[ExI] Belief in maths

Rafal Smigrodzki rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com
Wed Jul 7 21:26:03 UTC 2010


2010/7/7 darren shawn greer <dgreer_68 at hotmail.com>

>   I strongly disagree.
> >
> > The truth of the statement "Absence of evidence is not evidence of
> absence" is not a matter of opinion. It's a logical fact. If a person
> decides it's not true, they're discarding logic altogether, and simply can't
> be argued with.<
>
>
> I agree with you 100%. It is a completely logical and true statement.
>

### But absence of evidence *is* evidence. You cannot arbitrarily discard
this piece of information - depending on the context, absence of evidence
may be a reasonably strong evidence of absence.For example, the complete
absence of evidence for the existence of flying spaghetti monsters,
day after day, is a legitimate reason to continue disbelieving in the
spaghetti monsters. You should assign a lower likelihood to their existence
than you assign to the existence of entities for which there is evidence,
however shaky, such as the yeti. I hope you agree that the yeti is more
likely to exist than the spagetti monster, no?

Rafal
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