But in saying it this way, you're attempting to imply you can provide evidence. And I am simply pointing out that there is no reason to even consider that this is a possibility. Don't tell me you will do it later, because that's irrelevant. It's no different than saying nothing at all, or even saying "I have no evidence" or "I cannot provide evidence." They are all exactly equivalent in the end, except that the other methods do not have the implication that you might actually provide the evidence, despite you not giving us a reason to believe that, so it smacks of dishonesty.

Just say nothing at all, unless you have something to contribute. You'll be better off.

I make no claims about what is not hard for others. I do assert that most people do not do it, regardless of how hard it is.

Yawn. I am uninterested of your characterizations. Either actually make an argument against what I wrote, or do not. So far, you have not.

You are not, in any way, arguing against what I wrote.

Of course they can. So? Again: this, in no way whatsoever, implies that the media is not to blame. It just means that we have the power to ignore their bad behavior. But it's still their bad behavior. They are still to blame for it. Obviously.

Until you provide evidence, I won't believe it exists.

(See how this works?)

I meant -- obviously -- there is no journalistic or democratic reason to do it. Everything has a reason.

So you have no examples, then. Good to know.

I get that, but the main point is that there's no reason to report it in the first place, because there is no evidence ... regardless of how much you think it might be in line with his character to do it.

I don't know of any broadly reported unsourced attacks on Hillary Clinton. Can you give an example? The main attacks I know of on her were based on hacked documents that the DNC and others admitted were genuine; on a report by the FBI that no one called into question on the facts (though admittedly we couldn't verify some of those facts, such as that the information Clinton mishandled was actually classified); and so on.

Yes.

Not for me, no. I am one of the very few who actively dismisses any unsourced report.

Of course, it is our responsibility to ignore unsourced reports. But that doesn't mean the media isn't responsible for incessantly giving those unsourced reports to us ... obviously.

Did you not read my comment? I already answered this question: because it's the media that has trained us to believe assertions without evidence.

Even if you think it is in his character, unless there's SOME evidence it happened, then it's irresponsible to treat it as though it's possibly true.

The media regularly gives us stories without evidence, without substantiation, and asks us to believe those stories. Then -- I'm shocked! -- people end up believing stories without evidence or substantiation.

Only when we stop paying attention to source-less claims will we solve the problem of "fake news."

That would require the Earth to be very very special indeed, and I just don't see it.

Not at all. For example, I just generated a random number between 1 and 1e9. It was 869,502,332. By your logic, therefore, that number must have been very, very special. But no, it was just really improbable and that number happened to come up.

It may very well be the same case with life. Life could just be extremely improbable, and Earth just happened to be "the number" that was picked. This is what the Anthropic Principle is all about. Our perceptions are colored by the fact that we're here, so we think, "Since the Earth is not special, therefore, other planets must have life like Earth." It might just be that Earth was the lottery winner.

I said this in another post, but I'll say it again: The best evidence against life being common is the fact that it only happened once on Earth. It's fairly conclusive that all life on Earth has a common ancestor. If abiogenesis were easy and common, it wouldn't just stop once it happened one time, it would happen continuously over the billions of years since it happened for us. But it didn't.

And honestly, life on Earth being completely unique in the universe isn't that hard for me to believe when I look at the utterly insane complexity of cellular machinery. But again, extreme improbability doesn't matter when we're deal with the anthropic principle. We don't sense how long it took for intelligent life to pop up, just like we didn't sense the 13 billion years until you and I were born to think about all this.

likely

We have zero evidence for life being likely, except wishful thinking in the form hand-waving like the utterly useless Drake equation. On the other hand, we do have some suggestive evidence that life itself is improbable. The biggest evidence is that, as near as we can determine, it only happened once on Earth. If life was probable, it should have continued to re-occur, but we're fairly certain that all life has a common ancestor.

I think you mean "wrong" rather than "dangerous". There is a limited impact to our having a wrong opinion on the matter.

This will help you out

Dumbass, improbable does not imply magical. That's the other problem with life being really improbable, a lot of science people get all uptight that the religionists are going to run around gleefully saying "HA!!! THE SCIENTISTS ADMIT GOD IS THE ONLY EXPLANATION!!!"

More like, "it's how it was in the beginning. We all know at this point it's a dumb idea and a huge mistake, and Reddit has proven that editing can work and work well, but we're too set in our ways to admit it's a mistake and thus we'll call it 'working as intended' and pretend that it serves a purpose." See also: Deleting accounts.

Dammit. Reddit has spoiled me on submitting without having to make absolutely sure I didn't make any formatting mistakes and editing later. I wish Slashdot would come into the 21st century.