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martingale:
It most certainly was a proof:
Assumption: B lies.
Fact: B claims H has nukes
Conclusion: B's claim is not true

Uh, no. This only follows logically if B lies all the time. In 2003 that was looking likely, but not certain, and certainly not proof of anything.

It turned out in retrospect that he lied maybe 95% of the time. But that fact wasn't available in 2003.

A rational person can still disagree with you by disagreeing with some of your unstated underlying assumptions, such as e.g. that H had actually had them built fully rather than only partially say, or that he had them smuggled in, or that a workable program is much less expensive than you believe etc.

But there was no absolutely evidence to support any of those claims.

You're sounding like the people who said that Saddam really did have WMDs but... they were smuggled to Syria, which is why they were never found.

There's a vast uncrossable gulf between that kind of narrative logic, in which anything goes as long as it sounds vaguely plausible, and evidence-based argument, which requires a decent data set to argue implications from.

Unless you happen to be a WMD scientist, all of your assumptions about H and his country were derived from interpreting media reports available to you, together with the meta-assumption that these reports were not all outright lies and misinformation.

That and reading books and comments by the UN weapons inspectors, who might reasonably be expected to have a more accurate picture than the media.

In fact the media were spectacularly wrong and generally supportive of the party line, so there was no meta-assumption needed.

I assumed the primary sources - which were freely available to anyone - were more accurate than the media reporting.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Sun Jan 25th, 2009 at 07:04:01 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Uh, no. This only follows logically if B lies all the time.
There's no "all the time" in the example, only person U who assumes that B lies on TV. Your ojbection has merit of course, but only if you extend the scope of the original example hugely.

It turned out in retrospect that he lied maybe 95% of the time. But that fact wasn't available in 2003.
Actually, it was pretty obvious at the time that he lied, which is why the whole thing was such a hard sell. B's statements were repeatedly contradicted by the IAEA investigators on the ground in UN reports, his claims were not confirmed by any major powers (France, Russia, China) except for the US, his dossier was immediately shown to be lifted (and edited) from internet sources, his claims agreed with Powell's UN lies, which were also contradicted by the IAEA at the time, and of course most of his claims were contradicted by the Iraqi government at the time.

The only way anybody at the time could claim that it wasn't obvious that the UK government was lying was by weighting the USUK statements 99%, and all other statements 1%, say. That's actually quite reasonable for British people in general to do, on the grounds that they'd have to become paranoid otherwise, but non-anglophones had no such conflict of interest.

Which nicely again illustrates my point about unstated assumptions leading to divergence. Anybody who placed even 50% weight on USUK statements and 50% weight on statements from other sources essentially had to consider B a liar, simply due to the large number of contradicting claims of fact by other independent sources.

There's a vast uncrossable gulf between that kind of narrative logic, in which anything goes as long as it sounds vaguely plausible, and evidence-based argument, which requires a decent data set to argue implications from.
You seem to think that evidence-based argument (as opposed to calling something narrative logic?) requires a specific set of common initial assumptions (such as the famous I think therefore I am, which alone is obviously insufficient). Please list them.

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$E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
by martingale on Sun Jan 25th, 2009 at 11:38:01 PM EST
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