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I'm having trouble understanding the idea that "the onus is on the person making the positive claim to provide sufficient evidence to prove their case". It looks obvious why this is a good idea, but it seems completely open to the rhetorical trick of putting the onus on the other party to prove you wrong even if your own case is unproven (perhaps because the question is a hard one and whoever is tasked with proving anything will have a hard time).
What got me thinking about this was an internet argument on immigration and crime. Half a century ago the status quo was restricted immigration and the onus would be on the person advocating for more to prove that it was a good thing, nowadays the status quo is liberal immigration and the onus is on the person advocating restrictions to prove that it is a bad thing. No scientifically relevant change has taken place, only a change in government policy, but one side can now quote a basic principle of science to bolster their case in an argument even if they know nothing more than the other party.
The due diligence question is obviously is this actually a fundamental aspect of science as stated or is it misrepresenting a more nuanced principle?
FWIW, I think this highlights the distinction between epistemological and decision-making logics.
From an epistemological point of view, the burden makes sense -- the default position is equipoise or agnosticism. Until presented with reliable evidence, one should neither believe nor negate a claim. One is entitled (and IMHO obligated) to say that the question remains open.
From a decision-making perspective (including political & legal disputes), there is no luxury of equipoise. A decision has to be made, a political action is either taken or not, a legal verdict is issued. That's where defining the burden of proof becomes extremely relevant but that is always extrinsic to the scientific/epistemic perspective. Epistemology doesn't say anything about the idea that a criminal defendant should be presumed innocent until proven guilty -- that had to come from outside.
So yeah, in politics, one popular formulation (advocated a lot as Chestertonian or Burkean) is that altering the state quo bears the burden. That impacts the political debate but it doesn't change the question from a scientific sense.
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No, it is not a fundamental aspect of science. The idea of the null hypothesis is derived from statistical hypothesis testing, which wasn't even popularized until the mid 20th century. The idea that it is "fundamental to science" is clearly refuted by the history of science, which proceeded rapidly without it.
There is a practical matter, which is that a scientific community does not have the capacity to take every claim that passes through seriously. Thus, there is an initial burden of evidence to show your claim should be considered seriously. But is no different than in the court system that the initial burden is on the person filing the lawsuit. While reasonable, it is not a fundamental law of the universe. Above all, it does not constitute "evidence."
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I don't think it's about positive or negative claim. If you claim something as fact you have to provide evidence.
e.g. a liberal immigration policy is good because ... or a closed immigration policy is good because ...
Both claims require evidence.
The "onus" or burden of proof applies to the status quo. If we are doing something and it works why should we change. We need to be convinced by your "proof" before we expend effort changing.
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I think the correct fully-nuanced way to understand this is in reference to Occam's Razor:
'Moving from a less complex explanatory model towards a more complex explanatory model cannot be justified without the introduction of new data which the less complex model cannot explain.'
I think that's the fully general and correct formulation of who has teh onus to provide evidence in any situation.
The problem, of course, being that people will disagree about which of their models requires a less complex explanatory model, and the average person is ussually not qualified to judge those claims.
Is it less complex to say that we assume all races have the same genetic component of intelligence because it's only positing a single set of intelligence factors instead of multiple ones for different races, meaning there are fewer bits in the theory?
Or is it less complex to say that genetic drift and mutation and so forth are all things that we already know are parts of the model, so we would expect some random differences just based on noise, and having the values be exactly the same would require some mysterious extra factor countering that type of drift and forcing them to be the same?
(and then there are 10 more layers of nuance after that on both sides, of course)
So what naturally happens is that different people on different sides of an issue each feel that they have the simplest explanation that requires additional evidence to overturn, and therefore the onus to provide evidence is on the other side.
A lot of people will come to that conclusion because they are already on a side, and it is convenient for them if their side's views are the logical default, so they easily convince themselves that this is true.
On the other hand, we shouldn't be so cynical as to rule out the fact that many people encountering an issue will have thoughts or intuitions about which side's model is more parsimonious first, and join that side for that reason. They may still be wrong, but it's still epistemically virtuous if that honestly wrong interpretation of the actual question at hand is what guided them to choose a side. It's really about all we can ask for.
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I googled "positive claim" and one of the first relevant things that came up was Burden of Proof, which speaks as if positive claim means existential qualifier, For example, "there exists a teapot orbiting the Sun somewhere in the solar system." It contrasts that with a negative claim, which asserts the non-existence of something. Certainly, it is easier to prove a positive claim than a negative one.
