A lot of people say "you can't prove a negative", which I think is wrong. You can prove a negative. What you can't do is prevent other people from employing the fallacy of special pleading against an otherwise convincing proof.

Categorical negatives like "there are no Chinamen with blond hair" are difficult to prove, not because they're negative, ( Read more... )

ianvass and I are revisiting a previous post about God as egocentric personal opinion, in which a study found that people who claim to know God's will are really just introspecting. Evaluating their own opinions and saying they're God's opinions.

He notes that "as I was not one of the people in the study, you are over-generalizing. You cannot say that my ( Read more... )

I was recently talking with a friend-of-a-friend named Dbudlov who told me he "doesn't trust the government". Specifically he doesn't trust the NIST to tell him how the World Trade Center fell down. He doesn't trust the FDA to identify which foods or medications are safe and unsafe. He doesn't trust a lot of government sources for a lot of reasons ( Read more... )

In "The Demon Haunted World" Carl Sagan wrote about the importance of having a good "baloney detection kit". A way to determine what claims are actually true and what isn't. Friends often come to me with various ideas and ask me what I think about them, and I usually start with a three step process:

1. What is the claim, exactly? "Ideas must be ( Read more... )

I've been getting presented with a lot of ethical thought experiments lately. Often in real world contexts by people who don't read this blog. At work someone asked me why we can't trade box office futures but we *can* gamble in Vegas. On a different online forum someone asked me whether killing an enemy soldier for your country is any better than ( Read more... )

There are a few related comments that I keep coming across in various forms:

"Science requires faith (or is a kind or faith) just like religion. Everybody has faith in something."
"Science can't replace religion because it can't answer questions as well as religion."
"It's not a question of whether we have faith, it's what we have faith in ... ( Read more... )

In retrospect, one of the worst bits of advice in my life may have been come to me in junior high school from an English composition teacher named Mr. Cox. He advised our class "Never begin a sentence with 'I think'. Of course you think it. That's why you're saying it. If you're saying it, people can tell that's what you think." I think he was ( Read more... )

A common point in responses to my previous post was prosletyzing. "Telling people what to believe." "Promulgating views to others." "Desire to convert anyone who's otherwise satisfied." Most people seemed to take it as given that this was a bad thing, and even in those terms I couldn't disagree more ( Read more... )

I wish I could remember who said it or when, but a lawyer once said that the common perception about a fair court trial is basically a myth. It's rare in a trial when two people tell their sides of the story to a judge. It's far more often a case where one person says what happened and the other person lies, obfuscates, and tries to throw doubt on ( Read more... )

In my last post I mentioned that you can avoid disproving a negative by rephrasing a problem as two opposing positives. Science doesn't determine what is "true" or "false" as much as it determines which available explanation is most favorable. If you can't prove that one explanation is wrong you can at least show how another explanation is simpler ( Read more... )