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Do you go flying through intersections without looking for pedestrians or other cars? Do you drink from an unlabeled bottle of fluid because it appears to be milk? I can function in the world, with only partial information. Sometimes our assumptions bite us in the ass but we can't live our lives...

Frothingslosh. Have you ever been shown something that turned out to be not what it appeared? Has it ever happened to you? Have you ever seen a magician produce bouquets of flowers from their empty hand or the ace of spades plucked out of thin air? I have many times. Many other times, where...

I didn't notice when you changed your example from yesterday, when the "proof" consisted of 12 balls, 2 ramps, and 2 buckets. Now it's just zero balls and one bucket. I'm dancing around? So to you, being shown something is proof. For me, it is far from proof. Do I get to examine the bucket...

Not quite. For a number of reasons. One, I'm not rejecting logic because I don't like the conclusions. I'm rejecting it because in this case it's being used as a slight of hand, without furthering our knowledge in any way. If the balls are not in the bucket, it's an inescapable consequence of...

I think we all agree that the burden of proof is on the prosecution. It's one of the things about law and civics that we learn very early on. BUT The word "PROOF" has its own meaning in court, quite different from actual, real, uncontestable PROOF. There is no PROOF in court. As Rabbie, Frothy...

Yeah, well. Upgraded both my PCs to 10. Did not like it right off the bat. Slow as all hell (and I have an I7 machine with plenty of horsepower). Edge - bah. When I want to watch an avi or a wmv, I don't want to hear any popular new tunes or get any other streaming content other than what I am...

I agree with you there - proof for the legal system is a far cry from proof for a mathematician or a scientist.

Right - just as 'beyond a reasonable doubt' is not the same thing as 'beyond any doubt' which is the definition of proof. Exactly. Prosecution never proved their case. I guess you would accept their argument "Who else COULD have done it?" as proof that OJ did do it. Proof means something...

I will agree that in a thought experiment where there are only 2 possible outcomes and they are mutually exclusive, and you prove one of the outcomes, you have automatically disproved the other outcome. We know balls run down ramps, and that they don't dematerialize from one bucket and reappear...

What's an "exhaustive search" then? Searching implies there is a seeker who is looking for something. Maybe that seeker has bias that the thing will never be found. I don't even get this conversation anymore. It's perfectly clear to me that negatives are unprovable, they can only be...

So I'm the one stretching this one? Here, on the 380th (and counting) page of this thread. I'm not blowing any comments out of proportion. I don't get why you say I am. You said the most common challenge to a peer reviewed finding is a questioning of experimental technique - but my comment you...

Maybe Mike was a bad example. The purpose was to show that a completely bounded domain and a simple question still had big problems if you want to show proof. If Mike was a bad example, so were the ramp and balls. You contend that you can prove that a ball never entered the left bucket because...

Inadequate controls, misidentification of relevant variables, measurement error, statistical anomalies, sampling error - these are all important sources of experimental error and incorrect conclusions. These are at the heart of research and experimentation. They're not simply insignificant...

I can poke holes in your ramp scenario. It doesn't matter that the holes I poke are incredibly unlikely. They are not impossible. You say that the balls can't bounce out of the bucket. Can you prove that? How many trials would it take? An infinite number. Or would you use physics...

I don't see how nonexistence can EVER be proved. Certainly you can rule out highly improbable scenarios when searching for an explanation of an event - but that's just using probability to narrow the search. It does not constitute PROOF, which implies that EVERY alternative explanation has been...

I know this is an oldish thread but I just thought I'd weigh in. I have both the PS3 and the PS4. Some of the games were better as PS3 than they are as PS4 - example being the Tiger Woods golf series by EA Sports was far better than the new Rory McIlroy version. Far far better. And when I got...

Ancient and prehistoric people were just as smart as we are. We may have more facts at our disposal but other than that, a person living 75,000 years ago would be as smart as anyone today - minus the formal education. The tendency to think of early homo sapiens as knuckle draggers is a result...

If we're trying to reconstruct the past we're guessing and estimating. They can narrow things down to 500,000 years +/- or even a billion years is a rough estimate on the scale of the BIG BANG. Ancient human history can maybe be estimated to within 500-1000 years depending on what evidence they...

Like Frothy said, reconstructing human events from the past is a very different matter from understanding the forces in the universe. I took some anthro courses in college and they do have a clue how they placed the boulders, by the way. With ramps. But science is not going to fully explain...

Edit Sorry - my mistake. Thought you were taking Galaxiom's position - or that you somehow thought you were. What you wrote was quite clear but I still misconstrued.