over grudgingly, but also because we can only think
about handfuls of evidence at a time. The meat of science --- and what is
most difficult to teach --- lies in the processes of intuition, classification,
abstraction, and reasoning. I've (correctly) recommended against publishing
papers that had plenty of evidence and bad reasoning*, and some of the classic
papers in my field contain no evidence whatsoever --- instead, they begin with
a carefully defined set of assumptions that may or may not correspond to anything
in the real world, apply math and logic, and come to some unexpected conclusion
that might have some bearing on reality.
If one wanted to apologize for Hitchens, one might suggest that "evidnece"
was meant to include reasoning about data, perhaps pointing out that we have
no other evidence of mathematical assertions than their proofs, and so these
proofs should be admitted into evidence. This reading weakens the text still
further. Every idea, good and bad, comes wrapped in a chain of reasoning.
This is especially true for ideas about the existence of God, and these are
exactly the ideas that Hitchens is looking for an excuse to discard.
In this case, Hitchens is writing slogans, and that's a fine and honorable
profession. After the most cursory of examinations, this particular slogan
turns out to be weak, wrong, and open to the snarky reply of "Got any evidence
for that?". It's not his best work. I could make it more accurate by cutting
it down to "Bad reasoning out to be dismissed out of hand", but that's not
much of a slogan.
*I have vivid memories of trying to talk my co-author into running more
experiments for a paper a few years ago. He explained that if people
believe your story, piles of experiments won't help, and if they don't
believe your story, piles of experiments won't help. I didn't believe
him at the time --- running experiments is fun, I'm good at it, and it's
a hell of a lot easier than thinking about the results. But over time
I've (finally) come to accept his point of view as correct. It's the
model that's important.
>
> Jan
>
John Wilkins
<e6214f45-f9ea-4d0f...@h34g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,
Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
Unless you have God's heuristics, which involves noetic rays.
Mitchell Coffey
Just because you find support in both Chomsky and D'souza doesn't mean
you're wrong.
Mitchell Coffey
Mitchell Coffey
wrote:> > Garamond Lethe <cartographi...@gFNORDmail.com> wrote:
Eric Root
I second, while pointing out that, unlike ability to play chess, POTM
nominations are no indication of the intelligence of the poster. <8^)
Eric Root
Boikat
> On Nov 13, 11:27 pm, Andre Lieven <andrelie...@yahoo.ca> wrote:
>
> > On Nov 13, 9:10 pm, Metspitzer <kilow...@charter.net> wrote:
>
> > > This guy claims 100 million year transition from ape to man.
>
> > >http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6528125899828681800&ei=WhD-St...
>
> > So ? Does he have any *evidence* ? Uh huh...
>
> > "What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
> > Christopher Hitchens.
>
> > Andre
>
> "Yab a Dab A Doo" --Fredrick Flintstone said that. So What?
News flash: " The Flintsones" was not a documentary.
>
> I wonder though. Does Hitchens have evidence for that assertion?
Do you have any for any of yours?
> _______________________________________
>
> Some other quotes to consider:
>
> Since Hitchens evidently does not take what he is writing seriously,
> there is no reason for anyone else to do so. --Noam Chomsky
How strange. That's pretty much what everyone thinks about the crap
you post.
>
> Hitchens is also a militant atheist, or as he prefers to term it "anti-
> theist." --Dinesh D'souza
And...?
Boikat
Desertphile
<kilo...@charter.net> wrote:
> This guy claims 100 million year transition from ape to man.
Yes, but, humans have always been apes.
> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6528125899828681800&ei=WhD-St-_CpmkqALci533BQ&q=dinosaur+feathers&hl=en&client=firefox-a#
--
http://desertphile.org
Desertphile's Desert Soliloquy. WARNING: view with plenty of water
"Why aren't resurrections from the dead noteworthy?" -- Jim Rutz
J. J. Lodder
J. J. Lodder
> On 2009-11-14, J. J. Lodder <nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
> > Garamond Lethe <cartogr...@gFNORDmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On 2009-11-14, Andre Lieven <andre...@yahoo.ca> wrote:
> >> > On Nov 13, 9:10 pm, Metspitzer <kilow...@charter.net> wrote:
> >> >> This guy claims 100 million year transition from ape to man.
> >> >>
> >> >> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6528125899828681800&ei=WhD-St...
> >> >
> >> > So ? Does he have any *evidence* ? Uh huh...
> >> >
> >> > "What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
> >> > Christopher Hitchens.
> >>
> >> Did Hitchens offer any evidence for that?
> >
> > Why would any be needed?
> > It is a heuristic principle,
>
> Ah, so Hitchen's meant to say "What is asserted without evidence and is not
> a heuristic principle can be dismissed without evidence"?
>
> Probably not.
Are you misreading deliberately?
The heuristic principle is:
"What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
> > like Occam's razor,
>
> Ah, but Occam's razor was formulated by someone who both thought and wrote
> far more carefully than Hitchens. It is not that "externalities are not
> to be multiplied", but that they are not to be multiplied "unnecessarily",
> and 200 years of science can be fit underneath that "unnecessarily".
'Unnecessarily' can only be evaluated afterwards.
> Hitchens's writing (and perhaps his thinking) fails in two place here.
> First, "can" is very, very weak. Contrast this with Occam: "entia non sunt",
> "entities *must* not" (wikipedia's translation). I expect Hitchens considered
> "should be dismissed" or even "must be dismissed", but backed away, leaving
> the rhetorical flourish but empyting it of most of its meaning.
Why? 'can' is just right here.
> The reason for this is the second failure: lack of evidence is insufficient
> to dismiss an assertion.
It means the assertion can be replaced by its opposite,
without any evidential problems.
