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Robin Hanson's avatar

Lubos, yes, a statement is not its own evidence, but the fact that a person claims the statement is evidence, even if sometimes weak evidence.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

On one hand, it is a very inspiring reading. On the other hand, would you agree that all these statements how much evidence XY requires to make us certain at a UV level can be expressed much more accurately, e.g. in terms of the formulae behind the Bayesian reasoning (which I don't particularly like, but OK)?

I didn't quite understand in what sense a statement itself is its own evidence.

A statement about children who died under some unusual circumstances needs some evidence. Of course, the evidence doesn't have to be directly related to the children and a good track record of someone saying true things can be strong enough.

Well, I can tell you a real story of this kind that happened to me, and what it means. One hour before my PhD defense, I woke up in my former office where I spent a night ;-), got a shower, and found a projector. Half an hour before the defense started, I read an e-mail in Czech. It was 9 a.m. and the e-mail contained an extraordinary statement that one - and 5 minutes later, two - large airplanes crashed into some rather well-known buildings 50 miles from the place where I defended.

It was extraordinary and a priori unlikely but I - probably in agreement with your analysis - immediately knew that the message was almost certain. But this belief was still based on some strong evidence, albeit indirect one: the message seemed to be copied from the Czech Press Agency. It sounded strange that the author would fake such a serious message because this exact kind of tough fake messages wasn't usual with him. And it sounded even more unlikely that the Czech Press Agency would create such a silly black joke. So I immediately decided that it was almost certainly true. And of course, it was.

On the other hand, I received a lot of similar extraordinary messages from some other sources during different days than 9/11/2001 that I didn't believe simply because they were extraordinary while the evidence (of the phenomena themselves or the integrity of the messenger) was not. And I was right.

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