Gemli explains...

[Res Ipsa]

Absent context, I find Gemli’s statement about “true claims” questionable. At a minimum, I would add “assuming complete information.”

One of Peterson’s responses reflects my concern about complete information. A rational person can assert a false claim if they lack complete information.

Peterson’s response using prediction as a counter example is bizarre unless the “true claims” Gemli was referring to were predictions.

“Claims” could include claims of mixed fact and opinion. Without context, it’s hard to evaluate that aspect of Peterson's argument.

ETA: Having found Gemli’s comment and read the context, the claims under discussion were theological claims. Gemli’s argument jumps around quite a bit, and I’m skeptical that he stays consistent with himself.

It is certainly possible for a theological claim to be true. Gemli argues that he is simply taking the “null hypothesis” and placing the burden of proof on those making theological claims. There’s nothing wrong with that. However, the consequence of taking that position is that one must accept the possibility that whatever theological claim is being made is a true claim. Otherwise, Gemli would be making the positive assertion that the theological claim is necessarily false. That would contradict his claim to be taking the null hypothesis.

Next, rational people can and do disagree about every theological claim. According to Gemli’s assertion, that makes all theological claims necessarily false. But that directly contradicts his claim that he is simply asserting the null hypothesis.

Gemli’s statement can only work if the No True Scotsman Fallacy is liberally invoked. Rational people can be wrong about a claim through ignorance, if nothing else. Whatever defines a true claim, Gemli’s statement isn’t it.

Both seem way too invested in one upmanship and spend lots of words talking past each other.

[Res Ipsa]

Ockham's Razor has its heart in the right place—for one thing, it has nothing against mixed metaphors—but it's not reliable for choosing between theories because how much you assume isn't well defined. There are seriously people who invoke the Razor to justify their assumption of uncountably many copies of the entire universe, all forever undetectable to us, just because they think that this assumption lets them delete one iffy axiom from quantum mechanics.

These Many Worlds fans think of the measurement axiom in quantum mechanics as an extra assumption because to them it is a different kind of thing from all the other axioms, while they don't count their infinite worlds as additional assumptions, because all those extra worlds are merely more of the same kind of thing that we already agree that we have. They feel that they are like someone who is explaining the overturned garbage can by postulating that there are more racoons in the neighbourhood than we thought, instead of proposing that a wholly new kind of animal has intruded just to kick over our can.

I on the other hand feel that uncountably many parallel universes which can never be detected is the most blatant violation of Ockham's Razor that I can imagine, and that the measurement axiom is a crude placeholder which describes some real and important phenomena that we don't currently understand well. It's a dubious impostor of an axiom which will surely be replaced at some point, but accepting it for now is more sensible—and more honest—than postulating unobservable infinities just so we can pretend to have a perfect theory.

Evolutionary biology and special divine creation of species are another example of rival theories which both claim to be simpler and to make fewer significant assumptions. Part of accepting one theory or the other seems to include donning a lens that makes one's own assumptions seem common-sensical while the opposite assumptions seem enormous and unwarranted.

If the alternative assumptions are of comparable nature then it is easy to apply Ockham's Razor, but if the alternative assumptions are quite different in kind from each other then it's quite hard to say which set Ockham prefers.

Did that person on stage apply an elaborately staged trick using specialised contraptions that nobody would normally make, or did they simply use magic? Hey, the illusion theory requires us to postulate multiple tricky components while the magic theory only makes one assumption. Sure, we already know that smoke and mirrors exist, but the details of exactly how they're supposed to work in this case are obscure, and it should be clear to any thinking adult that the world includes many mysterious things, so why is it a big deal to postulate magic?

It may not be impossible to talk someone out of believing in stage magic but I don't think that appealing to Ockham's Razor is going to be a good way to do it.

I find it to be a helpful guideline, with the understanding that “simplest” or “fewest” are often manipulable and that the razor is not guaranteed to produce the correct answer. Because causation often depends on multiple contingent events or circumstances, the correct theory can be more complicated than necessary.

I tend to stick to the formulation “do not multiply entities needlessly.” Thus, although the stage magician’s trick is mechanically complex, magic is an unnecessary entity. The only necessary entity is the magician.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I tend to stick to the formulation "do not multiply entities needlessly."

Is Gemli doing that, iyo? If so, would you mind explaining it?

- Doc

[Marcus]

I thought I was done with quotes for a while, but this doozy of a nonsensical argument by Peterson is just bizarre.

Is DCP arguing here that predictions of a future event are the same thing as the "true claims" gemli referred to?

Curious that he didn't want to finish his analogy, and let it run out to March 30th.

