The thing is that "No Evidence" is just flat untrue. If Crazy Carl says that aliens abducted his prize turnip, that is in itself evidence that aliens did the deed. It is wildly unpersuasive evidence, but nonetheless evidence. People like to believe that "someone says" isn't evidence, which is wildly disconnected from how human society works. Even alleged facts boil down to "someone says". The vast majority of people who know the constant of gravity never measured it for example, they just work with what someone told them - an authority figure saying something is quite strong evidence.
Having evidence for untrue things also turns up naturally because of statistical mirages.
"No evidence" is a phrase that gets used in untruthful ways. There usually is evidence, of everything. True, false or irrelevant - there will be evidence of it in some form or another. The question is what standard the evidence reaches, not whether it exists.
The article addresses this exact point, and I would even go so far as to say that your conclusion, "'No evidence' is a phrase that gets used in untruthful ways" is entirely the point of the article.
> Is there "no evidence" for alien abductions? There are hundreds of people who say they've been abducted by aliens! By legal standards, hundreds of eyewitnesses is great evidence! If a hundred people say that Bob stabbed them, Bob is a serial stabber - or, even if you thought all hundred witnesses were lying, you certainly wouldn't say the prosecution had “no evidence”! When we say "no evidence" here, we mean "no really strong evidence from scientists, worthy of a peer-reviewed journal article". But this is the opposite problem as with the parachutes - here we should stop accepting informal evidence, and demand more scientific rigor.
I think there are different types of claims and they require different approaches.
For something purported to be factual and experienced personally (eg. did the accused assault the victim? did person experience alien abduction?), there's arguably no better way to handle these kinds of evidence except through witnesses and their testimony (and maybe cross examination).
Note that whether a single person experienced alien abduction is not a scientific question per se, it is simply a question of a person's subjective experience or memory. There's no hypothesis for this specific factual question, and no laws of nature are involved (yet).
On the other hand, questions such as "what is the gravitational constant", or "why do people report alien abductions?" is a scientific question. For the latter, scientists could hypothesize that (a) aliens are real (b) there's some kind of mass hallucination going on (c) some other weird phenomenon, etc. I think it's actually arguable that we don't have enough evidence to provide a convincing hypothesis about the general phenomenon (of abduction reports), but people confuse this lack of scientific hypothesis with the phenomenon not being real.
If you actually think about it, there's no reason any scientist could authoritatively say whether a particular person actually experienced alien abduction or not, just like no scientist could say whether a particular person had been assaulted or not. We might not have theories to explain the phenomenon, but that doesn't mean the reports are not true.
Not so simple necessarily as what people claim to be eyewitnesses to matters: If hundreds of people claim to have seen a building burning down but the building is still intact, then that isn't great evidence.
Maybe I don't speak English well enough, but I thought that "evidence" and "testimony" were clearly different things. E.g. in a judicial setting, a testimony may need to be backed up by "evidence" - the latter implying "physical", "objective" objects (documents, fingerprints, pictures).
"direct experience by judge" sounds like a can of worms. What if the judge believes religion is real based on their "direct experience", in a blasphemy trial?
In English common law, this is called "taking judicial notice".
It's usually for common-sensical things that aren't controversial. Of course, judges could misapply this rule, but if a judge is sitting on a blasphemy trial you have more problems (with the legal system) than a dispute about whether "religion is real".
I suspect the rule is just to make things less "anal" for court procedings. Otherwise every small bit of fact needs to be proven. Things like "summer is hot", "Taylor Swift is a famous singer", "computers can be hacked", "smart phones can take photos", etc. etc. Surely you don't want to call expert witnesses for these, right?
And given that the judge ultimately calls the shots (since they're the ultimate interpreter of the law), you'd have a problem if a biased judge is appointed anyway, no matter what rules of evidence is adopted.
I don't know a good translation for "Inaugenscheinnahme". Literally "taking-into-eyeshine".
It means observing the accused, the witnesses, objects introduced into trial and so on. In the sense of experiencing something with one's senses. It does not mean "let me apply my world view".
Visual inspection by the court, Sections 371-372a of the Code of Civil Procedure
This consists of any direct, sensory inspection by the judge for evidential purposes. Contrary to the somewhat misleading term used, ‘Augenschein’, ‘visual inspection’, it may also include sensory inspection by touching, smelling, listening and tasting. Consequently, sound and video recordings and data storage media are also included.
I suspect that's so they don't have to prove obvious things like: cameras exist, cameras can take pictures etc. Or for stuff like the defendant attacking someone during the trial.
Evidence in the scientific sense is something is any information which increases the likelihood of a claim being true. The fact that someone is willing to testify is evidence that the claim is true - not bulletproof evidence, but evidence.
Sometimes, people just saying something is extremely good evidence that it's true. My name is Stuart. I'm 22 years old.
It's clearly not good enough to pass a border, or to buy alcohol.
And here I have absolutely no idea if it is true or not. I don't know you, I can't see you. You could be a bot, a dog, a scammer, a teenager... Your evidence means nothing "evident".
If you could see me, could you be sure your eyes and ears were not lying to you? Could you be certain I was not a fragment of a paranoid delusion created by your subconscious?
Are you sure you're even awake right now? Are you sure that you've ever been awake? Are any of your senses evidently reliable?
Perceived reality can never be perfect evidence, and it's not possible to step outside of your own perceptions.
Evidence is just that. If you try really hard to achieve full epistemological rigour I think it's inevitable you'll wind up at the conclusion you don't know anything at all.
> any information which increases the likelihood of a claim being true
This sounds like "Bayesian evidence". However, I don't think "scientific evidence" has a precise agreed-upon definition. I would take "there is scientific evidence" to mean "some scientists say they have significant evidence that they themselves obtained directly and that they have published or presented".
And scientific evidence is also a very different bar depending on what sort of science you're doing. In medicine the gold standard is a double blind RCT but a geologist can't reasonably conduct RCTs with volcanic eruptions so they aren't required, but thankfully rocks are much simpler than biological systems. Or for psychologists p=.05 is enough for a study to be good evidence but particle physicists require much lower p values than that for something to be official scientific evidence.
I believe the opposite is actually true: in general, a physical piece of evidence means nothing unless accompanied by witness testimony tying it to the crime. A smoking gun is just a smoking gun unless a witness comes forward saying they saw the accused pointing it at the victim after the shot. Even for things like camera recordings, a witness of some kind must testify what it represents. The objects themselves merely serve to make the witness testimony more credible evidence, basically.
I'd say the difference is pretty simple: true evidence needs to be verifiable. Scientific studies provide evidence by describing the experiments/procedures needed to reproduce its claims.
Evidence for untrue things is still evidence, if it is verifiable. However, there is such thing as "no evidence". Crazy Carl's claim by itself would not be verifiable, therefore it is not evidence.
Needs to be verifiable for what purpose? Essentially all evidence is unverifiable, including the things you see out your eyeball when driving. At the very least, it's not reproducible that "car X had their turn signal on." Yet you risk your life on this information.
We should have different standards of evidence for different scenarios. If Bob ate a suspicious species of carrot and ended up in the hospital, that's a reasonable indication to not eat that type of carrot, even though it's not a controlled experiment and technically anecdotal evidence. You don't need N=10 people to end up in the hospital to listen to a story.
> that's a reasonable indication to not eat that type of carrot,
That's also why we avoided eating non-poisonous tomatoes for centuries leaving food proverbably on the table. The world experienced far more rapid progression when we started demanding reproducible evidence for reproducible events.
Which is a perfectly reasonable survival strategy. No, you might not reach a global maximum with it, but a local maximum is probably good enough in exchange for people not dying due to unknown causes.
There is no evidence that "ironmagma is a not a troll".
See, the 'no evidence' is used as a rhetorical device to make something 'appear' true.
Falling back on the old 'all evidence is questionable' because our eyes can deceive, and all perception is subjective, so all of reality is in doubt, is a rabbit whole.
Sure we live in a 'numinal' world. That doesn't mean we can't use thermometers to tell the temperature, even thought temperature itself is a construct.
I think the actual thing is that anecdotal evidence is actually quite compelling evidence. You can drive a car for days on end all on anecdotal evidence, successfully. It's just that it's less compelling than lots of anecdotes (data in aggregate).
Ok. I think we are just arguing about different levels of 'rigor'.
Of course, you can absorb information, observations, into your brain, and make judgments, like the road is wet, the light is red. It is fairly subjective, not recorded.
Whether you report to the police that you swear the light was green.
or
Crazy uncle says aliens ate his turnips.
