Chubby Nickel Audio Vlog

The amount and understanding of evidence goes up as the level of risk from the claim goes up. If it requires so much evidence just to put a good amount of your money down, imagine how much evidence it would take to believe someone about an eternal soul and eternal damnation. So I’m sorry, but as level of risk involved with being wrong about something increases, the amount and accuracy required of the evidence also increases. Pascal had his wager backwards.

If you’re going to risk your eternal soul, eternal suffering eternal magic man in the sky ass kissing… then you should require the as close to absolute proof as possible. Unfortunately the more you get into definitions for a creator, the farther you get from reasonable evidence.

Let’s say for some reason you’re playing poker and for some reason you put not only all the money you have and all the money from selling your assets on the table for this one hand, you also will end up owing a bookie your life or $10 million. You have no idea what is in your hand, and no idea what is in anyone elses hands. One of the people put all in, if you put all in you’re risking your life and everything you have, for the chance to at least double your money. Given that you have no evidence at all that you will win or even have a chance to win, do you go all in? Probably not. However if you had four kings the decision might be a little more difficult because the chances that someone can beat that hand is extremely low. There is evidence that shows that getting a getting four of a kind are extremely low. Let alone that even if someone else has four of a kind, they still won’t likely beat four kings. I think the decision would be difficult, but the odds of you losing a hand in a fair game with four kings is lower than the chances you’ll die in a car crash. You don’t base your evidence on that someone just said that the odds are extremely good, you base you evidence on what can be mathematically proven, and though you’re playing the odds, in the case of four kings, your odds are almost sure, as close as 99.9%. So: if you’re putting your own life on the line, you don’t trust anyone, you make sure you understand the risks completely and make sure the evidence is as accurate and sure as possible.

Let’s get serious now. If you had to put a good portion of your monthly income and/or your life’s savings at risk, would you still trust your friend without much question? With this kind of value at risk, trust isn’t near enough evidence to be considered reasonable. It doesn’t matter if the person you’re trusting isn’t lying, they could be wrong. Are you willing to risk all that money on the trust that not only your friend isn’t lying but that also he/she is correct? I doubt it. With this level of harm at risk, I would hope you would ask for reasonable evidence. You would need to know how the money would be spent, who is going to be in control, who you could talk to in case you have any questions, the experience of the people in charge… getting to the point: When the risk of a claim being wrong (or right) will cause significant harm, a good amount of evidence is required to support the claim.

Let’s say you’re looking for something that has a moderate value, you would probably require moderate evidence. Say you’re asking your nerd buddy whether you should install Linux or not. Now if your friend is lying is to you, this will cause some minor irritation so instead of no evidence, you should ask for at least some kind of evidence. So your friend goes on and on about how awesome Linux is and how some versions are easier for newbs and you can even play most Windows games easily in Linux… blah, blah, blah. You take him at his word because you trust him. I think that with this level of importance, trust is a perfectly decent level of evidence. Because: 1) if your friend is lying, it does little harm, maybe a day of wasted time and 2) your friend is usually right when it comes to computers. Anyway: trust is only a good enough form of evidence if the trust in the claim will likely only cause a little bit of harm.

We’ve all played monopoly, and the system the banks work on is similar. The game they play is basically moving money from one tycoon to another and its all about gaining property, whether intellectual or not. The difference is that the government and regular people are the only ones who actually pay. And big banks are the player in charge of the bank/imf/national bank and there’s a screen in front of them so noone knows if the banks are playing fair.