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To: Oldeconomybuyer
Such temperatures are not real, they are just stories...and I can prove it.

First, nobody in my sophisticated society reports experiencing such temperatures. You only get such stories from rural places where the peasants are gullible.

Second, such a temperature would be very remarkable and make a very interesting story. But we know that such stories are fun to tell, because they are so fantastic and unusual. Thus the people telling them, being that they are not men of sophisticated society and thus excitable and not careful or observant, undoubtedly report such things to impress people.

Third, experiencing things so fantastic is by definition rarer than things which are more ordinary. Thus every given report of such things needs to be weighed in evidence with the ratio of their innate probability in mind. This allows us to discount the fantastic reports, and thus we are able to know they never are true, because discounting them moves their probability to zero, and thus they become not just very unlikely, but actually impossible.

--from Hume's lost essay on why things can't get that cold.

36 posted on 01/16/2018 1:04:01 PM PST by AndyTheBear
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To: AndyTheBear

So, are you a Humerist?


47 posted on 01/16/2018 1:17:37 PM PST by WayneS (An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. - Winston Churchill)
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