They are really almost about the same level of verifiability. Then it is just probabilities that make us really dismiss the alien hypothesis.
That is a lot different from forming a hypothesis, performing a controlled experience and taking measurements to prove/disprove hypothesis.
When troubleshooting, I will take in all observations, no matter how strange. But I wouldn't say they are the problem without further verification.
Trolls would reasonably able to be detected by the contents of their posts/comments. Looking over the comment history, I see an absence of evidence that they are a troll and, in this case, absence of evidence is evidence of absence [because we can reasonably exhaust all of the "trials" [past comments]].
That is if someone looks. And has the same subjective view to interpret those comments.
I've seen plenty of people watch the exact same debate, and each believes 100% that their side wont hands down. Of course "there is no evidence" one side won or not.
The point is that "there is no evidence" is being used to promote the opposite views.
So I can disparage ironmagma in a title of an article, and all the reader who flips through them is left with impression that "ironmagma must be a troll, lot's of good people think so, and there is no evidence he isn't".
I probably should have come up with better example. But there is "no evidence" that the outcome would be different.
Agree this completely. So much scientific evidence I see published is just survey results from participants...which is sometimes just marketing or question phrasing. It's often enough to run with a headline though.
The standard for that evidence should be very different than the standard for reproducible physics, chemistry and biology experiments.
Other times it's just an extrapolation of a preexisting data set. Running this query produced this result.
> So much scientific evidence I see published is just survey results from participants
Don’t forget the likely bias that you are talking about scientific results in the press, which is a negligible subset of scientific work and which is biased towards humans, and sociological studies in particular.
From you comment I doubt you’re seeing much work in insect embryology or slippage in gravel pile formation (I don’t run across that stuff either)
> Agree this completely. So much scientific evidence I see published is just survey results from participants...
> The standard for that evidence should be very different than the standard for reproducible physics, chemistry and biology experiments.
I don't really see why we should treat evidence coming from surveys differently than evidence coming from physics, chemistry or biology experiments as long as surveys are well constructed, fulfill the criterion of validity and reliability and are reproducible. Yes, they are not 'hard facts' but often the only option to measure latent variables or fuzzy constructs. If they do this in a reproducible way I don't see the issue here.
On the other hand, 'hard sciences' such as neuroscience and medical science have a big problem with non-reproducible studies, even though they use more 'objective' measurement methods.
Consider I make some cosmological prediction based on Bob’ observational data (“stars with this spectrum mostly contain elements X and Y”). It does little good to repeat my analysis, which is entirely done on a piece of paper or in a computer program.
But Alice could say, “Well if that’s true, then this other thing would have to be true too” and go check that.
That’s the difference between “verifiable” and “repeatable”.
Sometimes “repeatable” is a sensible form of verification. Last year we spent 9 months trying to reproduce results from an important (to us) paper. Eventually we came up with a reliable process to reproduce the results of the paper — the hypothesis was correct — but it looks like the author just saw some signal a few times, and didn’t really demonstrate the principle they were trying to validate. We couldn’t use the same process described in the paper.
Since we can now get the result whenever we want we consider the theory valid.
Supernovas go off all the time, we would not use them as a standard candle if the did not.
If you gather a bunch of data on that supernova, you have evidence that supernova exploded. You don't have data on the nature of supernovas until you capture a wide range of them.
I apologize, I'm not claiming that no aspect of supernovas is observed more than once!
But so if you see something particularly unusual about that supernova (which happens a lot), it might be non reproducible, and you just have to live with that fact.
For example, multimodal observation of gravitational waves is still n=1
But most of these things are expected to be 'reproducible' given a long enough observation frame. For example when LIGO comes back online I expect we'll see more multimodal observations of grav waves soon enough. And the galaxy is filled with trillions of stars so over time the likelihood of equivalent behavior approaches 1. Most of these things are just chemistry following the entropy curve.
When 'intelligence' is involved it can be a little more tricky as we tend to pull some tricks that seemingly violate entropy at least on a local scale (that is systems at the local scale can become more ordered), which means it can take a lot of effort to the thermodynamic path a system took to get into its current configuration.
Not sure it's that straightforward. Case studies are anecdotal data of this sort, you just have to understand the limitations of this sort of evidence.
You could presumably check if Carl suffers from regular hallucinations, maybe run him through an fMRI to check if he's lying (assuming they can make that reliable), and so on. Each check increases confidence in the claim, even though it will never by itself be persuasive.
Yes? If I claim my name is Tudor, many people will just believe me outright without checking my papers or anything - a non-extraordinar claim doesn't require extraordinary evidence. If I claim I am the Pope, people will want more evidence than my saying so.
My question is, let's say I discover something new that is totally consistent with existing paradigms. Do I need to provide less experimental evidence than somebody who is claiming something that isn't?
I think your statement is more one of definitions of words and their meanings then once of science...
Lets say that somehow humans had not mixed baking soda and vinegar together before today. You decide to mix these things and get a mild foamy eruption that is cool. You do it twice and the same thing happens.
In this 'ordinary' example I would say you need less evidence to make your claims because the means of reproduction of the experiment and testing are within the reach of almost everybody. This could be quickly validated across the globe, and the reproducibility is evidence.
Now, if you require a billion dollar machine and a year of time to reproduce the experiment, you need to provide a lot of damned evidence so you don't waste a lot of scientists time and money that could be used for better things. Same with any experiments on people and/or the environment that can have effects that cannot be recovered from.
If you get a speeding ticket, likely the evidence is the word of the police officer who clocked you speeding. There's no way to go back in time, stand next to the officer and verify he actually directed the speed measuring device to your care and observed the number. Even if there's an audit trail - most of cases have nothing of the sort - it's extremely hard to verify it beyond any possibility of error. Other ticketable offenses - like rolling over stop or reckless driving - may have even less possible verification. And yet, if you tell the judge "your honor, there's absolutely no evidence I was doing that", while the police officer is standing right there testifying you did it, you probably won't find too much sympathy. Obviously, your understanding of what constitutes "true evidence" is not widely accepted.
We are talking about different kind of evidence here. There are two sense entries under the word "evidence" per Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary[1]:
1. the facts, signs or objects that make you believe that something is true
2. the information that is used in court to try to prove something
I was talking about sense 1, you were talking about sense 2.
I think the article is also about sense 1 of the word "evidence".
It's the same thing. The court just has more procedure around it, but outside the court it's the same thing. If somebody tells you "I saw John dining with Jack's wife last night at the restaurant" then unless you hired a private detective or the restaurant has cameras inside and for some reason is willing to grant you access to the recordings, there's no way for you to verify this claim. However, claiming "there's no evidence that happened" is nonsense - you just heard the evidence, and any reasonable person would conclude you did. Does it make you believe it's true, by itself? That depends, how much do you trust the person who told you that? How much are you sure they aren't mistaken? You seem to be confusing "evidence" with "ultimate proof" - and the Oxford is not doing its best job to set you straight, to be honest - if something makes you believe it's true, it's certainly evidence, but not all evidence will make you instantly believe whatever it suggests it's true - you would need certain quality and quantity of evidence for it to become proof.
What is worse, the media manipulators know that distinction. They do not actually confuse it - they know "without ultimate proof" and "without evidence" are different things. They never use it interchangeably, as it would happen if they, like you, were confusing the two. Instead, they use "no evidence" when they should have said "no ultimate proof" or "evidence, insufficient to make a definite conclusion" - to confuse you and present the matter as if there's actually only one possible conclusion, and you shouldn't even try to inquire about what it's based on, since there's literally nothing - "no evidence" - that you could look at. This is usually false, because if there was truly nothing, there would be little point of them trying to convince you. What they are trying to do is to prevent you from considering the evidence there exists, by falsely claiming "there's no evidence" and thus you should accept the conclusion pre-made for you. It doesn't mean if you consider the evidence you'd necessarily arrive at the opposite conclusion - but they are not willing to take the risk, they do not trust you. You can take that as another piece of evidence for how strong their argument actually is.
> claiming "there's no evidence that happened" is nonsense - you just heard the evidence, and any reasonable person would conclude you did.
I am not sure about that. If someone claims that you had stole something from a store, which you know you didn't, responding with something like "where is your evidence/you have no evidence" sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
if they say they saw you stealing - yes, that's evidence. If they just say "you stole" then yes, the correct question would be "why do you think so, on what evidence" - but a first-hand experience is definitely evidence. Moreover, often it'd be the only evidence available (not all stores have 100% video coverage). Of course, as always, the purported witness could also be lying, but if they claim they personally saw you stealing, this definitely counts at least as evidence, if not proof.