Let's say that on the 30th, the number is higher. If there were some analysts who insisted that it was actually lower, would he still consider them to be "rational"? If they insisted, passionately, that $38,585 is a higher number than $40,693, would Dr. Peterson insist that this is a completely rational interpretation of the true realized number, and that people who think that a DIJA of $40K is less than a DIJA of $38K are perfectly rational in that belief?

Yes, DCP didn't think this through at all. Expected values, even if one makes the best prediction possible, based on all available information, are in no way equivalent or analogous to the "truth claims" gemli was referring to in the conversation:

16 hours ago edited
gemli: "True claims are those that are acknowledged by all rational observers."

That's a transparently ridiculous assertion, and an obviously false one.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average will either be higher on 30 March than it was today, or it will be lower. That is, it is either true or false that the DJIA will be higher on 30 March than it was today.

At this very moment, many rational and very dedicated investment analysts and investors believe that the DJIA will be higher. At this very moment, too, many rational and very dedicated investment analysts and investors believe that it will be lower. They are staking large amounts of money on the DJIA number for 30 March. The expectation of one faction will turn out to have been true, while that of the other will prove to have been false.

He even acknowledges that he is describing short term expectations that are fairly immediately and easily resolved, which is completely irrelevant to gemli's point.

[Res Ipsa]

I tend to stick to the formulation "do not multiply entities needlessly."

Is Gemli doing that, iyo? If so, would you mind explaining it?

- Doc

He didn’t phrase it that way in the comments I read. I think he referred to fewer unwarranted assumptions, which I think invites argument over how to count assumptions and which assumptions are warranted. Is an omniscient, omnipotent God one assumption? Or do we count each attribute of the proposed God as a different assumption?

I think my formulation is less prone to manipulation in deciding how and what should be counted. But I think it would get him to the same conclusion without some of the responses that kind of derail the core of his argument.

Here’s how it works for me. I choose not to recognize the existence of anything without some good reason for doing so. Good reason can include both evidence and argument. But, the burden of the proponent that any proposed thing exists is heavier than more likely than not that the thing exists. The burden is that it is more likely than not that the thing necessarily exists. So, I’m open to a wide range of evidence, but it has to meet a pretty high burden.

Here’s why I’ve made this choice. My mind is capable of imagining all kinds of things — some that exist in the real world and some that do not. If I aspire to be a rational person (which I do), I need a way to determine which of the infinite number of things I can imagine from things that actually exist. At the same time I want to leave myself open to thinking about a wide range of “good reasons” so that I don’t miss something. My approach to existence meets both criteria.

So, my classic example is my coffee table. Every time I look in front of my couch, I see it. If I try to walk through it, I get bruises on my shins. I can stand on it and am higher up than when I’m standing beside it. And this is true of every person that has visited my living room. The preponderance of the evidence is that my coffee table must exist, as there is no evidence at all consistent with it not existing.

Now take God. What good reason is there for me to believe that God’s existence is necessary? Most of those arguments fall within the fallacies of arguments from ignorance or arguments from incredulity. Arguments from consequences may provide practical reasons for believing in God, but those are irrelevant to the question of whether such an entity actually exists. And if I felt there was good reason to believe that some god-like entity must exist, which of the infinite number of Gods that I can imagine should I claim existence exists? The sheer number of Gods posited over the whole of human history shows that the existence of any specific God is highly improbable.

Gemli, I think, takes almost the inverse of my approach. He seems to apply the lesser burden of more likely than not to exist, but then takes a very narrow view of what constitutes “good reason.” We end up pretty close on the issue of God’s existence. I think he says there is no God, based on lack of evidence. I would say that I see no good reason to believe God must exist. Might be hairsplitting.

I know I’ve rambled. Hopefully the answer to your question is in there somewhere.

[Physics Guy]

I also find Ockham's Razor a good rule of thumb guideline, if I'm simply curious about which of two theories to entertain.

Entertaining a theory isn't usually a once-and-for-all decision to believe that it's true, anyway. It's usually just a decision to invest a bit more in seeing how well the theory works, as opposed to deciding that the theory is too unlikely to have enough truth in it for it to be worth any more of my time. Decisions like that are kind of micro-transactions of belief. They do involve committing resources based on a positive judgement of likelihood. They just don't involve all that many resources, and don't require such a high likelihood. When the stakes aren't that high, anyway, then even an unreliable guideline like Ockham's Razor can be worth applying.

The Razor just isn't something one should expect to use to convince anyone else of anything. If they believe differently, they probably also count multiplied entities differently.

