DiGuru said:
While I think I am, I sometimes get the impression that people like Chalnoth and DemoCoder think I'm not being scientific, as I'm ignoring perfectly valid scientific and statistical reasoning.
If you want to make a sound argument, you have to obey rules of logic. If you want to make an inductive argument about the world, you have to obey the rules of mathematics, even moreso than when you're reasoning in a closed deductive system. If you want to make an argument in the absense of information, we have Bayesian inferencing to tell us how to compute the credibility or likelihood of certain statements. It's as simple as that.
This is not to say one cannot use other modes of thinking. That one can't dream or "play" with ideas or use intuition. Otherwise, no one would ever invent anything new.
But one cannot prove or convince other people following Western philosophy of the correctness of your "gut", or "intuition" or "dream" unless one uses the right tools. Why? Because people's instincts, their guts, their dreams can be wrong, in fact, they are very often wrong.
We don't have mind reading capability as a species. So the only way for person A to convince person B that an idea is correct, is to write it down very precisely, step by step, how it was arrived at, so that person B may playback the chain of reasoning in their mind and verify it. That's all we have as a species. It was this invention that took us from being hunter-gatherer hairless chimps to modern civilization. The invention of writing, of rules of reasoning, or logic, and more importantly, a rigorous symbolic representation of numbers and logic. That last step is important, because philosophers of language and cognitive linguists know that even two human beings who speak the same written language don't neccessarily agree on the same definition of a word. Just ask two people on the street to give their definition of a few vocabulary words.
The thing is DiGuru, it's all well and fine and say "I feel in my gut there's life on other words", but it is quite another thing to start referencing evidence and trying to claim support for your gut. Once your cross that barrier, you have made a logical assertion. And now, the fight enters the realm of logic and mathematics. So if you want to avoid being accused of being unscientific, don't assert a proposition based on pre requisite evidence, or else, someone can use that evidence to show how the proposition isn't supported.
This gets into the intelligent design debate. Believers feel in their "gut" that abiogenesis is impossible without a designer. That's fine. It's a belief. But once someone says "life from nothingness violates the 2nd law of thermo" or "life's complexity couldn't have been by chance because the probabilities are too slow", then one has made logical assertions that will rise or fall purely based on a chain of reasoning flowing from logic and mathematics.
In my hounding of people in their loose usage of law numbers to justify whatever their gut told them, I merely wanted to point out that their conclusions have no justification at all that is supported by statistical reasoning, even though their language sounds like "statistics language" It's handwaving arguments based not based on any calculations whatsoever, and it's easy to show just by asking them to see their equations.
Without regard to reasoning in the absense of information, Bayesian inferencing, which is pretty much the best you can possibly do in statistics, shows you exactly how you should adjust the likelihood of a general statement being true, like "the sun will rise tommorow". Normal boolean logic doesn't work, because often you don't have enough information to disprove something.
Choose to ignore it if you wish. But if you really fancy yourself a scientific guy, why would you ignore a beautiful field like Bayesian inferencing? Wouldn't you be curious, and go look it up and see how it applies?