"true evidence" should probably be replaced with "scientific evidence". If you have 10 witness on the stand, all who say they saw Bob shoot Alice then that is evidence that Bob shot Alice, even if we can't actually reproduce the shooting.
I would argue that true evidence (for a claim) can be defined as such piece of information that, when a third party is invited to examine it, they would arrive at the same conclusion as what was claimed.
Scientific evidence ought to meet the standard. If someone produces a video showing Bob shot Alice (let's assume faking the video is technically impossible), that would also constitute "true evidence". In that sense, I wouldn't consider witness' testimonies "true evidence".
I agree with the other replies that "true evidence must be verifiable" should only apply to scientific evidence.
It's a fact that legal evidence in court does not need to be "verifiable". There are rules for what counts as admissible evidence of course (complex rules at that), but AFAIK none of those requirements is "verifiable".
As I suggested in another comment, there's a big difference on how to evaluate scientific claims (which is required to be reproducible) and some random factual claim (eg. what did I have for breakfast). There is no way I can give "true, verfiable evidence" for what I ate for breakfast, but generally people take my word for it, and my word is "good enough" evidence.
There are other types of claims where, because the evidence is inherently hard to obtain, even "low quality" evidence is taken into account, eg. digging up a clay pot could be evidence of civilization or human settlement in an area. (Surely no one in their right mind would say to support such a claim you need to somehow independently verify it, right?)
>There is no way I can give "true, verfiable evidence" for what I ate for breakfast
This depends how far you are in the process of turning your breakfast into poop.
As for the digging up of the pots... it depends on the exact nature of the claim.
Digging up of the clay pot does mean there where humans with clay pots at that place some time in the past. The settlement claim is a larger claim, if they were travelers that lost their pots there, that's a lot different than the pots being buried in a basement of a permanent building. Finding lots of the same kind of pots over a wide area and scale of time show that a certain civilization (may?) have existed in that area.
> If Crazy Carl says that aliens abducted his prize turnip, that is in itself evidence that aliens did the deed. It is wildly unpersuasive evidence, but nonetheless evidence.
You're correct, evidence exists on a spectrum from "highly implausible" to "highly plausible".
> People like to believe that "someone says" isn't evidence, which is wildly disconnected from how human society works.
Human society is multi-faceted.
In the sciences, "someone says" is the lowest form of evidence there is. It is so close to "no evidence" that we simply disregard it without further thought.
In the legal system, "someone says" is the highest form of evidence there is - witness testimony can, and routinely does, trump any other evidence.
These are the two extremes. Other human societal systems use the word "evidence" to mean anything in between these two extremes.
You are conflating the science's usage of the word "evidence" with the legal usage of the word "evidence".
> In the sciences, "someone says" is the lowest form of evidence there is. It is so close to "no evidence" that we simply disregard it without further thought.
Not really. "Someone says they conducted an experiment in a certain way and the data they gathered was as follows:" is still a form of "someone says You're trusting that they aren't lying about their data (and they often are).
In science the point of someone saying they conducted an experiment in a certain way is so you can also perform said experiment and reproduce their evidence. If you choose to or not is a different story.
I don't think I'd be able to believe more than maybe 0.0001% of true scientific claims if I had to use an epistemological system where I only believe results I've personally replicated. Am I supposed to build my own version of the large hadron collider in order to believe in modern particle physics?
> In the sciences, "someone says" is the lowest form of evidence there is.
Actually, it really depends on:
- who says it
- is the statement within their field of expertise
- do they have known or likely personal incentives
- does the topic carry significant political, religious or ideological implications
- is the topic politicized
- is the field itself heavily ideological or activism oriented, hard science or somewhere in the middle
- is the statement consistent with statements from most other trusted experts
>In the sciences, "someone says" is the lowest form of evidence there is. It is so close to "no evidence" that we simply disregard it without further thought.
hmmm. So citations in scientific papers are really disses? Interesting!
nonetheless, the point stands. The original phrase is "the plural of anecdote is data" and sometimes in the early aughts that got corrupted to "the plural of anecdote is not data".
It's important, because all of our evidence flows through subjective interpretation and a human reporting mechanism. Even if a computer mainlines some numbers to a data store, there's a subjective force: why did the experimenter choose to focus on those measurements?
I'm not contending the point (I'm in slight agreement with you, I believe). I'm only trying to point out that people are often talking past each other, because each person in that two-way conversation are often using different meanings of the word "evidence".
There is too much nuance to call either end of the spectrum "wrong for the meaning of 'evidence'".
What they really mean is "no scientific evidence. If Crazy Carl says that aliens abducted his prize turnip, there is still no scientific evidence of aliens.
What if Crazy Carl has ever published a scientific paper? Does it count? Does the paper need to specifically be about turnips? Or about aliens?
It's not like there is a "scientist" card that some people carry and some don't... and it's not like none of the hypothetical card-carrying scientists would ever have crazy opinions.
It's not whether he has some magical "scientist" card, it's whether he ran an experiment.
Imagine Carl ran an experiment where he put a sign in front of various groups of turnips asking for things like aliens, Bigfoot, or faeries to take the turnips.
After running this experiment, only the turnips with signs associated to aliens were taken.
In this scenario, Carl would have some scientific evidence suggesting aliens took his turnips. It'd be weak evidence that likely wouldn't be replicated, but still evidence.
This seems deeply flawed. How did the hypothesis forming the basis of the experiment get formed in the first place if there was "no evidence"?
An analysis of compounds in DNA finds that there are, within a small margin of error, identical quantities of adenine and thymine, and identical quantities of guanine and cytosine. You have not yet been able to experimentally verify your hypothesis of a base pair rule. It is nevertheless not true to say there is "no evidence" of a base pair rule.
Sufficient evidence to form a reasonable hypothesis, but insufficient evidence to elevate your hypothesis to a theory, is still some evidence, and it is a lie to say otherwise.
I never said the scientific method is flawed. Your understanding of it, however, seems to be profoundly deficient, if you think the scientific method says "the only thing that constitutes evidence of any sort is something that has been specifically verified by experiment."
Testing and experimentation would be the high bar of evidence.
Then of course there are gradations below that. Observational studies, are just observations after all.
But because I can say "there is 'no evidence' that there are no aliens" is then the lowest bar, it doesn't mean there 'are' aliens.
But the point here is that 'no evidence' is being used as a rhetorical technique to promote actually false findings.
Kind of along the lines of simply injecting doubt into a debate in order to detract from real evidence. Like what has been done for cigarettes, sugar, etc...
Well it is scientific evidence, just weak. "1 person had their prize turnip abducted by aliens". Most people are waiting for 100 people to have their prize turnips to be abducted before they believe.
The problem with your argument is that there are already hundreds if not thousands of alien abduction reports.
(They probably didn't have turnips though, I hope that wasn't the point.)
The problem here isn't whether this is scientific evidence, but that the evidence isn't sufficient for scientists to form a reasonable hypothesis about what gives rise to the phenomenon (which could be (a) aliens are real, (b) some form of mass hallucination, (c) some form of synchronized fraudulent claim, (d) etc. etc. ).
I speculate that if somebody actually does a "literature review" of abduction reports they could pick out some signals to form some hypothesis, but presumably scientists have better things to risk their careers over.
But crazy carl saying his prize turnip was stolen by aliens ISN'T evidence that his prize turnip was stolen by aliens, it's evidence that crazy carl BELIEVES/SAYS his prize turnip was stolen by aliens.
1. That might rule out psychology as a branch of science.
2. This gets back to the point Scott is making - now define "scientific evidence". For any reasonable definition of scientific evidence, there is a lot of evidence for almost everything. I can find scientific evidence for aliens if I want to - to a terribly low standard, true enough - although what Scott picked on was homeopathy which works a bit better.
People underestimate lies, damn lies and statistics. There are facts that back up any worldview, no matter how insane. Carl could find scientific evidence to back up his theory. There'll be anomalous weather station readings, weird sounds, academics papers published by crazy academics that kinda support him. We've all met monomaniacal people; they aren't shy of finding scientific evidence for their case. Still bunk though.
It also rules out game theory as a science. Which might be fine if you think that math isn't a science, but then you have to resort to physical experiments to collect scientific evidence that 100 + 2 is indeed 102.
> For any reasonable definition of scientific evidence, there is a lot of evidence for almost everything.
Slight tangent, but I've seen a similar thing when trying to decide which religion, if any, is true:
Every one I looked at had at least a few very intelligent, seemingly rational adherents. It seems like there's a subjective element to what evidence each person finds persuasive.