> There is very little evidence in science, usually because nature hands it
> over grudgingly, but also because we can only think about handfuls of
> evidence at a time. The meat of science --- and what is most difficult to
> teach --- lies in the processes of intuition, classification, abstraction,
> and reasoning. I've (correctly) recommended against publishing papers
> that had plenty of evidence and bad reasoning*, and some of the classic
> papers in my field contain no evidence whatsoever --- instead, they begin
> with a carefully defined set of assumptions that may or may not correspond
> to anything in the real world, apply math and logic, and come to some
> unexpected conclusion that might have some bearing on reality.
There is no evidence at all in nature.
Evidence must be created by applying a suitable theory
to raw observances.
> If one wanted to apologize for Hitchens, one might suggest that "evidnece"
> was meant to include reasoning about data, perhaps pointing out that we have
> no other evidence of mathematical assertions than their proofs, and so these
> proofs should be admitted into evidence. This reading weakens the text still
> further. Every idea, good and bad, comes wrapped in a chain of reasoning.
> This is especially true for ideas about the existence of God, and these are
> exactly the ideas that Hitchens is looking for an excuse to discard.
Why would an apology be needed?
It is an excellent heuristic principle...
for dealing with creationists and the like.
> In this case, Hitchens is writing slogans, and that's a fine and honorable
> profession. After the most cursory of examinations, this particular slogan
> turns out to be weak, wrong, and open to the snarky reply of "Got any evidence
> for that?".
To people ike that you can say 'It's an axiom!"
> *I have vivid memories of trying to talk my co-author into running more
> experiments for a paper a few years ago. He explained that if people
> believe your story, piles of experiments won't help, and if they don't
> believe your story, piles of experiments won't help. I didn't believe
> him at the time --- running experiments is fun, I'm good at it, and it's
> a hell of a lot easier than thinking about the results. But over time
> I've (finally) come to accept his point of view as correct. It's the
> model that's important.
I've seen similar and worse, before.
'We produce 100 MB of data a day,
and we need a theoretician to tell us what it means.'
,
Jan
Burkhard
proposed heuristic was shown to work in a significant number of cases,
without preventing success in a significant number too?
Garamond Lethe
> Garamond Lethe <cartogr...@gFNORDmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 2009-11-14, J. J. Lodder <nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
>> > Garamond Lethe <cartogr...@gFNORDmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> On 2009-11-14, Andre Lieven <andre...@yahoo.ca> wrote:
>> >> > On Nov 13, 9:10 pm, Metspitzer <kilow...@charter.net> wrote:
>> >> >> This guy claims 100 million year transition from ape to man.
>> >> >>
>> >> >> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6528125899828681800&ei=WhD-St...
>> >> >
>> >> > So ? Does he have any *evidence* ? Uh huh...
>> >> >
>> >> > "What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
>> >> > Christopher Hitchens.
>> >>
>> >> Did Hitchens offer any evidence for that?
>> >
>> > Why would any be needed?
>> > It is a heuristic principle,
>>
>> Ah, so Hitchen's meant to say "What is asserted without evidence and is not
>> a heuristic principle can be dismissed without evidence"?
>>
>> Probably not.
>
> Are you misreading deliberately?
> The heuristic principle is:
> "What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
Yes, I agree that what Hitchens has presented may be classified as a "heuristic
principle". I then pick up this heuristic principle and feed it to itself.
"What is asserted without evidence,
e.g., the heuristic principle that what is asserted without
evidence can be dismissed without evidence
can be dismissed without evidence."
This is similar to the Cretian Liar paradox. Because the similarity is
unintentional is one of the reasons I consider this to be sloppy writing.
>> > like Occam's razor,
>>
>> Ah, but Occam's razor was formulated by someone who both thought and wrote
>> far more carefully than Hitchens. It is not that "externalities are not
>> to be multiplied", but that they are not to be multiplied "unnecessarily",
>> and 200 years of science can be fit underneath that "unnecessarily".
>
> 'Unnecessarily' can only be evaluated afterwards.
>
Afterwards of what?
Unnecessariality (to coin an unnecessary word) /can/ be judged after the
experiments are run, but it can and is used a priori to select which
hypotheses and experiments are worth of investigation.
>> Hitchens's writing (and perhaps his thinking) fails in two place here.
>> First, "can" is very, very weak. Contrast this with Occam: "entia non sunt",
>> "entities *must* not" (wikipedia's translation). I expect Hitchens considered
>> "should be dismissed" or even "must be dismissed", but backed away, leaving
>> the rhetorical flourish but empyting it of most of its meaning.
>
> Why? 'can' is just right here.
Not sure what you mean by that.
Yes, Hitchens used the word "can", and the connotation in this context is
"may" or "might" (or "has the ability to be" if you don't mind a bit of
wordiness). That's not a very strong statement.
"Should" and "must" would make much stronger statements, and because of
this I think it's much easier to see that they're wrong.
>
>> The reason for this is the second failure: lack of evidence is insufficient
>> to dismiss an assertion.
>
> It means the assertion can be replaced by its opposite,
> without any evidential problems.
It does? I'm afraid I don't follow how you came up with that reading.
>> There is very little evidence in science, usually because nature hands it
>> over grudgingly, but also because we can only think about handfuls of
>> evidence at a time. The meat of science --- and what is most difficult to
>> teach --- lies in the processes of intuition, classification, abstraction,
>> and reasoning. I've (correctly) recommended against publishing papers
>> that had plenty of evidence and bad reasoning*, and some of the classic
>> papers in my field contain no evidence whatsoever --- instead, they begin
>> with a carefully defined set of assumptions that may or may not correspond
>> to anything in the real world, apply math and logic, and come to some
>> unexpected conclusion that might have some bearing on reality.
>
> There is no evidence at all in nature.
> Evidence must be created by applying a suitable theory
> to raw observances.
>
You can define your terms that way, of course, but I think eventually
"evidence", "observation" and "theory" all end up chasing each others'
tails.
>> If one wanted to apologize for Hitchens, one might suggest that "evidnece"
>> was meant to include reasoning about data, perhaps pointing out that we have
>> no other evidence of mathematical assertions than their proofs, and so these
>> proofs should be admitted into evidence. This reading weakens the text still
>> further. Every idea, good and bad, comes wrapped in a chain of reasoning.
