Explaining logic with a storyfrom @sensei.nick

Transcript

If I told you there's a dragon in my garage, would you believe me? You can't see it. It's invisible. You can't hear it. It's silent, and you can't feel it. Its fire does not produce heat. So if there's no way to test it, measure it, observe it, or detect its effects, what is the difference between that dragon and no dragon at all? And that's what philosophers call the burden of proof, and it's simple. If you make the claim, the responsibility falls on you to support it and not the other way around. If I say that there's a dragon in my garage and and you say you don't believe me, I don't get to respond with, well, can you prove there isn't one? Because there's an infinite number of imaginary things I rank invent every second. Ghosts in your closet, fairies in your walls, and invisible force fields around your house. So if we required people to disprove every unsupported claim, conversation would collapse instantly. So logic created one rule, and that's claims require evidence, especially bold ones. And here's where it gets interesting. A lot of people reverse this. They make a dramatic claim and then expect everyone else to do the work of disproving it, researching it, debating it, and explaining why it's rank. And that's not how rational thinking worse, and it's shifting the burden. So if a claim cannot be tested in any possible way, it has no practical difference from being false. It might not be impossible, but there's no reason to treat it as true. So when someone makes a big claim, you don't need a twenty minute rebuttal. You ask one question, and that's, can you show me? If the answer is no, the conversation is over, and that's simply intellectual hygiene.