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 -
Okay, fair play, you at least didn't get anything horribly wrong in this one. It wasn't good, but you didn't get the basic premise of your article fatally wrong.
Ah, perhaps my above post would come off as a bit strange without context. The last two times I read felipec's crossposts, they made catastrophic mistakes in understanding the topic, but the tone was rather smug. I said that the next time he wrote a post and linked it here, if he was smugly wrong again I would stop reading his posts.
So I'm acknowledging that he did better this time. His engagement in the thread is also a bit better.
I was not smug, you believed I was smug. Big difference.
Technically speaking, he said the tone was smug.
Doesn't that claim that I was smug?
Are you really going to start a second branch off this conversation in the exact same direction?
It's not the same direction. In subthread
aI'm talking about why I don't believe it's good to elevate options to facts, I'm not talking about who/what was claimed to be smug anymore.In this subthread
bI'm asking a simple question: doesn't that say that I was wrong?In fact before I started subthread
bI was going to make a comment in subthreadathat I don't believe if I had said "the tone was not smug, you believed it was smug" my point would not have changed at all, even if more technically correct, your initial comment (he said the tone was smug) would not have applied, and I'm pretty sure I still would have been downvoted.I removed that comment because I didn't want to muddle my point, and I believe it's relatively unimportant what might have happened had I said something else. If you really believe it would have made a difference, I can edit the comment, but I don't think anything would change.
Then I read that he did in fact called me smug a few sentences later, so even if I'm not talking about "my tone"/"the tone" in subthread
aanymore (I'm talking about something more important: my original point), I wonder if you still believe he didn't call me smug, when in fact he straight up did. You don't have to answer.My actual point is in subthread
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