Sam Harris came closer when he put the accusing finger on faith. If you don’t place an appropriate burden of proof on each and every additional nice claim, the affective resonance gets started very easily.
How does one determine the appropriate burden of proof?
I think having a flawed (human) agent using this technique is too susceptible to the agent convincing themselves that they tried hard enough, and so we’ve just pushed the problem one step back: How do you know when you’ve tried hard enough.
And the answer is that you don’t; you’ve never tried hard enough, because you require infinite evidence to reach certainty. A good rule of thumb is that you can call it off when there are better things to do, but you can never promote your 93% certainty to 100% by virtue of having “done enough”.
How does one determine the appropriate burden of proof?
I would say that is when there is empirical evidence supporting the claim but, try as you might, you can’t find any that falsifies it.
I think having a flawed (human) agent using this technique is too susceptible to the agent convincing themselves that they tried hard enough, and so we’ve just pushed the problem one step back: How do you know when you’ve tried hard enough.
And the answer is that you don’t; you’ve never tried hard enough, because you require infinite evidence to reach certainty. A good rule of thumb is that you can call it off when there are better things to do, but you can never promote your 93% certainty to 100% by virtue of having “done enough”.