Thread:User talk:WaitingforGodot/Shameless self-promotion/reply (5)

Trivial as in "what do you expect the evidence to be for this assertion". It's not particularly difficult to formulate expected evidence from a belief, if you have your thinking cap on. In principle, it's then not particularly difficult to find what that evidence is and see if it's there. That's not a comment on the practical difficulty, as anyone working to discover something in science will undoubtedly tell you. But the method underlying it is easy.

But, since we have this horrible tendency to rationalise post facto, not least because it solves a few problems for us, we don't think in this simple cycle of generating anticipations of evidence from beliefs. We just think, ascribe "truth" to it, and then just get bogged down in asserting the truthiness of it. So it's far more difficult to convince someone that they're wrong than it is to prove that they're wrong.