[ninetyninenine]

> it can only give us extremely high confidence

Here's an interesting thing. Even high confidence can't be verified.

Let's say you examined 10 million swans and you think you observed all possible swans. But there's no way you can know whether or not the actual population is 10 billion trillion swans or a google swans.

If you observed 10 million swans and they are all white but those swans could only represent 1/99999999999999 of all possible swans. Then that means your observation is low confidence and there's no way whether we can verify what fraction of the population our sample size represents.

So actually high confidence is just an assumption. At a very technical level the confidence that science brings to the table is very very weak. We are making tons of assumptions and jumping to conclusions all the time.

[Koshkin]

> So actually high confidence is just an assumption.

This one is actually a funny statement. Not all assumptions are born equal :)

[ninetyninenine]

Yeah, we actually can't technically have any confidence for anything. Yet somehow we are. It's a bit paradoxical to our daily experience.