> If Crazy Carl says that aliens abducted his prize turnip, that is in itself evidence that aliens did the deed. It is wildly unpersuasive evidence, but nonetheless evidence.
Even as someone who has made a similar point recently, I think this is going too far. Carl claiming aliens is evidence of something weird going on with Carl, but there's still no reason to take his claim at face value. More likely Carl has a screw loose (good to know!) or is pulling a con.
If there's a con here it's being pulled by whoever stole Carl's turnip and framed the Aliens. We all know Carl has a screw loose, but raiding his garden is still a crime.
Kind of a pedantic argument focused on the “letter of the law” not physical reality. Physical state change of value to the aggregate must occur for society to work; propagation of empty rhetoric alone leads to social collapse; wouldn’t really call that “working on propagation of rhetoric alone”. Physical reality must provide evidence society works or people revolt. Thats what people mean when they say there’s “no evidence”.
For thousands of years society “worked” propagating religious babble then it didn’t. It’s low quality evidence society works on rhetoric.
If we say the trucks are on their way with food and they don’t show, the words meant nothing and the literal reality will dictate next steps.
Society doesn’t “work” on propagation of symbolic logic. It works when material outcomes are stable and equitable for the aggregate.
When society relies on functionally illiterate ossified minds propagating nostalgia babble, whether the babble is religious or statistical mirage that ignores the material stability of the aggregate (socializing a communal upside to a small cohort of mega rich rent seekers helicoptering us) societies fall apart.
Humans have real needs and when they’re met, society works. When they’re not due to over reliance on belief and philosophy society fails.
There’s plenty of high quality evidence to refute society works due to propagation of rhetorical statements. Real things need to occur too. Pre-language nomadic tribes built shared material stores, all based on the obvious physical reality. There is zero evidence society works on rhetoric at all and plenty the rhetoric propagates nothing but mirage.
> The vast majority of people who know the constant of gravity never measured it for example, they just work with what someone told them
In the U.S., at least, this is not true. Middle school and high school physics curricula include experiments to measure gravitational acceleration, so in theory (to the extent curricula are followed and students are present), almost everyone has measured it at least once.
I'm coming out as a Bayesian here. To me, "No Evidence" simply doesn't exist:
> If Crazy Carl says that aliens abducted his prize turnip, ...
Then, this is a piece of information like many other pieces. The question is only how I should process this. Maybe it will only strengthen my belief that Carl is, in fact, crazy.
But who knows maybe I should factor in some more information. Is Carly really that crazy as commonly believed or was Carl taking some strange pills yesterday?
Or in a COVID context:
So if a scientist says "no evidence that asymptomatic people transmit the disease", it might change your beliefs about the disease or on the person talking about related topics in the future as you lost trust in that person.
The people who use the phrase "No evidence" mean "no good evidence that moves the dial to a significant degree". But for brevity they shorten it to "no evidence" and assume people are capable of filling in the gaps instead of interpreting it extremely literally. We often speak without perfect precision in order to communicate ideas quickly and easily, and it's up to the reader to extend charitable and common sense interpretations.
The problem is that when public figures come out and say "there's no evidence...", they aren't assuming the public are smart and capable of understanding nuance and able to fill in gaps.
At least in the COVID context, they were worried that any nuance would confuse the public, so they simply gave the simplified, dumbed down version.
Of course it backfired a bit. I honestly don't know what's the optimal play for them, but it seems a bit revisionist to say that they assumed the public was capable of filling in the gaps...
The one abuse of that phrase I recall was around masks, where policymakers and science communicators initially said there was "no evidence" that they worked at reducing COVID transmission. I agree with your criticism when it comes to this case.
But when policymakers say there's no evidence for ivermectin's ability to treat COVID, I don't fault them because I see their choice of words as being aligned with the truth. Therefore they are accurately communicating science and good policy.
As with all uses of language, we have to look at it on a case-by-case basis whether it's being weaponized wrongly or used appropriately. I will criticize it when it's used wrongly, and otherwise not criticize it.
I think this is just a small part of a larger discussion, which is what the role of science communication should be. Is it to inform the public or is it to help change public behavior. It seems pretty clear in retrospect that the CDC had a specific public behavior outcome they were trying to achieve, and framed their evidence or lack thereof with that in mind.
I think that was a mistake because of the erosion of trust, but to be totally honest, I'm not sure where I stand on this overall.
Statistically (at least as a frequentist), it is more correct to say "we do not find significant evidence of a difference between group A and B" than "we find evidence that groups A and B are the same". I would even pick " no evidence of a difference" over claiming a null result is evidence for the null (without additional work).
It's worth being very careful about these constructions.
"no evidence of a difference" is fine so long as it's proceeded with "This study found", which when studies are translated to press reports often gets dropped, especially in headlines.
On this particular issue, even the original studies often screw things up unfortunately. Frequentist statistics works very differently from people's natural intuition, and the attraction of a binary decision tool (NHST) has led to a lot of lazy thinking and sloppy science.
> The thing is that "No Evidence" is just flat untrue.
No it isn't, it's a term of art and it tells you something very important: the second half of the phrase is still only a hypothesis and no one has tried or been able to prove it in a rigorous way. And if you understand that, it gives you a lot of context for how to interpret it.
Does it get misused by non-scientists to mean other things? Sure. But you get lied to every day with far more sophistication, so I guess I don't understand the huff about this particular bit of jargon.
This was a weak article, basically. Leave the scientists their jargon, if you don't like how it's being used, argue about the specifics of the point.
> No it isn't, it's a term of art and it tells you something very important: the second half of the phrase is still only a hypothesis and no one has tried or been able to prove it in a rigorous way.
Can you restate the meaning of the term of art "No evidence"?
Can you cite any source that explains this fact you are relaying in greater depth?
Does science have a different term to communicate the nonexistence of evidence?
Basically, "there is no (scientific) evidence of X" means that nobody published a peer-reviewed paper yet presenting evidence for X. At least that's a common interpretation...
> Interesting, but that doesn't even attempt to answer any of the 3 questions I posed
This is horrible sealioning[1], please stop. Surely if there's an entity responsible for rigorously defining and documenting the term under discussion, it's the linked article and not arbitrary commenters in a discussion about it. No one anywhere in this thread is using this term in a way inconsistent with the articles, so if you have a complaint please take it there. Demanding we all stop and define terms is just a way of evading discussion. If you have an alternative definition, you can propose it yourself.
This doesn't make sense since it's quite possible someone on HN has more expertise on the topic than the article writer.
So of course we can't rely on the writer, or the written words, of any 'linked article' to be authoritative and decisive in any sense or in any capacity.
i.e. Everything is only tentative until someone offers a better argument/proof/analysis/etc...
> The thing is that "No Evidence" is just flat untrue. If Crazy Carl says that aliens abducted his prize turnip, that is in itself evidence that aliens did the deed. It is wildly unpersuasive evidence, but nonetheless evidence.
I've encountered a similar issue in arguments for / against various religious claims.
Even when people are arguing in good faith, there's sometimes a disagreement about what evidence is considered valid.
The problem (in your case) about religion is when one side wants to convince the other side.
For example, I have personal "spiritual" revelations that I acknowledge nobody in their right mind would believe unless they witnessed/experienced something similar themselves. (And I make this claim in good faith.)
And this is actually fine. People hold different views because they have different experiences. And while communication can narrow the gap, it doesn't eliminate it completely.
I think it's an actually interesting thought experiment to suspend your disbelief about whatever you currently believe about alien abductions, and imagine that you actually experienced it yourself. What could you have said to convince people it actually happened? Is there a way to not become Crazy Carl besides pretending it didn't happen?
Your response is effectively an antagonist style one (as written here). You're responding to Carl's statement, by immediately providing something to discredit Carl.
If, you were actually someone involved with the turnip theft, and in a legal sense had something like standing to challenge Carl's statement, then your mutual testimony would probably be considered.
If Carl tried to file an insurance claim for his stolen turnip, an insurance adjuster might ask a neighbor whether they saw what happened, but otherwise the neighbor who saw the turnip spontaneously combust has nothing resembling legal standing. You're suggesting that it is the insurance adjuster asking that determines whether the neighbor's statement is evidence, while Carl's statement is definitively evidence? Is the key to producing evidence being the first to make a claim about a topic?
This is ignoring other words that we have. If Crazy Carl says that something happened, that is a claim, not evidence. That something is missing is evidence, but not that anyone/anything in particular took it.
And pushing that "alleged facts" boil down to "someone says" is ignoring some methods of science. Some people have recorded what the value of gravity on earth is. They have also recorded an analytic equation to calculate it, with the argument that it would work in other locations. They have then worked examples validating the equation in other locations. They have also given directions for how you can, personally, validate the value where you are. This is all very different than "someone says."
