Homosexuality and "Love the sinner, hate the sin"

[Simon_Jester]

Be careful when assuming that consensus implies evidence, however.

Consensus does not imply evidence. It does imply the existence of heuristics- people can at least agree on what types of methods may be used to arrive at an answer to the question. Having bad heuristics may mean you get wrong answers, but no question can be answered without heuristics.

Being able to find consensus answers that are broadly shared among a significant chunk of a large group is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition. If you can find such an answer it might still be wrong. But if you can't find such an answer, then the odds are any answer you try to come up with will be just as wrong.

The significant chunk of the group doesn't have to be a majority, or even a plurality, either. It just has to exist, in quantity and quality that suggests that you haven't just roped together a crowd of maniacs or fools.

[Feil]

To follow your weather example, it is possible to predict with 80% certainty that it will rain between 2 and 3 centimeters tomorrow, even though one could conceive an infinite quantity of rainfall, rain that simply never stops for the entire future of the world, so 2-3 centimeters would be, in the absence of all evidence, 0% probable, because we have evidence that positions 2-3cm at the the peak of an asymptotically decaying probability curve that tends rapidly to zero once you get very far outside 2-3cm.

Holy zen, that was one hell of a vague and awkward run on sentence. Restating:

To follow your weather example, it is possible to predict with 80% certainty that it will rain between 2 and 3 centimeters tomorrow. One could conceive an infinite quantity of rainfall, rain that simply never stops for the entire future of the world. In the absence of all evidence, therefore, there is no reason to prefer 2-3 cm to 10-11 cm, or 100000-100001cm; each guess is 0% probable. However, we have evidence that positions 2-3cm at the the peak of an asymptotically decaying probability curve that tends rapidly to zero once you get very far outside 2-3cm. Therefore 2-3cm can be stated to have 80% certainty, because the evidence favors it over a few other less probable outcomes, and an infinite number of infinitesimally probable outcomes.

[Feil]

Be careful when assuming that consensus implies evidence, however.

Consensus does not imply evidence. It does imply the existence of heuristics- people can at least agree on what types of methods may be used to arrive at an answer to the question. Having bad heuristics may mean you get wrong answers, but no question can be answered without heuristics.

Being able to find consensus answers that are broadly shared among a significant chunk of a large group is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition. If you can find such an answer it might still be wrong. But if you can't find such an answer, then the odds are any answer you try to come up with will be just as wrong.

The significant chunk of the group doesn't have to be a majority, or even a plurality, either. It just has to exist, in quantity and quality that suggests that you haven't just roped together a crowd of maniacs or fools.

Might a better method be to group all the people with the same heuristic, rather than the people with the same conclusion, and then evaluate the truth-likelihood of the conclusions on the basis of which conclusions attain the highest concentrations within groups using the same heuristic?

[Simon_Jester]

For most complicated questions, I would argue that there isn't much risk of different people coming to the same conclusion by very different methods.

But yes, you can refine the method considerably. I don't have all the answers in mind for that, and don't want to sit down and overthink it further until I do.