Disproving a claim that something exists is often quite difficult, and this difficulty is often mistaken for… — John Allen Paulos
Disproving a claim that something exists is often quite difficult, and this difficulty is often mistaken for evidence that the claim is true...Presented as I am periodically with these and other fantastical claims, I sometimes feel a little like a formally dressed teetotaler at a drunken orgy for reiterating that not being able to conclusively refute the claims does not constitute evidence for them.
p. 95Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
There’s always enough random success to justify almost anything to someone who wants to believe.
p. 44
The moral, again, is that some unlikely event is likely to occur, whereas it’s much less likely that a particular one will...The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur. If you don’t specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place.
p. 37
Correlation and causation are two quite different words, and the innumerate are more prone to mistake them than most.
p. 159
