suggestions to reduce misinformation and bias

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How do you prove the negative?

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Quote from: Penguinn on June 10, 2018, 06:04:47 PMHow do you prove the negative?
Negative

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Quote from: totallyred on June 11, 2018, 04:21:14 AMNegative

I think he means proving all members are not actually a single person taking multiple roles.

As far as that point goes, I think it is moot. The logistics, and seeing how this forum operates in real time, makes it impossible for it to be realistically all one person.

I don't know about the other points.

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The negative = something that's "not"

How do you prove something "ISN'T"? If the fact that something "IS" can't be proved, it means it isn't.

For example how would you prove there ISN'T a ghost in your room?

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Quote from: Penguinn on June 11, 2018, 05:49:35 PMThe negative = something that's "not"

How do you prove something "ISN'T"? If the fact that something "IS" can't be proved, it means it isn't.

For example how would you prove there ISN'T a ghost in your room?

But that doesn't mean you can't prove a negative.

How do you prove there isn't a human lawyer hiding somewhere in your room? If you search all possible spots in your room, you can claim with good plausibility (beyond reasonable doubt) that there is not a lawyer hiding anywhere in your room. Record all spots in your room 24/7, for a month straight, analyze all the footage, and that's very strong proof. He'd have to have appeared sometime or die out of dehydration. 

What is generally meant with "proving a negative" is that you can't prove "something does not exist". That becomes a problem with ill-defined phenomena that have never been observed before.

How do I prove there isn't a magical, invisible, immaterial, aphonic, human-shaped lawyer hiding in my room? Well, that I can't prove with any of my means. The vagueness and lack of concrete definitions for the first word makes the case ever more difficult. Is the human-shaped lawyer invisible only to the capacity of the human eye, or magically invisible?

Anyway, for those of us who registered after the drama in the old forums, I understand totallyred's concerns. What I can say is that the mods and their diaries seem pretty trustworthy.

I'd also like to think this forum operates on a loss.