>> This is especially true for ideas about the existence of God, and these are
>> exactly the ideas that Hitchens is looking for an excuse to discard.
>
> Why would an apology be needed?
> It is an excellent heuristic principle...
> for dealing with creationists and the like.
I disagree. Creationists have plenty of evidence that their worldview is
correct. What you consider to be evidence for evolution they don't consider
to be evidence at all. Thus, it works just as well for them as it does for
you. An assertion that evolution is correct has not been presented with
any proper evidence, and thus can be dismissed.
>> In this case, Hitchens is writing slogans, and that's a fine and honorable
>> profession. After the most cursory of examinations, this particular slogan
>> turns out to be weak, wrong, and open to the snarky reply of "Got any evidence
>> for that?".
>
> To people ike that you can say 'It's an axiom!"
>
Treating it as an axiom does not answer the charge of poor writing as it was
not presented as an axiom. But let's say that it is. Does this axiom allow
me to dismiss the mathematical theorem that sqrt(2) is an irrational number?
We have no evidence or observations of 2 or its square root, only a chain of
reasoning. If chains of reasoning are to be admitted as evidence, then the
axiom excludes nothing (unless you want to use it to exclude other axioms).
>> *I have vivid memories of trying to talk my co-author into running more
>> experiments for a paper a few years ago. He explained that if people
>> believe your story, piles of experiments won't help, and if they don't
>> believe your story, piles of experiments won't help. I didn't believe
>> him at the time --- running experiments is fun, I'm good at it, and it's
>> a hell of a lot easier than thinking about the results. But over time
>> I've (finally) come to accept his point of view as correct. It's the
>> model that's important.
>
> I've seen similar and worse, before.
> 'We produce 100 MB of data a day,
> and we need a theoretician to tell us what it means.'
<grin>. Yep. And since the theoritician isn't here yet, let's crank
out another terabyte just to be on the safe side.
> ,
> Jan
>
J. J. Lodder
> J. J. Lodder wrote:
> > Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> >> On 14 Nov, 09:32, nos...@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J. Lodder) wrote:
> >>> Garamond Lethe <cartographi...@gFNORDmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> On 2009-11-14, Andre Lieven <andrelie...@yahoo.ca> wrote:
> >>>>> On Nov 13, 9:10 pm, Metspitzer <kilow...@charter.net> wrote:
> >>>>>> This guy claims 100 million year transition from ape to man.
> >>>>>> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6528125899828681800&ei=WhD-St.
> >>>>> So ? Does he have any *evidence* ? Uh huh...
> >>>>> "What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
> >>>>> Christopher Hitchens.
> >>>> Did Hitchens offer any evidence for that?
> >>> Why would any be needed?
> >>> It is a heuristic principle,
> >>> like Occam's razor,
> >>>
> >>> Jan
> >> heuristics are still evidence based - success rate e.g.
> >
> > Yes, afterwards.
> >
> > Jan
> >
> and shouldn't we (or rather Hitchen's) have evidence then that his
> proposed heuristic was shown to work in a significant number of cases,
> without preventing success in a significant number too?
You mean: has it ever been used to make a creationist shut up?
OTOH, here is no known means to make Hitchens shut up either,
Jan
J. J. Lodder
> In article
> <e6214f45-f9ea-4d0f...@h34g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,
> Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > On 14 Nov, 09:32, nos...@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J. Lodder) wrote:
> > > Garamond Lethe <cartographi...@gFNORDmail.com> wrote:
> > > > On 2009-11-14, Andre Lieven <andrelie...@yahoo.ca> wrote:
> > > > > On Nov 13, 9:10 pm, Metspitzer <kilow...@charter.net> wrote:
> > > > >> This guy claims 100 million year transition from ape to man.
> > >
> > > > >>http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6528125899828681800&ei=WhD-St
> > >
> > > > > So ? Does he have any *evidence* ? Uh huh...
> > >
> > > > > "What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
> > > > > Christopher Hitchens.
> > >
> > > > Did Hitchens offer any evidence for that?
> > >
> > > Why would any be needed?
> > > It is a heuristic principle,
> > > like Occam's razor,
> > >
> > > Jan
> >
> > heuristics are still evidence based - success rate e.g.
> >
> Unless you have God's heuristics, which involves noetic rays.
Aaaaaarrggghhh!
Using God's own N-rays is unfair!
I flee in despair,
Jan
John Wilkins
<nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
I was lying in a Vat one day, when I learned how to use N-rays.
Friar Broccoli
Taken together those two examples demonstrate so much insight that
they really cause me to wonder about All-Seeing-I.
Kent Paul Dolan
> J. J. Lodder <nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
>> Garamond Lethe <cartogr...@gFNORDmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> This guy claims 100 million year transition
>>>>> from ape to man.
There having been no apes of any kind 100 million
years ago would make that the teensiest bit
implausible, yes?
or
http://preview.tinyurl.com/ygmag47
>>>> So ? Does he have any *evidence* ? Uh huh...
>>>> "What is asserted without evidence can be
>>>> dismissed without evidence."
>>>> Christopher Hitchens.
>>> Did Hitchens offer any evidence for that?
>> Why would any be needed?
>> It is a heuristic principle,
Right, a heuristic principle doesn't need evidence
to be merely stated, only the subsequent evidence of
high probability of success to be widely accepted.
As Hitchen put it, it was just advice; take it or
leave it. Most of us, having limited lifetimes and
confronted with unlimited garbage assertions meant
to baffle and befuddle us, to devour our time and
resources, would be well advised to take it.
> Ah, so Hitchen's meant to say "What is asserted
> without evidence and is not a heuristic principle
> can be dismissed without evidence"?
No, he meant to say what he said. Your use of a
strawman to diminish his argument is of course of
zero merit.`
> Probably not.
>> like Occam's razor,
> Ah, but Occam's razor was formulated by someone
> who both thought and wrote far more carefully than
> Hitchens.