Maybe we should not be mixing the meaning of "evidence" in a scientific context with the meaning in a legal context. Clearly science does not care about human laws, verdicts, juries, etc.. Different contexts, different meanings. Just because an unsupported claim can be valid legal evidence does not mean it can be scientific evidence.
In the scientific context it would still be considered 'evidence' of some kind because there is indeed a very very very small chance an alien in fact, in ground truth, stole the prized turnip for whatever reasons.
Fair, I should have said "physical evidence" there for the missing items. My point was more that there is a difference, even if you can lump them in a very broad category term.
I understand how public can misunderstand this phrase but scientifically it is clear and justified.
Sometimes “no evidence” means that we haven't found compelling evidence yet. Some people are desperate and want all the studies to be done immediately and evaluate the risk if the theory is real or not.
But for scientists the desire to reach certain outcome is actually counterproductive as it can introduce bias. Slower and less passionate process can lead to better results.
For example:
1) We had no evidence of covid being airborne and then we found this evidence.
2) We had no evidence that masks help and then we found no evidence.
Two different theories, two different outcomes. Covid is airborne and it changes our understanding (however, we gradually realized that it is impossible to limit the spread and all the measures ultimately were useless). And that masks most likely had very little effect.
The reporters could write better for lay public explaining that “no evidence” means that currently we don't have evidence but it could be found later or that “no evidence” is actually that we have a lot of evidence that is indicating in some other direction and the chance of new evidence that rejects those findings is smaller but still could happen.
"We had no evidence that masks help and then we found no evidence."
Actually we did from the decades surgeons wore masks to prevent the spread of airborne diseases. Once we knew Covid was one of them, then even if the protection was one way, it would have reduced infections if everyone wore one.
(Notably, this review is from 2015...it is not subject to the ridiculous politics of Covid.)
> However, overall there is a lack of substantial evidence to support claims that facemasks protect either patient or surgeon from infectious contamination. More rigorous contemporary research is needed to make a definitive comment on the effectiveness of surgical facemasks.
Also, rather (in)famously, a review saying the same thing was censored from the web in spring 2020, because...reasons.
While I'd personally love to see extensive, rigorous investigation of this question, simply repeating "masks work", or "people didn't do it correctly" (your current argument) when all of the current high-quality evidence
suggests otherwise doesn't inspire confidence in those of us who actually use the scientific method.
If the claim masks don't work didn't come from the same people who said isolating didn't work, I might take them seriously. I might not just see it as motivated reasoning or another lame effort to discredit or cast suspicion on authorities.
If it didn't come from the same conspiracists who see nefarious censorship everywhere or people who only see their personal rights being infringed over our social obligations to each other, I might take them seriously.
Or I could take them seriously if they understood the risk of confirmation bias by cherry picking preferable information when credible contradicting studies or meta-studies exist (like this one that states "The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected respiratory particles in both laboratory and clinical contexts." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33431650/ ). Or the risk of socially promoting that one-sided certainty.
Or if they just understood the precautionary principle that if in the face of competing evidence, we could potentially all benefit from taking the more cautious approach at the risk of minor personal inconvenience, I might take them seriously. But I don't because they aren't serious people. And they aren't even slightly interested in applying the scientific method.
And they don't realise they are in the loud, unreasonable minority who have a megaphone they would never have had before the Internet, and they don't feel obliged to use that power responsibly. With time and education I hope they will dwindle in number, or at least shut up a bit.
I was curious what an llm might think about this comment:
> Please rate the following comment from 1 to 5 on how rational it is, how emotional it is, and whether or not the author is making a strong or weak argument:
> Rationality: 3/5 - The author presents a reasoned argument supported by a reference to a scientific study. However, the argument is somewhat undermined by a lack of direct engagement with specific counter-arguments and a generalizing tone about those who hold opposing views.
Emotionality: 4/5 - The comment is emotionally charged, especially in its dismissive tone towards those who disagree with the author's perspective. The language used ("lame effort," "shut up a bit") indicates a strong emotional investment in the topic.
Strength of Argument: 3/5 - The argument is moderately strong. It relies on a credible source and logical principles like the precautionary principle and the risk of confirmation bias. However, it is weakened by broad generalizations about the opposing side and a lack of specific rebuttals to their claims.
That lines up pretty well with how I perceived that. There is a lot of emotion and broad generalizations in these conversations. Is anyone changing their minds about any of this after 4 years of digging into their positions?
"Is anyone changing their minds about any of this after 4 years of digging into their positions?"
LLMs probably don't understand that not everyone is intellectually honest, that conspiracists who ignore a preponderance of expert evidence to insist on their own positions, generally feed on the attention. I'd say that in countering that, sarcasm, caricature and calling attention to the absurdity of their arguments can be more persuasive to others than watching two non-experts debate specific points while carefully select papers ad nauseam. I'd guess others might even identify with the emotion of a commenter's frustration that after years of evidence, discredited positions that unnecessarily risked people's lives continue to be retold.
And I'd hope that others would recognise the expert consensus that masks are effective at scale in flattening the curve, buying time to develop vaccines and hence saving lives, and see the importance of reason over a choice of linguistic flourish. Maybe since an LLM can't understand how sick of the post-truth era we've become you'd want to weigh in on the discussion itself.
My understanding is that flattening the curve was an argument in favor of social distancing and movement restrictions. It predates mask mandates. A properly trained LLM would miss your masking reasoning. See
The bigger problem is an LLM doesn’t have access to things that aren’t written down. Although it may see a bunch of publications popping up declaring “pain is the fifth vital sign” and a bunch of new pain management CME courses, it cannot see the pharmaceutical reps showing up at doctors’ offices to sell Oxycontin.
“Community masking is not aimed to prevent everyone from ever getting infected, the aim is to reduce transmission and ‘flatten the curve’, reducing peak healthcare demand, or to work in combination with other measures like social distancing to contain transmission in the short-term.”
The Masks4all paper (your link) is neither credible, nor is it a study. It should never have been published.
It is a mashup of a literature review with a bad methodology, and a simulation that adds no new information to the debate. It excludes and/or minimizes randomized clinical trial data when that data doesn't support the desired narrative.
For those who might read this later, the Cochrane collaboration published a high-quality review of masking literature:
That's one paper out of dozens, feel free to pick another.
“Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” Dr. Karla Soares-Weiser, the editor-in-chief of the Cochrane Library, said in a March 10 statement. https://www.factcheck.org/2023/03/scicheck-what-the-cochrane...
It's not particularly conclusive, whereas many other sources point to a small increase in protection. Which is important at scale.
I read a few, none of which seem to be above some criticism. Which is why I'm inclined to let more qualified people synthesise and summarise it all. You however seem certain that you know better than the consensus which is that there is a small advantage to mask usage. But you haven't demonstrated why. Are you an epidemiologist? Serious question.
Are you actually suggesting we should have surgeons unmask in an operating theatre and see if the rate of post-op infections go up? I'd like to see that get through an IRB. This is the same mentality that says every current vaccination should be compared against saline placebo.
Actually we could. Maybe we won't do such studies because they are irrelevant because avoiding spitting into the surgical opening is a reason good enough. But then we cannot claim that masks during the surgery prevent the spread of airborne viral diseases.
But if we needed to guard for them and the good evidence is lacking, then not testing would be unethical.
Yes, even covid vaccine today could be compared with placebo, for example, in children. Europe never mandated covid vaccine for children and today in the UK they cannot even get the vaccine unless in a risk group. The US however recommends covid vaccine for children without the evidence that it makes any difference today. It definitely should be tested in trials before such recommendations.
I don't think that IRB would reject such studies. At the start of pandemic everybody was saying that doing human challenge trials by infecting healthy volunteers would be unethical. And yet the UK did them. The red tape takes time and I can understand that during pandemics we may need to act quickly and cannot test everything. But in principle we can and do need to all kinds of trials to obtain proper evidence.
As you say, COVID was an outlier because of the urgency of the situation and the newness of it. We don't have either situation with OR hygiene, and if we're wrong and OR masks actually are doing something preventive, then we would be doing harm to the patients involved relative to the inconvenience to the surgeon.
The vaccine question was about vaccines in general, much as RFK Jr is talking about doing. Again, with the weight of long experience on how well they prevent diseases in mind, it would be unethical to expose a kid to that by giving them a placebo shot. Measles is pretty benign but not totally so. See a case of SSPE in your career and you'll never forget it.