The issue you're talking about seems to be more like "null hypothesis," which is definitely just cultural consensus and is essentially a rhetorical trick, and not very rigorous. When I took statistics class in school, I never liked null hypothesis as a concept, as I noticed that it didn't seem mathematical to me (although it was intuitive).
Science is not immune to this at least according to Yudkowsky. I've read attempts to formalize what burden of proof ought to be, and the ones that seem aesthetic to me are just having proof "in proportion to how complex the hypothesis is," which is in line with Occam (buzzword dump). This has the added benefit of ignoring the order that evidence is encountered.
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Politically, this is the instrumentalization of Chesterton's Fence (and the related concept I've taken to calling "Chesterton's Ruins"). The status quo bias presumes the wisdom of the past, in a Panglossian logic, isn't so bad, so you need to justify any changes. It's the conservatism of the comfortable.
I just watched this happen at a local courthouse. A new young judge was just seated. He wants everyone to think well of him, he wants to be seen to be energetic not lazy, he looks at his schedule and his first trial isn't until the end of next month! So he calls the two lawyers in the case and says, can you do Friday? They, of course, say yes, because judges never reschedule anything unless it is really important and they don't want to piss off the new guy.
But now those two lawyers are calling everyone else they're working with and rescheduling things to make Friday work, and the ripple effects are felt throughout the courthouse. And all the other judges are mad at the new judge, for fucking with the system. But he had no idea, he just saw an opportunity to do something and did it.
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This is because most people don't understand formal reasoning. Proposition A being unproven doesn't mean Not A is assumed to be true. The "default" is agnosticism. This is a little more complicated in practice because most of the things people are arguing are not brand new subjects, so there's probably preexisting evidence which would skew our conclusions one way or the other if we could agree on what it means.
A considerable amount of research has taken place; however, that is mostly irrelevant to internet debates on immigration since those debates are overwhelmingly normative, with a couple of ablative empirical arguments for when you don't want to lead with your normative objection.
That a considerable amount of research has taken place doesn't actually tell anyone anything. Whether or not "thousands of lines of code have been written" is wholly independent of whether "the software performs to specification".
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Oh definitely, I just meant the change from one status quo to another isn’t scientifically relevant.
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I'd treat this like a social norm. The practical problem being solved is that people have finite time. This rule is useful because it keeps conversations productive. It's not necessarily a philosophical claim; "ignore claims that don't have evidence" is probably a good heuristic but isn't proof of anything.
Suppose I enter a conversation and make a surprising statement, contrary to the common wisdom. To pick an example, if I'm hanging out with a bunch of libertarians, I might say:
If we're being super-literal, my statement is technically about what's going on in my own head; I either believe that, or I don't. So, if my conversation partners want to be jerks, they could say "That's true." and mean, "Yes, you probably do believe that because you are an idiot and believe any number of false things."
But, that's a generally obnoxious way to approach conversations. The commonly-understood subtext of my statement is something like:
So, now I'm not just making a statement about what's going on in my own head. I'm (1) making a claim about reality and (2) telling my conversation partner that THEY should adopt my view. In the context of a conversation, it's perfectly reasonable for them to ask, basically, "Ok, why? Why should I think that?"
There are two practical reasons for this:
There are a couple exceptions to this principle.
Philosophy journals have unlimited pages and can take up questions where "everyone knows" the answer. Economics journals also have lots of space. It's appropriate for the National Bureau of Economic Research to investigate all kinds of questions along the lines of "What happens if we continue current policy?" / "What happens if we change policy?"
There are all kinds of things that I believe where, if you caught me at a cocktail party, I'd have a hard time mustering evidence. For example:
It happens that my belief comes from an econometrics paper I read a decade ago. I don't remember the title of the paper, and certainly don't carry a copy with me. So, if someone (say, a doctor) disagreed with me, I'd pretty much shrug and acknowledge that I don't have any convincing-to-them evidence to hand. But I'm also not going to change my viewpoint back to the 'common belief' simply because I left an econometrics paper in a drawer. So, this gets us to "Agree to Disagree" which is a good way to handle social conversations when no one has access to evidence at hand.
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"The Sovereign is he who sets the null hypothesis"
If there's a principled way to do that outside well defined scientific experiments, then I have yet to encounter one.
define "well defined"
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I think in theory the principled way is Occam's Razor, 'whichever model fully explains the observed data and is most simple is the null hypothesis'.
But of course that's an abstract metric, humans can't actually calculate that correctly in complex systems.
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