That sounds a lot more like an opinion arising from
your (unknown/unexpressed) agenda than like known
fact.
> It is not that "externalities are not to be
> multiplied", but that they are not to be
> multiplied "unnecessarily", and 200 years of
> science can be fit underneath that
> "unnecessarily".
> Hitchens's writing (and perhaps his thinking)
> fails in two [to] place here. First, "can" is
> very, very weak. Contrast this with Occam:
> "entia non sunt", "entities *must* not"
> (wikipedia's translation).
Well, you're already on record as noting that Occam
put his weasel wording in as the word
"unnecessarily"; all the strong language in the
world won't help overcome that glaring weakness.
Hitchins just chose to put his weasel wording in the
verb rather than in the adverb. Both heuristics deny
their chance of being objectively applied.
> I expect Hitchens considered "should be dismissed"
> or even "must be dismissed", but backed away,
Again you argue with strawmen, and with "facts" of
your own devising.
> leaving the rhetorical flourish but empyting it of
> most of its meaning.
So you say.
As an aphorism it conveys more than sufficient
"meaning" -- don't feel yourself obligated to be
bluffed by evidence-free insistent assertions, no
matter at what volume they are shouted.
> The reason for this is the second failure: lack
> of evidence is insufficient to dismiss an
> assertion.
That rather depends on the "from what activity is it
being dismissed", I would expect.
Surely "X is true, so based on that assertion alone,
give me lots of your money to continue to lead my
current wastrel lifestyle" is a cubbyhole emitting
from which _any_ evidence free assertions may be
safely dismissed.
> There is very little evidence in science,
False. Some parts of science can produce evidence
counting in the trillions of examples and more, like
the evolutionary history of hard shelled marine
organisms. _On average_, science is rife with
evidence, either rife as already gathered or easily
gathered rife addenda to quantities of evidence
already gathered.
Observation of Earth by satellites routinely
produces "evidence" in the hundreds of petabytes.
> usually because nature hands it over grudgingly,
This isn't a contest between foes. Chaos doesn't
have the emotions you ascribe to it.
> but also because we can only think about handfuls
> of evidence at a time.
False.
Ever since the "we" doing the "thinking" began to
include bureaucracies, committees and computers,
this has been false.
Thus, it has been false for several thousand years
at a minimum.
One single mathematical proof, that of the four
color map conjecture, required consideration of a
handful of billions of special cases. With a
computer doing the task, the proof was effortful but
straightforward, and as each special case was
resolved, it became an entity of evidence for the
theorem as a whole.
Another single mathematical proof, that of Fermet's
last theorem, combined the life-works of many
mathematicians in disparate fields of math to
achieve that one proof sought for centuries.
> The meat of science --- and what is most difficult
> to teach --- lies in the processes of intuition,
> classification, abstraction, and reasoning.
"Management is the art of making good decisions on
the basis of inadequate evidence" I once read.
Science in your view sounds suspiciously iike
management, yet the success reputation of science
far outshines the success reputation of management.
> I've (correctly) recommended against publishing
> papers that had plenty of evidence and bad
> reasoning*, and some of the classic papers in my
> field contain no evidence whatsoever --- instead,
> they begin with a carefully defined set of
> assumptions that may or may not correspond to
> anything in the real world,
Ah, yes, like the grad student at UNC who built his
thesis by proving a wonderful set of things about
all members of a certain topological set. He never
bothered to check whether the set was non-empty, and
of course further checking by his thesis panel found
that the set indeed _was_ empty. Since one can prove
absolutely _anything_ about the members of an empty
set, his thesis committee members were singularly
unimpressed with his results.
> apply math and logic, and come to some unexpected
> conclusion that might have some bearing on
> reality.
Or not, which is rather Hitchins' point, I would
surmise.
Just how much _should_ we be willing to pay or risk
on evidence-free assertions? Should we sacrifice all
prudent management of the environment because some
sky pixie is asserted to be looking out for our
interests and asserted to be magically going to
clean up all the messes we make?
If we accept that kind of assertion, and we've been
gulled, the planet dies. Oops.
> If one wanted to apologize for Hitchens, one might
> suggest that "evidence" was meant to include
> reasoning about data, perhaps pointing out that we
> have no other evidence of mathematical assertions
> than their proofs, and so these proofs should be
> admitted into evidence.
You've badly confounded "reasoning about data" with
"proving mathematical claims", which is a far less
general process, then tried to apply conclusions
only appropriate to the narrow case, instead to the
more general case.
Of course, mathematicians _want_ no additional
evidence once a correct proof is in hand, though we
will compete for the glory of producing a terser, a
clearer, a more beautiful, or a more expository
proof, even after the result has been proven once.
> This reading weakens the text still further.
No, because you've muddle-minded your argument down
a rat hole.
> Every idea, good and bad, comes wrapped in a chain
> of reasoning.
An evidence free assertion by you that no _single_
exception exists, yet the ideas contained in the
babbling of the village idiot can safely be
suspected of having no "chain of reasoning" wrapper.
> This is especially true for ideas about the
> existence of God,
I have never, and I've read as many as any
mildly interested party, seen a chain of reasoning
attempting to "prove" the existence of some deities
or other, that wasn't riddled with illogic, usually
"false antecedents", and only convincing to the
already mindwashed.
Moreover, any such arguments seem to apply equally
to all deities alike, so that they provide nothing
particularly useful about the existence of any one
deity in competition with the existence of any
other, supposedly mutually exclusive, deity.
All you have in the end, when you look at the
package of deity existence proofs as a whole, is the
contentious screaming of the rabble. We don't have
to read great philosophers to obtain that result,
just go out in the street where any two sects are
battling for attention.
> and these are exactly the ideas that Hitchens is
> looking for an excuse to discard.
In your opinion.
In my opinion, those are the bullying hot air
assertions from which he seeks protection by
providing marginally intelligent people with a way
perhaps to avoid being infected with muddled
thinking.