If we already have strong evidence that the current vaccine is effective, then I agree, we don't need to to do another placebo controlled studies. But very often in medicine we don't have any evidence besides our beliefs.
No, I think they're more saying that until studies prove with certainty that surgical masks work with 100% effectiveness, doctors should not feel the inconvenience of having to wear them.
> Actually we did from the decades surgeons wore masks to prevent the spread of airborne diseases.
I remember asking my dad (who was a doctor who performed surgeries - mostly c-sections and appendectomies - often) about masks, and his answer in the early 80s was interesting:
“It’s mostly to prevent me from getting spit into open wounds and incisions when I'm talking or I have to sneeze or cough. Bacteria is a real problem, and the mask stops that.”
I never really thought much of that until recently.
But you can see this go both ways. Ortho surgeons in total procedures have full air filtering due to the large amount of bone dust that's liberated, some of which are very fine particles. No one wants to breathe that in.
Meanwhile, I'll be in TB clinic shortly with an N95 mask on. I've yet to convert my TB test in 17 years.
We absolutely rely on surgical masks not to contaminate the field. But they don't have one way valves, so if we trust the airflow one way, it's logical to trust them for airflow going the other.
>> “It’s mostly to prevent me from getting spit into open wounds and incisions when I'm talking or I have to sneeze or cough. Bacteria is a real problem, and the mask stops that.”
> so if we trust the airflow one way
Pedantic, but it matters: that's not airflow, that's droplets and spit.
Surgeons don't wear masks to prevent the spread of airborne diseases. They wear them to prevent spittle going into an open wound and to protect themselves from blood splatter.
If they wore masks to prevent airborne diseases, they would wear them when meeting patients, not just during the operation.
The difference is during a regular meeting, the skin is uncut. The skin is a major protection against diseases and the body has a bunch of mechanisms at its regular openings (nose, ears, etc) to protect you.
When you cut through someones skin, you bypass one of the major first lines of defense. Therefor surgeons reduce the risks, for a similar reason why clean their tools before use.
One of my pet peeves is the continued use of ambiguous phrases like "masks work" or "masks help" when there are effectively two different mechanisms (inhalation/exhalation).
I suspect the prolonged mass confusion over such an elementary topic will be one for the Science Communicator books.
IMHO the issue is that masks work but masking as a social phenomenon can suffer a number of problems, like non-compliance, partial compliance, poor fit, children, misuse, reuse, damaged masks, cloth masks, needing to eat, and all kinds of factors. So scientific experiments in a controlled setting with one or two people show that masks work as a mechanism, but getting everyone to go along with and practice good masking etiquette might not work so well. So population studies show masks working much worse than their mechanism would suggest they can. Especially when there is intentional non-compliance and protests motivated by culture war battles.
Arguing with people who just spout "masks don't work" and then intentionally are non-compliant (and encourage others to) is like arguing with motivated idiots.
No, masks work, period. Masking only works if people freaking do it.
on the flip side, so much of the Covid discourse was about these fabled policies which would do great things (but required 100% compliance), followed by indignation/panic and hysteria/angry mobs when it turned out that 100% compliance is hard.
We won't need 100% effectiveness and 100% compliance. If they only work at 10% effectiveness, then over a network of thousands, they will measurably save lives.
...on a mannequin, in a lab, or when used as a filter between two hamster cages. Perhaps. But there have now been plenty of negative studies in hospitals, which really starts to beg the question: if you can't get effective compliance in a hospital, where are you going to get it?
Just to be clear, I was with you right up until the part I quoted. It's fine to say that mechanistic studies show something to be true, but it's totally wrong to leap to the conclusion that these mean anything. If I tell you that you're 100% certain to lose weight if you stop eating, that's True ("Starving works. Period."), but it's not meaningful.
Every failed drug ever tested worked in a laboratory before it went to clinical trials.
"...on a mannequin, in a lab, or when used as a filter between two hamster cages. Perhaps." No, you are coping hard. The studies above are not done by idiots.
"if you can't get effective compliance in a hospital, where are you going to get it?" Nice pivot, but the subject is whether they work, which they do. Compliance is a different question. That's like arguing that condom effectiveness is low when people don't use them properly. And because the figure is low, let's just conclude condoms are ineffective so people should stop using them altogether.
"Every failed drug ever tested worked in a laboratory before it went to clinical trials." And some actually worked in trials. Your job is to explain which is the better analogy. That unanticipated practical considerations exist does not invalidate every conclusion you dislike.
However, even if masks work slightly, or not at all, even if there are dozens of studies saying so, there is enough conjecture to warrant wearing them anyway just in case. If two equally qualified mechanics disagree on whether to change your brakes, you change your damn brakes. If you don't that's stupid. If you don't and then drive a busload of people, that's criminal.
But masks do work, and they're cheap and barely an inconvenience. The problem is everyone thinks they're smarter than an epidemiologist. Thanks Internet.
I'm not getting in an argument about this. You don't understand what you're reading, and you're cherry picking papers based on a poor understanding of data quality. I will say that your first link is the Masks4all (Jeremy Howard) paper, and it is not a reputable scientific publication. It doesn't follow a valid methodology for a literature review, and leaves out/minimizes major RCTs that don't support their pre-determined conclusions.
The second link is not a study, or a meta-review, and contributes nothing. The fourth link is not a scientific paper at all.
The third link is the WHO summary of masking data in mid-2020. It covers the same ground as the Cochrane review (below), but re-weights the data somewhat arbitrarily to achieve the stated conclusions.
The Cochrane review is the gold standard summary of the evidence for public masking, considers all published data, and includes/excludes/weights data based on a rigorous standard for statistical and experimental quality. Please read it.
You've not refuted anything about your own methodological error or conspiratorial bent, but just cast doubt on the sources I gave. We can do that all day. The Cochrane review is controversial and has pretty clearly been misinterpreted by some. Check out some of the commentary by doctors on FactCheck (https://www.factcheck.org/2023/03/scicheck-what-the-cochrane... - sources included):
- Aggregating the three studies together, he said, “they show a consistent and fairly convincing effect.”
- “Taken together, these two RCTs are consistent with a small reduction in risk,”
- "“To me, this shows that there is a reasonably clear modest benefit to community masking interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic, decreasing the rate of infections in groups of people who are given masks and told to wear them by ~13%," he said. “That’s quite an important benefit in the context of a pandemic.”
I'm not sure why you think your opinion on what constitutes a high quality source is somehow superior to that of the thousands of experts who have concluded otherwise. Unless you are also an epidemiologist and a scholar I'm not convinced your cherry picking is worth more than anyone else's. I'm okay with leaving things up to them. But even if you are, you're in the minority.
Point is:
1) a modest increase protection is amplified by a network effect. There is evidence pointing to that increase.
2) people's lives depend on this, so if there's any uncertainty, do the reasonable, socially responsible thing and put up with the minor inconvenience of a mask, just out of caution
3) I don't need to understand every source as I don't pretend to be an expert. We already have those (that presumably aren't all part of big-mask) and they can and should be trusted to fairly weigh up the available evidence and advise us.
Your motivation to conclude one way just seems irrational, suggesting you aren't an expert either.
The problem with the phrase “No evidence” outside of a scientific context is that it sounds like it’s dodging the question, when, as you pointed out, it just means we don’t have data to support that relationship. The other way this is used is to try to “prove” a negative by communicating that we cannot establish a link, and may be accompanied by the expert stating there is evidence for the opposite case. Text bites rarely have context other than this “no evidence” statement.
For a layperson, they feel like they are having the wool pulled over their eyes and are not given a truthful answer. For example:
Interviewer: Can you say for certain that X causes Y?
Scientist: We have no evidence that X causes Y.
Interviewer: But can you say for certain that Y is NOT caused by X?
Scientist: There is no evidence of that relationship.
The scientist is trying to choose their words carefully because they are operating on the principle of only communicating what the data is telling us. The interviewer wants a clear, definitive answer. Both parties become frustrated.
I do agree with the article that this is poor communication because the scientist sounds like a lawyer and is hiding something rather than stating the facts of the situation. I’m sure there are better ways to communicate this that communicate either “we don’t know yet” and “we do not believe there is a link” instead this line.
Side note: another related and interesting distinction is the difference between unproven and disproven. If you saw a headline that a major hypothesis was “unproven”, it means only that there is no data to support it. Disproven is what the layman often thinks this means which is actively finding evidence to the contrary.
There’s different kinds of “masks” and different kinds of “work”
FFP3 are the standard for protecting against airborne disease and they work as intended. That’s literally one of the purposes they’re designed for.
