tagriffy wrote: ↑Tue Nov 29, 2022 7:48 pm
OTOH, the fact there are no Corn Flakes in the bag may also indicate the person who did the shopping saw there was enough on hand to not need include it in their grocery shopping. So we could see the absense of Corn Flakes in the shopping bag as a significant indication that you did the shopping only if your household were out of Corn Flakes. And even then, we would have to assume the person who did the shopping didn't simply forget them or wanted to try something new. That might be surprising, but there are still many different causes that could result in no Corn Flakes being in the shopping bag. So while it may be a good bet that you did the shopping, I wouldn't like the odds enough to take that bet.
As I said, absence of Corn Flakes is no proof that I was the shopper. When I'm the only one in my family who doesn't eat Corn Flakes, though, the absence of Corn Flakes in the weekly shopping has to count as some significant evidence that I did the shopping.
More importantly for this thread's real discussion, I think, the absence can easily point more strongly towards me being the shopper than the presence of Corn Flakes would point away from me. Suppose there were only a 1% change that my other family members would ever omit Corn Flakes, and with me the chance is 50%. If Corn Flakes are present, I'm only about half as likely as anyone else to have done the shopping, but if Corn Flakes are absent, then I'm fifty times more likely to be the shopper than anyone else is.
There just is no blanket logical rule of reciprocity about absence and presence, as evidence. You have to look in detail at how likely absence and presence would respectively be, under each rival hypothesis.
Having said that, I agree that bad arguments can be made in favour of true propositions, or against false ones. Just because the Book of Mormon actually is ahistorical doesn't mean that every argument against its historicity has to hold water. If the goal is to understand why and how things are true, and not just to tick the right final boxes, then it's important to unravel the flaws in a bad argument, even if one agrees with its conclusion. Even if one agrees that the Book of Mormon isn't historical, it's a worthwhile contribution to explain which reasons for believing that are sound, and which are actually bogus.
It's not uncommon in physics, on the other hand, for something to remain controversial for some time even though there's a simple argument for one side, until someone comes up with a trickier argument, that is somehow easier for people to accept. For one thing, it's harder to admit that you've failed to follow a simple proof, than to accept that you were confused on a tricky point. After the controversy is settled by the tricky proof, however, it often comes to be acknowledged that the simple argument was not only right but also perfectly valid, and people just didn't want to believe it. The tricky proof is then forgotten. I mention this just to warn that sometimes it's worth thinking twice about whether an argument that one would like to dismiss as simplistic is really as bad as one wants it to be.
I was a teenager before it was cool.