LogFAQs > #905715664

Revelation34 posted...

I misread your post.

How badly did you misread my (multiple) posts that you decided to argue that "You flat out claimed they were thrown out"?

Revelation34 posted...

You made the claim they weren't. Simple as that. Prove they weren't also thrown out.

Again, I don't need to prove something didn't happen.

Here, let's make this easy. I hereby claim that I cannot use telekinesis.

Are you going to disbelieve that claim? After all, I haven't offered any evidence in support of that notion.

What if someone named Bob comes along later and says I'm lying and I actually *can* use telekinesis? Are you taking Bob's side? Again, I made the claim first, so those rules you made up say that the burden of proof lies with me.

In that situation, anyone sensible would say that the burden of proof lies with Bob, not me. I haven't given any evidence to support my claim that I can't use telekinesis, true, but it's almost impossible for me to do so anyways - how am I to prove that I can't do something? In addition, Bob's claim both violates Occam's Razor ("the simplest explanation is the most likely") and is the one arguing a positive claim (that I *can* use telekinesis). Logically, people would want to see a video of me making things float or something similar before they believed Bob.

Now let's review the facts of our situation.
-TC's friend swore after straining his back
-Woman politely asked him to mind his language
-TC escalated the confrontation by swearing at the woman and her kids
-Woman's husband "gets involved"
-TC and friend are thrown out of the store

We can draw a few inferences from this:
-Although we don't know what "gets involved" means, it's very likely that it didn't involve punches being thrown or else the cops would have been involved. As such, this was probably restricted to arguing.
-Bearing that in mind, there's almost nothing the woman and her husband did that would be grounds for evicting them from the store. She made a polite request to someone, he verbally engaged after TC's friend had escalated the situation by speaking in an insulting (and, depending on how the friend was acting, possibly threatening) manner.
-Further supporting these points, TC does not mention any physical confrontation, nor does he mention the other family being thrown out, even though both of those would presumably warrant mention in his story if they happened.

So we have two possible situations here:
-TC and friend were thrown out of the store. Nothing else of note happened to the woman and her husband. This fits with what we know as fact and does not require any additional assumptions.
-TC and friend were thrown out of the store and so were the woman and her family. This requires us to assume that one or both of them acted in a way that warranted their removal, which is something not stated or alluded to in the TC's post. It also requires us to add an additional action to that "list of facts" above.

Occam's Razor indicates that the first situation, by dint of requiring fewer assumptions, is more likely and burden of proof would be to prove they were thrown out, not vice versa. Russell's Teapot further affirms that the burden of proof would be on saying the family was thrown out, as you cannot ask someone to disprove an unproven action.

In essence, if we look at a situation with unknowns, the proper assumption is to assume a null response, that nothing happened to them beyond what we know. The last we know of the woman and her husband, they were still in the store after their argument with the TC's friend; unless you have proof to the contrary, it's assumed by default that that's where they remained afterwards.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!