> In this case, Hitchens is writing slogans,
In your opinion.
I don't find his aphorism in any way similar to
"fifty-four fourty or fight", so I'm unwilling to
allow you to dismiss it by twisting it into
something semantically freighted to be deliberately
misconstrued as a "slogan".
That's roughly as honest as backspace's word salad
argumentations here are.
> and that's a fine and honorable profession.
"And so are they all, all honorable men" -- who's
sloganeering, one more time?
> After the most cursory
How about if we say "biased and agenda driven"
rather than "cursory"? Your argument is as full of
holes as a five year old dishrag.
> of examinations, this particular slogan turns out
> to be weak,
No weaker than Occam's razor, just the same weakness
differently expressed.
> wrong,
In your opinion, an opinion you have failed to
support adequately.
> and open to the snarky reply
Somehow, being subject to snarky replies isn't
terribly meaningful as a gauge of merit, or
responses like mine would crush arguments like
yours with a zero failure rate.
_Everything_ communicated is susceptible to snarky
replies.
That which is true of everything is significant of
nothing.
> of "Got any evidence for that?".
Which, of course, was not a meaningful inquiry nor a
serious challenge, but was instead a usual attempt
at humor here in talk.origins when a thread has
already derailed itself and become painful to
behold, while the baggage spills onto the trackside.
> It's not his best work.
It isn't perfect, but it's an awfully good start at
creating some form of wisdom to use against the
ravening forces of irrationality.
> I could make it more accurate
Well, no.
> by cutting it down to
But that's an approach you take only because you
hope to make it disappear with each additional round
of whittling you apply to it.
That "diminish it until it goes away" approach is an
agenda driven exercise, not a functionality
improving oriented exercise.
That kind of behavior in my rather brutal
neighborhood gets people shot dead on the street for
the sin of "disrespecting" (where no respect has been
earned in the first place), whatever in hell
"disrespecting" is supposed to mean.
> "Bad reasoning ou[gh]t to be dismissed out of hand",
> but that's not much of a slogan.
How about "agenda laden twaddle should be dropped
in the bit bucket" as long as we're cobbling
together insulting slogans?
> *I have vivid memories of trying to talk my
> co-author into running more experiments for a
> paper a few years ago. He explained that if
> people believe your story, piles of experiments
> won't help, and if they don't believe your story,
> piles of experiments won't help.
One doesn't run gobs of experiments for the other
fellow, one runs them for ones own peace of mind.
Once you suspect you've proved something in science,
your next immediate objective is to prove yourself
wrong.
Only when all your efforts cannot accomplish that
should you be willing to share your suspicions.
> I didn't believe him at the time --- running
> experiments is fun, I'm good at it, and it's a
> hell of a lot easier than thinking about the
> results. But over time I've (finally) come to
> accept his point of view as correct. It's the
> model that's important.
Certainly a better approach than gutting
Hutchinson's heuristic because you don't like him,
or you don't like his intentions in creating it,
would be to improve it until it can do the task for
which he intended it.
I'm not all that crafty with words, but I think
simply rewording it slightly does that much:
"Extraordinary assertions made without evidence can
be dismissed without evidence."
Which of course merely piggybacks on the
accepted existing heuristic "extraordinary
claims require extraordinry evidence".
That way, ordinary "gut feel" or "neutral observers
think should be true" "assertions without evidence",
that don't raise immediate red flags for anyone,
could be given a tentative status until evidence
gathering has occurred, or, in your example, until
mathematical proof has been achieved.
Thus the Riemann hypothesis concerning zeros of
his "zeta" function in the complex plane,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis
on which much of higher mathematics depends, has
been given tentative status as "accepted wisdom"
simply because incredible amounts of searching by a
wealth of techniques has failed to produce a single
counter-example, even though the hypothesis has also
resisted all attempts so far by very smart
mathematicians to prove it.
Ditto Goldbach's (strong) conjecture,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldbach%27s_conjecture
and probably several (hundred) more of which I am
unaware.
xanthian.
Garamond Lethe
> Garamond Lethe wrote:
Debating whether or not Hitchens is a sloppy writer
isn't terribly interesting. Let's snip to the good bit.
<snip>
> > There is very little evidence in science,
>
> False. Some parts of science can produce evidence
> counting in the trillions of examples and more,
I was doing this just last night. I picked up a shiny
new terabyte hard drive and all of my dissertation,
related work, benchmarks and data was rattling around
in about 7% of it. But this paper needs simulation
results, and at the end of the evening I was worried
that I was going to run out of space. When you're
generating multiple lines of text per cycle on a
simulated gigahertz machine, the data tends to pile
up fast.
So let's say I had on the order of 10 billion lines
of text. After poking around a bit, I found the 24
lines I needed and discarded the rest.
I can't think about 10 billion lines of text. Nobody
can. What I can do is use statistics and modeling
to think about how 24 lines of text can say something
interesting about the remaining 9,999,999,976.
> like
> the evolutionary history of hard shelled marine
> organisms.
And an expert on hard-shelled marine organisms has
examined how many of these over a lifetime? Should we
say a day to completely characterize what might be a
new species, an hour to classify difficult cases, and
a minutes to sort through well-known species? How many
of these trillions of fossils do you thing a paleontologist
will get to in a career? Out of those, how many do you
think will end up in published work? A dozen?
> _On average_, science is rife with
> evidence, either rife as already gathered or easily
> gathered rife addenda to quantities of evidence
> already gathered.
I can't think of a field where this is the case, but
then I can't think of a scientific field that doesn't
make use of statistics and modeling. If we knew how
to use lots of evidence, that wouldn't be necessary.
We don't. That's a limitation of us as humans. So
instead of 10k data points we fit a regression, and
magically 10k data points have been reduced to a R^2
and p-values, and *those* are the data points we reason
about.
>
> Observation of Earth by satellites routinely
> produces "evidence" in the hundreds of petabytes.