FF2/N95 also work quite well, which was known for a long time, including from SARS and MERS studies.
Work can mean that they prevent transmission or reduce the risk. It might have been worth wearing a surgical mask, as I remember reading that it did reduce risk enough for it to be recommended in Germany once the establishment got over their mask procurement predicament.
Finally, original Covid was not as contagious as current Covid, which is one of the if not the most contagious airborne disease.
Based on e.g. SARS it would have been rational to recommend FFP2 masks, as was done in e.g. South Korea. However, incompetent Westen governments utterly failed to make such masks available to the population, so they tended to err on the “no evidence masks work” side.
Just because you have not looked for evidence does not mean it doesn't exist.
I have no evidence that my neighbor has a water softener - but that evidence does exist and I could obtain it in several ways (ask him; break into his house). Maybe he doesn't have one, maybe he does - but either way the evidence exists if I cared to look for it.
> Sometimes “no evidence” means that we haven’t found compelling evidence yet.
Most of the time when no evidence is used, it's to drive political or business activity. For example:
“There is no evidence that Asbestos is unsafe.”
I wish that news media would just be honest, or tell us when research is ongoing so people people were not panicking over something that is simply just not known.
“Researchers have good reason to believe that masks will help prevent the spread of COVID-19, but research is ongoing at _______ to determine if COVID-19 is airborne, and how effective masks are in preventing the spread of COVID-19.”
Unfortunately, the truth is boring and outrage and panic drive clicks.
That's one sense in which it is used, but the other sense is the opposite -- "no evidence that covid vaccines cause people to become magnetic" is not a "yeah, we haven't checked for the evidence yet, but we'll get right on it".
The point of the article is because this can cut both ways it is impossible to distinguish between the shades of meaning, and the phrase should be discarded entirely.
I think "ignoring it" is unnecessarily imputing bad faith.
But ignorance is a thing, even for authorities.
There's a difference between a person/institution having no evidence of X, and no evidence of X in general. So, "who" doesn't have evidence, and how much effort they took to attempt to find evidence before they declared it non-existent, is a relevant question when "no evidence" claims are proposed.
It's funny, because when a person or institution comes out and says "there is no evidence" of whatever (without a context), it would be discredited if any obscure person in the world has such evidence, even if not widely published. It would, IMHO, be much better to say that "we have looked into <all the reasonable sources and literature> and found no evidence" instead.
Where by “ignoring” you mean “carefully studying and doing comparative risk analysis”? That risk was reported early on, and has been very well covered over time but each round of studies has shown that catching COVID while unvaccinated is substantially riskier.
Do you have any evidence to support that assertion? I first learned of the issue from the scientific community tracking the data collected by the public health community.
Here’s an example of what that looked like in June 2021, covering developments in May, just 5 months after the first country in the world had approved the vaccine (UK, 2020-12):
Here's a quote from the very Reuters article you linked:
> The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said last week that heart inflammation after receiving the Pfizer vaccine had been no cause for concern as such incidents were similar rate to those in the general population.
The CDC and other agencies also continue to heavily downplay the risk as 'mild myocarditis.'
Yes, and that’s accurate. People have carefully monitored it, but the risk is very low and much lower than getting COVID. That doesn’t fit any definition of “ignoring” in the English dictionary just because antivaxxers would desperately love to have something they weren’t wrong about.
No evidence sounds definitive. "We _lack_ evidence" would be clearer, for instance, because it at least suggests that their _could_ be evidence, but it hasn't been found yet.
Except of course that masks do help, and we did find evidence. However many would like to justify their inability to accommodate the slightest inconvenience necessary to help the people around them - a clear case of starting with the premise ("I don't like wearing a mask") and then perceiving any data through that view.
That's not accurate. Obviously there are many different studies with different conclusions. But by “evidence” we usually mean the total conclusion from all of them. In medicine it is usually done via metareviews and even then evidence can be graded to different levels and quality.
So, in short, Cochrane review shows that we don't have a good quality evidence that masks were effective. And the low quality evidence indicates that masks either had no or very little effect. Some people try to quote one or two studies out of context but that's not helpful because we need to take the totality of evidence into account.
It is possible that once we obtain high quality evidence, these conclusions will be overturned. Surprisingly there is very little interest in doing such studies.
Total conclusion from all of them would be a high bar, given that such a large section of society had become convinced that they do not work for reasons far removed from any facts.
What do you mean by high bar? Cochrane group are specialists who do exactly that and provide gold standard of evidence. Sometimes the evidence goes against accepted wisdom. That's how science work.
The problem with society is that we live in a world where everyone demands answers NOW and people in positions that need to provide answers MUST give answers. So regardless if a politician or authority figure knows the answer or not, everyone is unwilling (for whatever reasons) to say “I don’t know.”
When I worked at Apple retail, we were trained that if we were asked a question that we didn’t know the answer to was to say, “I don’t know, let’s find out together” and you either did some research on Apple’s site or asked someone who may know with the customer.
Because nobody wants to say that they don’t know the answer…yet (and that’s key) they take the current working theory and say there’s no evidence to the contrary.
The point of that answer in specific is so the specialist doesn’t make up an answer if they’re not 100% sure it’s the right answer for the customer. Its goal was to make the specialist feel it’s okay to say you don’t know to the customer but that you’re going to work with them to find the right answer.
Words sometimes have a technical and a colloquial meaning. Colloquially, "no evidence" means the thing that technically should be called "unconvincing evidence" or "little evidence". This is similar to the word "theory", which has a different meaning colloquially than technically.
Question: If science communicators use the colloquial meaning instead of the technical one, are they bad science communicators? Or especially good ones?
I think it's the latter. I also think if you're smart enough to know the technical definition, you should be smart enough to make this translation without making a stink about it. And given that half of the given examples are about COVID, there's some chance that the author has an axe to grind.
"The author" here is none other than Scott Alexander, formerly of Slate Star Codex. For what it's worth, I wouldn't worry too much about his axe grinding; if there's anyone you can take at face value he would be the one. When he has biases he's pretty clear that he has them.
You point out a colloquial meaning of the phrase "no evidence", but look closer at his examples -- these are routinely used in both colloquial and technical ways, and in the end muddy the waters more than necessary. In his words, from the article:
> You can see the problem. Science communicators are using the same term - “no evidence” - to mean:
> 1. This thing is super plausible, and honestly very likely true, but we haven’t checked yet, so we can’t be sure.
> 2. We have hard-and-fast evidence that this is false, stop repeating this easily debunked lie.
> This is utterly corrosive to anybody trusting science journalism.
> If the story is that nobody has ever investigated snake oil, and you have no strong opinion on it, and for some reason that’s newsworthy, use the words “either way”: “No Evidence Either Way About Whether Snake Oil Works”.
You spent how long telling me that "no evidence" is bad writing, and your solution is "no evidence" + weasel words? That's even worse. Just recognize that the thing you have no opinion on is not newsworthy, and just drop it. That's right, less writing is good journalism.
The greater problem here is the fear of authority. If there is a position to present, then present it directly. If the position is that snake oil doesn't work, then just say it. If you aren't a good enough authority, then find someone who is.
This is where scientific communication has ultimately failed. The strongest authorities we have all use the weakest language that they can! By refusing to represent a strong position, we have left a void. That void will inevitably be filled by the least scrupulous authors. Whatever fills the void will be implicitly held in awe by the lack of direct criticism we had constructed around the void in the first place.
Refusing to participate creates an inverse cult. An anti-cult where everyone agrees to never share what they believe. It spreads its anti-message just as quickly, and cements itself just as divisively, as any evangelist organization does. We must recognize that the anti-cult lives on equal footing with the cult. The true power of each exists, not in their core truth claim, but at the boundary of argument. Argument is engagement, and engagement is fuel. To avoid engagement is to starve.
There are some topics that are still being researched, and if people say anything other than ‘There’s not enough evidence either way and so until we know more sit tight.’ or something to that effect, they’re simply being misleading.
At the same time, these topics are being sensationalised by various people and so something should be said about them. You can use stronger words to discuss the sensationalisation itself, but when discussing the topic and the evidence itself rational, even handed language should be used as that is the language of science.
Unfortunately using (misleading) stronger language to stand out more against unscrupulous actors merely ruins your integrity and message. It’s better to be a source of good information for the people looking for it than to add to the pile of untrustworthy noise
> There are some topics that are still being researched, and if people say anything other than ‘There’s not enough evidence either way and so until we know more sit tight.’ or something to that effect, they’re simply being misleading.
