I kinda wanted that to say “written in 1930 and first published in 1929”…
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Some of us have bullshit detectors that save hours of pointless reading without the need to scorn others.
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“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” Thank you, Carl Sagan.
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Yeah, no.
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Proper critical reading and analysis of a research paper is no small task*. I would suggest the average lay reader look at the overwhelming consensus. Many sources (primary literature and reviews) have refuted this work in excruciating details. We trust experts that climate change is real due to overwhelming consensus despite a small number of naysayers, why should we not trust the consensus on this?
In cases like this, the burden of proof is on the person claiming their unexpected finding as truth. I am not prepared to waste weeks doing a meta analysis that wont lead anywhere, when many other respected people have already done so. The authors need to step up their game, and just do a more conclusive study if they want people to beleive them.
*When I review a mansucript for publication I may spend several days working on it. However there are red flags that a trained reader knows to look for. This may not be apparent to someone who hasn’t been trained in reading primary literature. It is just a trained skill that takes practice and experience in a field.
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Couldn’t find any recently-deceased empiricists’ graves to piss on this time, Mitch? How sad for you.
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“Explosive” sounds like an overreaction on their part, but maybe they’re cranky because their atheism isn’t a faith-based position? I mean, mine isn’t. It’s a reasonable conclusion (or at least, it seems so to me), based on the available evidence, or lack thereof.
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But sometimes that is the correct stance to take. I know that perpetual motion/free energy cannot be true. Or at least it cannot be true given our current understanding of physics. Any perpetual motion machine would require us to also redefine physics at a fundamental level. When someone produces yet another free energy device that results in some infinitesimally small energy gain should we welcome it uncritically or maybe look for what flaw is causing a wrong result?
The balance would be different if any of these tiny results with world shaking ramifications had monumental results instead. Logically it should be easier to find a minor flaw that has resulted in a tiny bias, than it would be to fundamentally shift our understanding of the world.
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Yeah, you can’t definitively prove the non-existence of God, or fairies, or precognition, but that doesn’t mean it’s an article of faith to assume the non-existence of those things. Non-existence carries no burden of proof.
Somebody upthread quoted the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That’s true, but it’s even more general than that – claims require evidence. No “extraordinary” required.
Believing a thing exists without evidence that it does is faith. Not believing a thing exists without evidence that it doesn’t is not. The two positions are not equivalent, because proving a negative is not equivalent to proving a positive.
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“Atheism” is simply not believing in God. Agnostics, by definition, do not know whether God exists.
Not knowing whether something exists is not a form of “belief.” If you don’t know whether X exists, then certainly you don’t “believe in” X. Every agnostic is an atheist, by definition. There are also additional atheists who are not agnostics.
Atheism is not a “faith,” for the same reasons that “not playing soccer” is not a sport.
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NonSportsBall isn’t a thing?
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I almost went pro at not-playing-soccer until I failed to tear my ACL.
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I can totally envision how your career wouldn’t have turned out.
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That is what asporists explosively tell me, every time I point out to them that asporism is a sport. Just like how people also tend to get shouty at me when I repeatedly insist that water doesn’t make things wet, even though I’m being super polite about it.
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In order to preserve my spot in the “middle” of the debate, I must reserve judgment about whether or not I am a professional soccer player 
Who knows? Anything could be true—or false. Surely that is the reasonable moderate position.
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At least it’s not red?
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Is it really a moderate position? Or is it a super position?
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14 posts were split to a new topic: Agnostic or Atheist? YOU DECIDE!
Sure, that’s how we bootstrap p-values. Sometimes p-hacking is hard, so instead we just do a meta-analysis of what percentage of past analyses succeeded in their p-hacking to estimate the probability that we could succeed if we tried again. If the probability of success is greater than 1-α, then we conclude that we were right in our precognition of the data.
Otherwise we’d have to do actual scientific research, and do you have any idea how hard that is?
/S (in case its needed)
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my astrologer says precognition is bullshit.
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