In many discussions I'm pulled back to the distinction between not-guilty and innocent as a way to demonstrate how the burden of proof works and what the true default position should be in any given argument. A lot of people seem to not have any problem seeing the distinction, but many intelligent people for some reason don't see it.
In this article I explain why the distinction exists and why it matters, in particular why it matters in real-life scenarios, especially when people try to shift the burden of proof.
Essentially, in my view the universe we are talking about is {uncertain,guilty,innocent}, therefore not-guilty is guilty', which is {uncertain,innocent}. Therefore innocent ⇒ not-guilty, but not-guilty ⇏ innocent.
When O. J. Simpson was acquitted, that doesn’t mean he was found innocent, it means the prosecution could not prove his guilt beyond reasonable doubt. He was found not-guilty, which is not the same as innocent. It very well could be that the jury found the truth of the matter uncertain.
This notion has implications in many real-life scenarios when people want to shift the burden of proof if you reject a claim when it's not substantiated. They wrongly assume you claim their claim is false (equivalent to innocent), when in truth all you are doing is staying in the default position (uncertain).
Rejecting the claim that a god exists is not the same as claim a god doesn't exist: it doesn't require a burden of proof because it's the default position. Agnosticism is the default position. The burden of proof is on the people making the claim.
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Notes -
Should we be agnostic about Russel's Teapot?
E: Mostly focusing on continuing your thought about agnosticism. Your point about guiltiness is right.
Yes. Although I don't like to use the term "agnostic" because it relates to knowledge, and here we are dealing with belief. I prefer "skeptical".
The default position is
uncertain, so maybe there's a teapot, maybe not. That means we are questioning its existence, therefore we are skeptics. But this also means we don't believe its existence (not-guilty), which is different than believing it doesn't exist (innocent).Russel's Teapots seems bogus to me. I would absolutely not like to be "skeptical" (
not-guilty) about Russel's Teapot. I don't believe in such a teapot (innocent). Can it be proven?When I continued to think about this post, this is the reasoning that occurred to me: I am not completely ignorant. I know a few facts here from experience:
Teapots do not naturally form in outer space.
Humans do not normally send teapots to outer space.
Based on this line of thinking, I'm comfortable with believing it doesn't exist (
innocent).The one can come to me and say I haven't proven it
beyond a reasonable doubtbut now it feels like we're haggling over the standard of proof, not the burden of proof.Whereas your post gets the burden of proof right, it doesn't say much about standard of proof. Perhaps that is just a different topic?
But there is still zero evidence that such a teapot doesn't exist. Even if I were to grant you that your rationale is solid, that's not evidence.
I feel people have a hard time understanding that unlikelihood is not evidence. If someone tells me it's unlikely for me to lose in Russian roulette, that's not evidence that I'm going to win. Unlikely events happen all the time, and people don't seem to learn that.
What are the chances that the entire housing market is overpriced and it's about to collapse? Someone might have said "almost impossible" right before the financial crash of 2008, and in fact many did.
What are the chances that Bernie Madoff is running a Ponzi scheme given that his company has already passed an SEC exam? Again, "almost impossible" is what people said.
Black swans were considered impossible long time ago, and yet they existed, which is precisely why the term is used nowadays to describe things we have no evidence for, but yet could happen.
You can be considered right in thinking that black swans don't exist, that Bernie Madoff is legit, and that the housing market is not about to collapse (
innocent), right until the moment the unlikely event happens and you are proven wrong. It turns out a cheeky Russian astronaut threw out a teapot in the 1970s and it has been floating since.Why insist in believing the unlikely is not going to happen only to be proven wrong again and again when we can just be skeptical?
What is evidence? Is seeing a video recording of the defendant shooting his wife evidence? Recordings can be faked, even if it's unlikely.
I agree with the rest of what you said, that people who predict things will often be wrong.
What's stopping me from being skeptical about everything, even in the face of stuff you call "evidence"? Maybe you & your blog are just a GPT bot. Why should I just assume I'm talking to a human?
Which is why evidence should not be considered proof. People often confuse the two, for example in the aphorism "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" which is incorrect: it is evidence of absence, it's just not proof.
You shouldn't. Why do you need to know that I'm a human?
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