With some kinds of things, like tables, it's easy to become reliably convinced that they exist. Even with those kinds of things, though, it may be much harder to learn what they really are. No amount of banging one's shin on a coffee table is going to reveal the atomic structure of the table's glass top. In fact there are ways to confirm that atomic structure just as thoroughly as one can confirm that the glass is hard on shins, but these confirmations of atomic structure are a lot harder to do than shin banging. And they probably involve more faith in abstract principles, like the principle that the chunks of glass in the lab are going to be typical of all the glass in the world.

The Higgs field is more pervasive than coffee tables. It's everywhere, and it's responsible for the mass of all matter we know. It's nonetheless really hard to confirm that it exists. You need a giant particle accelerator to smash things together hard enough to make a tiny and quickly vanishing splash in the Higgs field—and you need decades of particle physics to discern that tiny splash against the background of all the other crazy stuff that happens in those particle collisions.

If you only ever believe things that can easily be confirmed, you probably won't exactly be wrong about anything, but you'll live in a simplified, low-bandwidth world that may be self-consistent as far as it goes but that is far from the whole story. That doesn't mean that entertaining all possible fantasies is a good strategy, but I think it does mean that it pays to have a certain amount of epistemological risk tolerance, to be prepared to entertain possibilities to a certain extent in case they lead to discoveries.

[Marcus]

Nice essay, thanks!

...If you only ever believe things that can easily be confirmed...

Pretty sure that's not an issue for gemli. Or anyone reading here, for that matter.

Scene:

A coffee table, a Higgs field, and an angel that twinkled golden plates containing an imaginary history out of existence ...

Song begins:

"One of these things is not like the others..."

End scene.

[Physics Guy]

Regardless of what people actually believe or not, if the arguments they make against belief in angels would also apply against belief in Higgs bosons, then they should find better arguments against angels.

I don't believe in the angel, either. I still just feel that if you're going to bother arguing with people about their beliefs then you ought to do a proper job of it and make honest arguments. It's easy to say that angels which can only be seen after intense spiritual effort and preparation can't be real, because real things like coffee tables don't require any such effort to notice, but is anyone really prepared to live by that standard, of rejecting anything harder to confirm than a table?

If not, then I don't think one should be making that argument, no matter how silly it seems that these witnesses strained for hours to convince themselves that they'd seen an angel with golden plates. The fact that it's hard to see something isn't a proof that it isn't really there. If I really had to say which thing was most unlike the others, out of an angel, a Higgs boson, and a table, I honestly might have to say the table. Higgs bosons only ever exist in a pretty tenuous sense. They're not just like angels, but they're even more unlike tables, I think.

It may be that the argument can be improved. Can we articulate just what the relevant difference between angels and unstable particles is, and why detection difficulty is more problematic an issue for angels than for particles?

[Res Ipsa]

Regardless of what people actually believe or not, if the arguments they make against belief in angels would also apply against belief in Higgs bosons, then they should find better arguments against angels.

I don't believe in the angel, either. I still just feel that if you're going to bother arguing with people about their beliefs then you ought to do a proper job of it and make honest arguments. It's easy to say that angels which can only be seen after intense spiritual effort and preparation can't be real, because real things like coffee tables don't require any such effort to notice, but is anyone really prepared to live by that standard, of rejecting anything harder to confirm than a table?

If not, then I don't think one should be making that argument, no matter how silly it seems that these witnesses strained for hours to convince themselves that they'd seen an angel with golden plates. The fact that it's hard to see something isn't a proof that it isn't really there. If I really had to say which thing was most unlike the others, out of an angel, a Higgs boson, and a table, I honestly might have to say the table. Higgs bosons only ever exist in a pretty tenuous sense. They're not just like angels, but they're even more unlike tables, I think.

It may be that the argument can be improved. Can we articulate just what the relevant difference between angels and unstable particles is, and why detection difficulty is more problematic an issue for angels than for particles?

On what basis do you characterize my argument as dishonest?

[Rivendale]

It may be that the argument can be improved. Can we articulate just what the relevant difference between angels and unstable particles is, and why detection difficulty is more problematic an issue for angels than for particles?

From my experience many people think that the supernatural could operate on a different set of laws which until said laws are discovered it makes them unfalsifiable. There is just no reason to think that ghosts exist. The argument seems to be that "lots of people have believed in this throughout history," therefore it carries weight for evidence. This is has been done for many things (bigfoot, gods, angels, ghouls). As Gemli says, it isn't evidence for anything.

It is impossible to know that ghosts don't exist. Currently we have no reason to think they do. Gemli keeps claiming that people have claimed their existence for all of history (same with gods, demons...pick your belief) Throughout history there hasn't been any demonstration of their existence which isn't true for the ghostly world of the Higgs or other manifestations in the natural world. Isn't that a clear difference in claims?