No ‘common sense’ understanding of the burden of proof by Dr Sohail Ansari

But We have certainly tried those before them, and Allah will surely make evident those who are truthful, and He will surely make evident the liars. [Quran, 29:3] Lying lips are abomination to the LORD: but they that deal truly are his delight. King James Bible 

(I LAUGH BUT BELATEDLY part 4)

 ‘The systemic collapse of the US society has begun

 I have lived in the United States for a total of 24 years and I have witnessed many crises over this long period, but what is taking place today is truly unique and much more serious than any previous crisis I can recall.  And to explain my point, I would like to begin by saying what I believe the riots we are seeing taking place in hundreds of US cities are not about.  They are not about:

1.Racism or “White privilege”

2.Police violence

3.Social alienation and despair

4.Poverty

5.Trump

6.The liberals pouring fuel on social fires

7.The infighting of the US elites/deep state

They are not about any of these because they encompass all of these issues, and more.

It is important to always keep in mind the distinction between the concepts of “cause” and “pretext”.  And while it is true that all the factors listed above are real (at least to some degree, and without looking at the distinction between cause and effect), none of them are the true cause of what we are witnessing.  At most, the above are pretexts, triggers if you want, but the real cause of what is taking place today is the systemic collapse of the US society.

The next thing which we must also keep in mind is that evidence of correlation is not evidence of causality.  Take, for example, this article from CNN entitled “US black-white inequality in 6 stark charts” which completely conflates the two concepts and which includes the following sentence (stress added) “Those disparities exist because of a long history of policies that excluded and exploited black Americans, said Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning group.”  The word “because” clearly point to a causality, yet absolutely nothing in the article or data support this.  The US media is chock-full of such conflations of correlation and causality, yet it is rarely denounced’.

https://thesaker.is/the-systemic-collapse-of-the-us-society-has-begun/

‘Philosophy of Religion

The Burden of Proof

Why is it that the burden is on the person who makes the claim?  Well think whether or not it is a better way to proceed through life to accept anything and everything that people claim to be so.  Experience should instruct every thinking human that there is a high probability that not everything that people claim to be true is actually true.  Some claims might be made with the claimant aware that the claim is not true and some claims might be made with the claimant thinking that they are true but being mistaken.  As it is for most humans not a very good idea to proceed through life based on beliefs that are false and thinking beliefs and claims to be true when they are not, most humans and those who would use reason to guide them will want some evidence and reasoning to support a claim being asserted to be true.  So the burden is on those who make claims to offer reason and evidence in support of those claims.

If a person claims that X exists and is real then the burden is on that person to supply some support for that claim, some evidence or proof that others can and should examine before accepting it.’

Massimo Pigliucci

If the claim of a writer that Correlation is evidence of causality, then the burden is on the writer to supply some support for that claim so that readers can accept it.  

"Correlation does not imply causation" refers to the inability to legitimately deduce a cause-and-effect relationship between two variables solely on the basis of an observed association or correlation between them. This fallacy is also known by the Latin phrase cum hoc ergo propter hoc ("with this, therefore because of this"). 

Brady, Henry writes in "Causation and Explanation in Social Science"that ‘correlation implies causation’ is an example of a questionable-cause logical fallacy, in which two events occurring together are taken to have established a cause-and-effect relationship’.

The importance of "Granger-causality". The New Classical Macroeconomics by  Hoover and The New Classical Macroeconomics by Kevin proves the importance of  ‘The Granger causality test’ that is a statistical hypothesis test for determining whether one time series is useful in forecasting another.

To be an ace arguer, a writer needed to conduct ‘The Granger causality test’ for giving examples of conflations of correlation and causality. Examples were to be the representative sample that sought to proportionally reflect specified characteristics exemplified in US media, thus helped to obtain insights and observations.

"Correlation does not imply causation’’ is true  But a writer does not support with evidence that ‘US media is chock-full of such conflations of correlation and causality’ thus fails to prove that it is true for the American Media.