in the "What exactly is is CRT? thread…
I wrote this:
so the bottom line is I called you out when you lied about
a ‘‘Harvard professor’’ quote and your response was’’
and Observe wrote this:
‘’ No. you called me a liar (and here is the important part)…
without evidence’’
‘‘Without evidence’’ the problem is that Observe hasn’t provided us
with any evidence as to the ‘‘Harvard professor’’ name’’ and therein lies
the tale…all Observe has given us is a statement…no evidence…
and my response was another statement, with no evidence…
so where exactly is the evidence? that lies with facts
and the facts in this particular matter is the name of the “Harvard
professor” name who stated this
" It was a Harvard professor (not fox) who said that maths (consequentially also
science, logic and rational thinking) is racist."
this is not a factual statement, hence it is not an evidence statement…
had Observe given us the name of this fictitious “Harvard professor” then the
the statement would have been an evidence based statement…
there is a fact within the statement…
for example had Observe said, "It was a Harvard Professor, ‘‘JOHN SMITH’’, (not fox) who
said, Etc…Etc…that would have made his statement a factual statement, an statement
of evidence…we can look up this ‘‘JOHN SMITH’’ of Harvard and see if he actually make
such a statement…
let us say, I ask, what is the distance from the earth to the sun?
now that isn’t an evidence base statement… that is a question…
I answer, the earth is 93 million miles from the sun… that becomes
an evidence base statement…
but let us say you disagree with that statement… the earth is not 93 million miles
from the sun… prove your evidence…I might say, scientists have determined the
distance of the earth to the sun… decades ago… and again, you might say, I
don’t believe that “evidence” prove to me, right here and right now, the
earth is 93 million miles from the sun… well, unless we both can understand
the math, the equations behind the 93 million miles distance, I can’t prove it…
in other words, if we demand strict direct evidence of any statement,
such as the earth is 93 million miles from the sun…we can’t prove that statement.
I certainly don’t have the math skills to ‘‘prove’’ how far the earth is from the sun…
So in fact, I don’t have the ‘evidence’’ to prove that the earth is 93 million miles
from the sun…
On a very basic level, we must accept ‘‘evidence’’ that is, at best, second hand…
Today I had some blood work taken for an upcoming physical… let us assume
that something showed up, say my blood work shows signs of Cancer…
the doctor will say, you have ‘‘evidence’’ of cancer in your bloodwork…
and I say ‘‘prove it’’ doctors are experts at reading the results of bloodwork,
and she says, ‘there your levels are higher then they should be’’
and how does that exactly ‘‘prove’’ to me, give me evidence I might
have cancer? At some level, I am going to have to take her word for it
due to my inability to read the bloodwork…I simply don’t have the knowledge
to be able to ‘‘read’’ or understand the numbers given on a bloodwork
paper…what she says is ‘‘Evidence’’ are just numbers to me…
the fact is that there seems to be different ‘‘levels’’ of ‘‘Evidence’’
or ‘‘proof’’
at a basic level, we have evidence such as the ‘‘nameless’’
harvard professor… if Observe provides that name, he is giving
us evidence for his statement…now I am the one on the hook for
calling Observe a ‘‘Liar’’…but the entire question revolves around the nature
of evidence…what is ‘‘evidence?’’
and somehow we have drifted into Epistemology…
the theory of knowledge, its methods, validity, and scope…
the question facing us here is this, ‘‘is knowledge still valid even
if we don’t understand that knowledge?’’
is the sun still 93 million miles from earth, even if we cannot understand
the math behind that ‘‘evidence?’’
we must take it on faith that the math works out because we ourselves
cannot work out the math…how does evidence work out if we cannot,
by ourselves work out or understand the evidence?
and in our modern scientific, mathematical world, where so much '‘evidence’
is outside of our own knowledge or understanding…how do we work
out our understanding of evidence if we cannot grasp the nature of the
evidence? we lacks the skills to interpret what the evidence is telling us…
Kropotkin