>
I got to talk to a few of those folks at LLNL a couple
of years ago. They had a serious bandwidth problem
getting that data from the top of the mountain with the
telescope on it to the bottom of the mountain where it
was more feasible to locate a data center.
I've also known a few astronomers, and they do exactly
what I do: classify, abstract, reduce, sample, model.
The evidence on which papers get accepted or rejected
in astronomy comes down to a few dozen numbers, at least
one of which will have the word "error" next to it.
> > usually because nature hands it over grudgingly,
>
> This isn't a contest between foes. Chaos doesn't
> have the emotions you ascribe to it.
But it's a useful model, and I certainly can't lay claim
to being the first to come up with it.
> > but also because we can only think about handfuls
> > of evidence at a time.
>
> False.
>
> Ever since the "we" doing the "thinking" began to
> include bureaucracies, committees and computers,
> this has been false.
>
> Thus, it has been false for several thousand years
> at a minimum.
>
> One single mathematical proof, that of the four
> color map conjecture, required consideration of a
> handful of billions of special cases.
Which humans could not and still cannot do. So, we have
to settle for abstraction the problem by way of computer
programming.
BTW, you're off by a few orders magnitude in your
recollection of how difficult that problem was:
"Appel and Haken's approach started by showing there is a particular set of
1,936 maps, each of which cannot be part of a smallest-sized counterexample to
the four color theorem. Appel and Haken used a special-purpose computer program
to check each of these maps had this property. Additionally, any map
(regardless of whether it is a counterexample or not) must have a portion that
looks like one of these 1,936 maps. To show this required hundreds of pages of
hand analysis. Appel and Haken concluded that no smallest counterexamples
existed because any must contain, yet not contain, one of these 1,936 maps.
This contradiction means there are no counterexamples at all and the theorem is
true."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem
This proves my point: because they couldn't abstract 1,936 cases
down to a smaller number of general cases, they had to drag in a
computer to do the work for them and the result was a butt-ugly
proof. Because they're mathematicians they're allowed to get away
with this. I can't think of a similar example in science. Give
a biologist 1,936 individual cases and she'll start thinking in
terms of a much smaller number of genuses and species. A chemist
will do the same thing. So will an astronomer. So will a computer
scientist.
Because we're human and have human limitations, we only think
about data point to the extent that we can fit them into boxes.
Science is the process of reasoning about the boxes, not the
data.
> With a
> computer doing the task, the proof was effortful but
> straightforward, and as each special case was
> resolved, it became an entity of evidence for the
> theorem as a whole.
>
> Another single mathematical proof, that of Fermet's
> last theorem, combined the life-works of many
> mathematicians in disparate fields of math to
> achieve that one proof sought for centuries.
>
But mathematicians don't need to use statistics and modeling,
mostly because they're not collecting noisy data from imperfect
instruments. However, if I can stuff my data into a handful
of boxes, then I can bring mathematical tools to bear. Until
I do that, though, I simply cannot reason about about piles
of data.
> > The meat of science --- and what is most difficult
> > to teach --- lies in the processes of intuition,
> > classification, abstraction, and reasoning.
>
> "Management is the art of making good decisions on
> the basis of inadequate evidence" I once read.
>
> Science in your view sounds suspiciously iike
> management, yet the success reputation of science
> far outshines the success reputation of management.
Based on the papers that I've published in the peer-reviewed
literature and my reading of that literature, I'd say my method
not only works, but is endemic. There are a few exceptions
such as the Lamport paper I cited to you a few months ago,
and the work my sweetie publishes, but they use *no* data ---
just math, logic and intuition.
>
> > I've (correctly) recommended against publishing
> > papers that had plenty of evidence and bad
> > reasoning*, and some of the classic papers in my
> > field contain no evidence whatsoever --- instead,
> > they begin with a carefully defined set of
> > assumptions that may or may not correspond to
> > anything in the real world,
>
> Ah, yes, like the grad student at UNC who built his
> thesis by proving a wonderful set of things about
> all members of a certain topological set. He never
> bothered to check whether the set was non-empty, and
> of course further checking by his thesis panel found
> that the set indeed _was_ empty. Since one can prove
> absolutely _anything_ about the members of an empty
> set, his thesis committee members were singularly
> unimpressed with his results.
Yes, and you can find several experimental papers
confirming the evidence of N-rays that were actually
published. So?
> > apply math and logic, and come to some unexpected
> > conclusion that might have some bearing on
> > reality.
>
> Or not, which is rather Hitchins' point, I would
> surmise.
>
But when it does, you can get a Turing award for it, as
Leslie Lamport did for a data-free paper on applying
a metaphor of special relativity to the problem of
distributed time in computers.
(Turing is also famous for work that was only grounded
in mathematical reality.)
> Just how much _should_ we be willing to pay or risk
> on evidence-free assertions?
That's a decision I have to make from time to time when
reviewing papers. Based on the quality of the paper,
the answer can be "several years of my career". I can
do this because evidence is not the only metric by which
a paper can be judged, and brilliant, seminal work like
that done by Lamport and Turing need not depend on
anything other than intuition, logic and math.
> Should we sacrifice all
> prudent management of the environment because some
> sky pixie is asserted to be looking out for our
> interests and asserted to be magically going to
> clean up all the messes we make?
Ummm... no.
>
> If we accept that kind of assertion, and we've been
> gulled, the planet dies. Oops.
Yup.
> > If one wanted to apologize for Hitchens, one might
> > suggest that "evidence" was meant to include
> > reasoning about data, perhaps pointing out that we
> > have no other evidence of mathematical assertions
> > than their proofs, and so these proofs should be
> > admitted into evidence.
>
> You've badly confounded "reasoning about data" with
> "proving mathematical claims", which is a far less
> general process, then tried to apply conclusions
> only appropriate to the narrow case, instead to the
> more general case.
Err... proving mathematical claims is the *more* general
process, which is why the first thing I try to do with
my data is reduce it to a mathematical abstraction.
