I’m confused by the point of this post. What do you want to say in the end? Is it a post with no overarching point, just here to start a conversation (but then, about what)?
The pattern you’re talking about reminds me of Jaynes’ explanation of reasoning about supernatural phenomenon (which is probably just the standard Bayesian explanation), where your prior against such a thing is so high that you put more probability on almost any alternative. Similarly, an argument for why you can’t convince a Bayesian (which believes somewhat that simplicity matters) of the existence of God is that most proposals of God are hypothesis of infinite, or at least maximal complexity, and by Occam’s Razor these are the last one that will be considered.
But in your post, you cast that reasoning as… wrong? I’m not even sure of that. I want to read the word “error” in your last sentence as the error made by “us” (the reasoners that don’t believe in God) , but grammatically it makes more sense as the the error of the argument for the existence of God.
“But in your post, you cast that reasoning as… wrong?”—I didn’t say that at all.
The point of this post is identifying a particular pattern.
The claim is that just because X is false doesn’t mean that there aren’t some pretty strong arguments for X that are correct, so long as there are even stronger arguments against X.
I’m curious what made this post confusing. I’ve reread it a few times and I can’t see which part is unclear, but then again this is always hard as the author of the post.
I’m confused by the point of this post. What do you want to say in the end? Is it a post with no overarching point, just here to start a conversation (but then, about what)?
The pattern you’re talking about reminds me of Jaynes’ explanation of reasoning about supernatural phenomenon (which is probably just the standard Bayesian explanation), where your prior against such a thing is so high that you put more probability on almost any alternative. Similarly, an argument for why you can’t convince a Bayesian (which believes somewhat that simplicity matters) of the existence of God is that most proposals of God are hypothesis of infinite, or at least maximal complexity, and by Occam’s Razor these are the last one that will be considered.
But in your post, you cast that reasoning as… wrong? I’m not even sure of that. I want to read the word “error” in your last sentence as the error made by “us” (the reasoners that don’t believe in God) , but grammatically it makes more sense as the the error of the argument for the existence of God.
“But in your post, you cast that reasoning as… wrong?”—I didn’t say that at all.
The point of this post is identifying a particular pattern.
The claim is that just because X is false doesn’t mean that there aren’t some pretty strong arguments for X that are correct, so long as there are even stronger arguments against X.
I’m curious what made this post confusing. I’ve reread it a few times and I can’t see which part is unclear, but then again this is always hard as the author of the post.