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by differentView 4309 days ago
>They're doing the experiment because they already believe things are this way and they're trying to get evidence to confirm it.

Hypothesizing is one thing, but to believe without evidence is just blind faith.

2 comments

If you don't have a higher Bayesian prior on the hypothesis than others, how did you select it out of hypothesis-space as something to test? (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Locate_the_hypothesis)
Isn't faith blind by definition?
No. One of the most commonly used definitions of faith is trust or confidence in a person or thing. Whether or not that trust or confidence is based on evidence or not is a separate matter that is not conveyed by the word.

Even in the case under discussion, that someone might have faith that something is a particular way, and are doing an experiment to confirm it (more likely disprove an alternative), that doesn't mean it's 'blind' as in without reason. People can have a lot of good reasons for believing something is a particular way without having measured it directly yet.