Burden of Proof

By | May 6, 2023

It probably shouldn’t surprise me, but I am often taken aback by people’s misunderstanding of the Burden of Proof.

The normal failure mode is “I am presenting this new thing and you need to prove it doesn’t work (is not great, etc.)”.

The correct use of Burden of Proof is a requirement that the new hypothesis prove it is at least as good as the status quo/current approach. Also the proposal that the new idea is not perfect is not actually a new hypothesis.

For example, at the current time, LLM are presented as a technology that will replace or vastly augment programmers/writers/artists/etc. The response to any criticism is either “you’ll fall behind if you don’t adopt it” or “prove that they won’t replace …”.

Whether the tool is a great idea or not is less important than being able to make a rational decision about where to focus resources. Many bogus claims are made on any given day. No one has time to disprove them all, or to spend time evaluating all of them to find any gold in the pile. The only rational approach is to have the proponents of the idea provide enough proof to actually accept the hypothesis. This is how science has moved knowledge forward for centuries.

But, humans seem to be lousy at the rational approach, and prefer to go the emotional route.

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