>
> Of course, mathematicians _want_ no additional
> evidence once a correct proof is in hand, though we
> will compete for the glory of producing a terser, a
> clearer, a more beautiful, or a more expository
> proof, even after the result has been proven once.
>
> > This reading weakens the text still further.
>
> No, because you've muddle-minded your argument down
> a rat hole.
It gets me published.
>
> > Every idea, good and bad, comes wrapped in a chain
> > of reasoning.
>
> An evidence free assertion by you that no _single_
> exception exists, yet the ideas contained in the
> babbling of the village idiot can safely be
> suspected of having no "chain of reasoning" wrapper.
>
I've never run across anyone who, when asked why they
believe something, stated "the idea fell into my head
and I have no reason at all to think it's true". By
the time we're willing to make a statement of belief,
we're already well on our way to constructing a story
as to why this is true. Even someone like Elijahovah
provides his reasoning when he posts here. If you
know of a counterexample, I'd be happy to hear it.
> > This is especially true for ideas about the
> > existence of God,
>
> I have never, and I've read as many as any
> mildly interested party, seen a chain of reasoning
> attempting to "prove" the existence of some deities
> or other, that wasn't riddled with illogic, usually
> "false antecedents", and only convincing to the
> already mindwashed.
Exactly.
The chain may be faulty, but it does exist.
> Moreover, any such arguments seem to apply equally
> to all deities alike, so that they provide nothing
> particularly useful about the existence of any one
> deity in competition with the existence of any
> other, supposedly mutually exclusive, deity.
>
Yup.
> All you have in the end, when you look at the
> package of deity existence proofs as a whole, is the
> contentious screaming of the rabble. We don't have
> to read great philosophers to obtain that result,
> just go out in the street where any two sects are
> battling for attention.
>
Well, there are the humorous ones, too, like Godel's.
> > and these are exactly the ideas that Hitchens is
> > looking for an excuse to discard.
>
> In your opinion.
>
> In my opinion, those are the bullying hot air
> assertions from which he seeks protection by
> providing marginally intelligent people with a way
> perhaps to avoid being infected with muddled
> thinking.
>
I agree that was what he was trying to accomplish.
I disagree that he accomplished it as well as he
ought to have.
> > In this case, Hitchens is writing slogans,
>
> In your opinion.
>
> I don't find his aphorism in any way similar to
> "fifty-four fourty or fight", so I'm unwilling to
> allow you to dismiss it by twisting it into
> something semantically freighted to be deliberately
> misconstrued as a "slogan".
>
> That's roughly as honest as backspace's word salad
> argumentations here are.
>
> > and that's a fine and honorable profession.
>
> "And so are they all, all honorable men" -- who's
> sloganeering, one more time?
>
<grin>
> > After the most cursory
>
> How about if we say "biased and agenda driven"
> rather than "cursory"? Your argument is as full of
> holes as a five year old dishrag.
>
Speaking of honorable sloganeering.... ;-)
> > of examinations, this particular slogan turns out
> > to be weak,
>
> No weaker than Occam's razor, just the same weakness
> differently expressed.
Your opinion, of course.
>
> > wrong,
>
> In your opinion, an opinion you have failed to
> support adequately.
>
Perhaps. But you've not managed to say anything yet that
would convince me of that.
> > and open to the snarky reply
>
> Somehow, being subject to snarky replies isn't
> terribly meaningful as a gauge of merit,
For polemical writing I think this is a valuable metric.
> or
> responses like mine would crush arguments like
> yours with a zero failure rate.
>
May I ammend my statement to read "effective snarky replies"?
;-)
> _Everything_ communicated is susceptible to snarky
> replies.
>
"The probability that a single copy of an allele with selective
advantage $s$ will be fixed in a population of effective size
$N_e$ is $2s(N_e/N)/(1-e^{-4N_es})."
I look forward to observing the master demonstrate his skill.
Moving on to the next interesting bit....
<snip>
<snip>
> > *I have vivid memories of trying to talk my
> > co-author into running more experiments for a
> > paper a few years ago. He explained that if
> > people believe your story, piles of experiments
> > won't help, and if they don't believe your story,
> > piles of experiments won't help.
>
> One doesn't run gobs of experiments for the other
> fellow, one runs them for ones own peace of mind.
That put me in mind of this:
Running gobs of experiments is a Very Bad Idea when you're
trying to convince reviewers, and it's a much worse idea
when you're trying to convince yourself. It's a clue that
you understand neither the problem nor the solution, and
are hoping that a large pile of results will be able to
stand in for understanding. This approach has a very
poor track record, and I speak from personal experience.
(Well, ok, there's one other reason for running gobs
of experiments: you have no idea what's going on and
you hope that by looking a reams of data some thought
will occur to you. It's also easier to report to you
adviser that "I'm running experiments" instead of "I'm
still thinking about which single experiment I need
to run". Doing this lets you do your pondering free of
adviserial interference.)
>
> Once you suspect you've proved something in science,
> your next immediate objective is to prove yourself
> wrong.
Yes. One approach to doing this is trying to prove it
for all programs. When reviewers see this, they
immediately try to think of a case that you didn't
cover, and there will always be one.
A better approach is to abstract the problem so that
you're proving it for all programs that have a particular
characteristic, and so by demonstrating it for a *single*
program with that characteristic, you've demonstrated it
for all programs.
Which leads nicely back to my point that there isn't
much evidence in science, and that this is a good thing.
With the gobs approach, I've said something about all of
the programs I've managed to test, which for the universe
of all possible programs will be pretty insignificant.
Given less evidence and a model, I can say something
about an entire class of programs.
Or, to use your fossil example: listing the measurements
of every fossil I can get my hands on may have some utility
to a scientist, but it ain't science (and isn't even stamp
collecting). Looking at those measurements, picking
out which are important, and then being able to classify and
abstract all fossils like these with just a few measurements
is where science starts to kick in.
>
> Only when all your efforts cannot accomplish that
> should you be willing to share your suspicions.
>
Yes.
