I feel like often people ask me “Oh yea? Name some examples.” and the burden is on me to prove something by providing representative examples. But often it’s so overwhelming how many examples there are for something that I feel obligated then to either list everything, or try extra hard to find good examples, and even then I feel like I could be misrepresenting the case by not providing enough examples. Basically I feel like I would have to give many, many examples, or none at all, otherwise anything in the middle could be non-representative of the true trend.

Ironically, now you will want me to give examples of situations that I’m talking about. But for this I will provide 2 examples and rest on good faith that you will believe me (given the context of this post) that this happens much more often than I care to provide examples for.

So one example is when you are attempting to prove to someone that a certain thing is scientifically proven or is agreed upon as scientific consensus. You can look to the generally agreed hierarchy of evidence and provide what it considers to be high-quality evidence, such as meta analyses and systematic reviews, but even then there can be disagreement between specific reports, and there can be outliers that disagree with the overall most common trends or findings. So the only way to really prove something is to provide many, many different instances of scientific evidence to the point where the other person would be unable to find the same level or amount of evidence to the contrary by virtue of the fact that it doesn’t exist to the same overwhelming degree, essentially proving the scientific fact. But again, this takes either an enormous amount of high quality evidence from various different sources, or nothing at all and simply an assertion that something is in fact scientifically proven or agreed upon as scientific consensus, because anything else in the middle could misrepresent the case and make it seem less substantiated than it actually is. It’s either “all or nothing”.

And now I’ll provide a specific anecdote about someone who argued that there are no decent stories with a female main protagonist. I am so sure and believe it to be so obvious that there is an extensive history of great female main protagonists and female-driven stories, in all forms of storytelling, that I found this an overwhelming task to attempt to prove when the person asked for specific examples. How can I make the case of the wealth of good stories with female main characters without providing an exhaustive (or highly numerous) list? Even if I pick a few great examples, the person can always make the objection that “Those are an exception, and they don’t represent the overall trend.” and I risk misrepresenting that trend if the examples chosen aren’t the best ones available, too. How can you possibly prove something like that without a very long and well-thought out and extensively researched list? Again, it seems like it’s either attempt such a daunting task, or don’t engage with the request for examples at all and just assert the claim that there are many examples, without specifying any to avoid the risk of taking on the burden of proving it and possibly misrepresenting the trend.

I hope this made any sense at all.

  • Flax@feddit.uk
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    7 months ago

    It’s not that I’m moving the goalposts, atheists moved the goalposts to impossibility. If the universe is finite and there’s nothing infinite beyond, infinite concepts cannot exist. Neither can objective morality. It’s like looking at a cake and asking for evidence that somebody baked it.

    • Maalus@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Ah yes, objective morality and the ‘maker argument’ which can be summed up to “if I go out in the woods, step on shit, look around, no animals that I can see, god must have shat himself”. That’s the thing - you can’t prove god exists. You filled in the gap with a mythology and think it’s the only explanation for life to exist. So you cannot bring proof. So you cannot convince an atheist that god exists because you yourself don’t even know that.

      • Flax@feddit.uk
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        7 months ago

        So basically your method is “Disregard all evidence of God as being something else”. Seems rational.

            • Maalus@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              Ah yes my ridiculous standard of “it needs to be true”. You have nothing. Otherwise it wouldn’t be religion and faith, it would be common sense. You use parlor tricks to confuse people who don’t know better. But when someone knows all of your tricks and calls them out one by one, you throw a hissy fit.

    • Fal@yiffit.net
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      7 months ago

      If the universe is finite and there’s nothing infinite beyond, infinite concepts cannot exist.

      But how are mirrors real if your eyes don’t exist?

      See. I can post nonsense too