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> "Lies propagate, that's what I'm saying. You've got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that's connected to the first lie. And if you kep
by btown 10y ago
> "Lies propagate, that's what I'm saying. You've got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that's connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you'd even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn't work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn't work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they've got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn't exist and there's no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn't just mistaken, it's anti-epistemology, it's systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there's someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there's a lot of people out there telling lies—"
- Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/65 http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/65
- xapata 10y agoEven in the scientific community there are arguments about epistemology -- thus the occasional paradigm shift. Currently many scientific disciplines are overly reliant on Frequentist evidence, but many scientists only have a weak understanding of statistics, so we've ended up in a situation where most published studies in some fields are not reproducible. I expect the dominant episteme will shift within the next couple decades.
- WhitneyLand 10y agoThis is a totally unfair defense of science deniers. Science has flaws but, deniers have malice. No matter what mistakes science makes it has one fundamental virtue that politicians will never have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
- jessaustin 10y agoParent wasn't defending "deniers", but rather pointing out a genuine problem with lots of current research. Purely observational studies like we see in health and environmental fields will never be falsifiable. That is, that one study really did find that these fifty people who drank tea really did live longer (on average) than those fifty other people who drank coffee. How would one falsify that? How about the meta-analysis based on this and twenty other studies? How about the meta-meta-analysis built on top of that?
- xapata 10y agoNo defense given. I'm just trying to explain why someone might choose to believe something non-scientific. Doing some descriptive science, if you will. Edit: I think I've discovered the irony of someone who decries science denial but downvotes my analysis rather than debating on its merits.