> > I didn't believe him at the time --- running
> > experiments is fun, I'm good at it, and it's a
> > hell of a lot easier than thinking about the
> > results. But over time I've (finally) come to
> > accept his point of view as correct. It's the
> > model that's important.
>
> Certainly a better approach than gutting
> Hutchinson's heuristic because you don't like him,
I haven't met him. I've read two of his books and
enjoyed them, but I don't think they're anything I
need to reread. Like most people who don't study
science, he doesn't do well when making broad
generalizations about it.
> or you don't like his intentions in creating it,
Or maybe I just get annoyed with sloppy writing.
> would be to improve it until it can do the task for
> which he intended it.
>
I think I posted something along those lines. Oh, right,
you're replying to it.
> I'm not all that crafty with words, but I think
> simply rewording it slightly does that much:
>
> "Extraordinary assertions made without evidence can
> be dismissed without evidence."
You managed to make it worse. "Can" is still there, and
now non-extraordinary assertions get a free pass.
>
> Which of course merely piggybacks on the
> accepted existing heuristic "extraordinary
> claims require extraordinry evidence".
>
This is excellent writing. "Require" is much stronger
than "can", it's symmetric, short, all the words are
pulling their own weight. "Claims" is more neutral than
"assertions" and allows this to be targeted to both
scientific and religious claims. This also solves the
"chain of reasoning" problem. Sagan's formulation has
no difficulty with admitting chains of reasoning as
evidence (and so this covers mathematics as well), but
such reasoning must be extraodinary in order to demonstrate
gods exist.
As an added bonus, this even says something about how
non-extraordinary science is done.
I hesitate to call anything perfect, but I can't see how
this can be improved.
<snip>
>
> xanthian.
>
A pleasure as always.
heekster
wrote:
Is this another one of those Hilary Putnam/Wachowski brothers
faux-losophy things? Pickled cerebellum in a vat?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam
"Bones, you can do it. Finish connecting Spock's brain.
A minute ago, it was child's play."
Damn, I need one of those helmets.
heekster
Lodder) wrote:
Introduce him to Suzanne.
John Wilkins
<heek...@ifiwxtc.net> wrote:
Check here
http://www.amazon.com/reader/0521297761?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=sib%5Fdp%5Fp
t
and search for "noetic rays" if you don't see them already
heekster
wrote:
I was right.
"No present day philosopher would espouse such a view."
Walter Bushell
heekster <heek...@ifiwxtc.net> wrote:
But what if they reproduce?!
--
A computer without Microsoft is like a chocolate cake without mustard.
Mitchell Coffey
> In article <qpq3g5d5564ebtgmlvglcmtcga8celk...@4ax.com>, heekster
>
>
>
> <heeks...@ifiwxtc.net> wrote:
> > On Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:47:34 +1100, John Wilkins <j...@wilkins.id.au>
> > wrote:
>
> > >In article <1j98x7n.1pev5fwjto...@de-ster.xs4all.nl>, J. J. Lodder
> > ><nos...@de-ster.demon.nl> wrote:
>
> > >> John Wilkins <j...@wilkins.id.au> wrote:
>
> > >> > In article
> > >> > <e6214f45-f9ea-4d0f-83b5-248b6bea5...@h34g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,
> t
>
> and search for "noetic rays" if you don't see them already
What's wrong with that?
Pickels
heekster
wrote:
That would be an actual miracle.
Ye Old One
Nope. Medical science can do such things these days.
--
Bob.
A religious war is like children fighting over who has the strongest
imaginary friend.
heekster
I was excluding that possibility.
It seemed that it would be a rather egregious set of ethics violations
on the part of the participating medical personnel.
Ye Old One
Very true.
--
Bob.
When D-G made Madman out of clay he forgot to magic the brain. I think
that explains everything.
J. J. Lodder
> On Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:04:05 -0500, Walter Bushell <pr...@panix.com>
> wrote:
>
> >In article <7lr3g5tci74j2s6la...@4ax.com>,
> > heekster <heek...@ifiwxtc.net> wrote:
> >
> >> On Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:25:21 +0100, nos...@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J.
> >> Lodder) wrote:
> >>
> >> >Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> >> >
> >> >> J. J. Lodder wrote:
> >> >> > Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> >> >> >
> >> >> >> On 14 Nov, 09:32, nos...@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J. Lodder) wrote:
> >> >> >>> Garamond Lethe <cartographi...@gFNORDmail.com> wrote:
> >> >> >>>> On 2009-11-14, Andre Lieven <andrelie...@yahoo.ca> wrote:
> >> >> >>>>> On Nov 13, 9:10 pm, Metspitzer <kilow...@charter.net> wrote:
> >> >> >>>>>> This guy claims 100 million year transition from ape to man.
> >> >> >>>>>> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6528125899828681800&eiS
> >> >> >>>>>> t.
> >> >> >>>>> So ? Does he have any *evidence* ? Uh huh...
> >> >> >>>>> "What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without
> >> >> >>>>> evidence."
> >> >> >>>>> Christopher Hitchens.
> >> >> >>>> Did Hitchens offer any evidence for that?
> >> >> >>> Why would any be needed?
> >> >> >>> It is a heuristic principle,
> >> >> >>> like Occam's razor,
> >> >> >>>
> >> >> >>> Jan
> >> >> >> heuristics are still evidence based - success rate e.g.
> >> >> >
> >> >> > Yes, afterwards.
> >> >> >
> >> >> > Jan
> >> >> >
> >> >> and shouldn't we (or rather Hitchen's) have evidence then that his
> >> >> proposed heuristic was shown to work in a significant number of cases,
> >> >> without preventing success in a significant number too?
> >> >
> >> >You mean: has it ever been used to make a creationist shut up?
> >> >OTOH, here is no known means to make Hitchens shut up either,
> >> >
> >> Introduce him to Suzanne.
> >
> >But what if they reproduce?!
>
> That would be an actual miracle.
Especially if she really met Von Braun,
Jan