OK, but then the argument is conclusive vs. inconclusive. Obviously that's something you can present a clear position on. This position does not exist in a vacuum: you brought up the lack of consensus in response to a vain assumption of consensus. The most important part of your entire sentence was, "sit tight".
What is often done instead is to present broad inconfidence. Anyone who assumes any consensus anywhere has broken the cardinal rule. They have made the obvious mistake, and will suffer the consequences. Here's the problem with that tactic: we all suffer the consequences.
Weasel words don't resolve the contentiousness of scientific communication. They dodge it.
In what way is ‘We need more evidence to know either way’ not a clear position? How is that weasel words?
Feigning confidence of certainty in the absence of clear evidence is not scientific.
This isn’t a problem about consensus, it’s a problem about evidence. I agree that scientific communicators and scientists should think for themselves and read widely and draw their own conclusions, but sometimes the evidence isn’t there to support a belief either way. Is that really dodging something?
I think "no evidence" is problematic and I think Bayesian reasoning is fundamental to science reporting. Maybe it doesn't even go far enough though, sometimes you need domain expertise.
Consider:
● Pesticide A was evaluated by the FDA and was declared safe in USA.
● Pesticide A was evaluated and banned in Europe.
● Pesticide A's molecule is similar to pesticide B, which is declared unsafe in USA.
● Of the last 10,000 pesticides to be declared safe by the USA, it actually turns out that Y% of them end up later being declared unsafe or only safer at a lesser dose.
● Pesticide A has only been evaluated by giving a 10,000x dose and looking for effects within a 1-week period. It has never been evaluated by giving a natural dose and looking for long term effects, nor effects on pregnant mothers.
● State that uses Pesticide A (but also many other products) has a 10x elevation of very rare cancers
This is a very realistic picture of the type of datapoints you might start with.
---
Or consider a case like this:
● Fighter pilot says he saw an alien spacecraft accelerate 100x the speed of a rocket with no noise, or visible propellant
● 50 other people say they saw strange things in incidents too
● There's good reason to think that faster-than-light-travel violates causality
● Scientists haven't found any radiowaves that indicate intelligent life anywhere they have looked
I think the point is: I don't see how you get good answers without a bunch of really good bayesianists in the FDA or in Science
I totally agree, but even good bayesianists still can't deal with the problem that people want concrete answers, and they don't accept "it depends on your priors"... :-/
People wanting concrete answers is a good force. Authorities saying "We don't know" is also a good force.
Combine these two good forces and you end up with "Let's do some more research" which is what we need more of. "Is autism actually going up in the US? We don't actually know, and instead of bayesian hedging, let's construct some studies that definitively answer that."
In my comment I originally considered writing "people want concrete answers, now"...
I totally agree that for important issues more research is always needed when one needs to resort to Bayesian analysis, but sometimes for policy reasons somebody needs to make a decision quick and they can't wait 2 more years for indisputable evidence. COVID is a good example, governments can't just say let's wait for two years and see what happens... Even for the autism example, even if authorities only find a substantial but not definite likelihood that autism is going up, they are supposed to prepare for policies that might help alleviate the problem, instead of waiting it to become a definite problem and then fixing it after the fact. For example, let's say chemical X is deemed to have 80% chance of causing increased autism, it's hard to argue we should wait until it's 99% before restricting the use of X. Of course if it turns out upon more research the likelihood is closer to 0% the policy can be reversed.
Isn't it part of the job of the good Bayesianists to establish their own reasonable set of priors? It seems silly for a layman to ask a statistician if there's any there there and have the statistician say "Well that depends, what do you think?"
I'm always suspicious when politicians use the phrase "no evidence" or "there's no intention to". They're essentially meaningless as the "no evidence" could easily be due to no-one investigating the issue although it's slightly better if the amount of investigation has been clarified.
Likewise, when it comes to politics I've found "evidence based" to be a red flag. Most of the people using it mean seem to have come to a particular position first, then cherry picked whatever evidence they could find to back up that position. Ironically enough, it usually signifies someone who's ideologically devoted to a particular position.
> Most of the [politicians saying "evidence based"] seem to have come to a particular position first, then cherry picked whatever evidence they could find to back up that position.
How is that different than anyone else, for example yahoos arguing on the internet? The idea behind "evidence based" is a recognition that public policy has almost always been opinion-driven, and that we should cite evidence in support of our policies before adopting them.
Does that mean the evidence is correct? No. (Though even cherry-picked evidence is better than no evidence!). Does it mean you agree with the policy? Certainly not in all cases.
But the idea is sound. I think what you're upset about is not the "evidence based", it's that there's a partisan lean to the use of the term and that your tribe, whichever it is, is still doing the opinion thing and doesn't like citing studies.
(Disclaimer I'm not a scientist) Apparently in scientific circles, people can shoot down new claims by saying it doesn't have enough evidence, while the "default/fallback position" (held by the "establishment") is backed by even less evidence.
I'm not saying it's a common thing, but if you're looking for "evidence based" red flags, this might also be something to look out for too.
>Apparently in scientific circles, people can shoot down new claims by saying it doesn't have enough evidence, while the "default/fallback position" (held by the "establishment") is backed by even less evidence.
This brings to mind a pending bill in California where they are trying to amend the state constitution to allow the state to discriminate based on race, sex, etc. as long as it is "research-based" or "research-informed". In practice, I imagine it would enable the state to cherry-pick or even solicit research that would allow them to discriminate in the way that they want.
I am not fond of the author's substitute suggestion - "Scientists: Snake Oil Doesn’t Work". This turns scientists into a priesthood of experts, and that is not what science is about.
Science is a process, not an authority. We should not "trust the science". We should analyse and question it for ourselves.
I think the essential problem with the style of journalism from the article is that it reduces the substance of stories into an appeal-to-authority. It is not a trustworthy authority - there is plenty of history for people employed as scientists to make assertions that now look ridiculous.
Journalists should put more focus to the arguments and less to the conclusions.
>This turns scientists into a priesthood of experts
>We should not "trust the science"
Unfortunately, those are accurate descriptions of many people's relationship with science, including many academics and scientists themselves.
Whether by malice or subconscious self-deception, the most used and useful part of scientific studies is the conclusion, without regard for the reproducibility and efficacy of the experiments or observations. The veracity of these conclusions is weighted by two things:
1. The existence of data-gathering and experimenting rituals, but not necessarily the soundness of the data or experiments
2. How aligned the conclusion is with the expectations and beliefs of the scientists, their funders, and their target prospects
I thought there was some subtlety where snake oil does, in fact, work? The problem was "snake oil" sold by people that were deceptive as to what they were actually selling. Do I remember that history wrong?
"Statistically significant" is another misleading one for most people I think. People not familiar with the phrase are going to understand it as "important" or "large effect". Something like "high confidence" would be better, along with reporting the effect size.
A lot of the time the effect size is low (and will probably disappear with better controls) so leaving this out and leaning on the term "significant" is good for clickbait.
Same with "not statistically insignificant". People think for two things to be at all related they must be "statistically significantly" related, but it's not true.
Agreed, especially as articles titled "no evidence..." usually contain evidence in favor of the proposition (except that there is also evidence against it).
I get similarly annoyed by the use of the term "significant" in statistics, which is a technical term in the field, not an expression of the importance or magnitude of the finding.
It's very easy to satisfy the human mind. It's very easy to stay satisfied. The human mind wants to be satisfied, it does not want the truth. Consult any list of fallacies to see the difference between facts and satisfaction. The true nature of the universe is very complex and hard to understand.
Thus we have science. Science, as a practiced art, is a way to delay satisfaction of the mind. My mind will not be satisfied about question X until certain questions are answered.
(Bear with me) It can be very clearly observed that the Sun goes around the Earth. Every day I can observe this. I am satisfied. It is ONLY when other questions come up, that I must become unsatisfied and make more observations, and come up with a new theory.
I may observe the phases of the moon, and see that the Sun shines on the lunar surface from a certain angle. This observation is not consistent with the Sun orbiting the Earth, as I know that the Moon is closer to Earth than the Sun; thus the daily Lunar cycle should match Earth's cycle. My observations are not consistent. (There's also a lot of other evidence, but I like this one).
In fact, it is just an illusion caused by the Earth spinning round.
====
Science communicators need to talk about tests a lot more - what mental model is an expert using, and how do they test that model? How is evidence incorporated into that model to update it?
I remember at the start of the pandemic a tweet by a famous biologist and philosopher about masks and the spread of the disease. He stated confidently that "there is no evidence" that masks slow down the transmission of the virus (he most probably changed his mind). I had some respect for this guy, but it's all shaken know. In fact, it's all shaken for most intellectuals.
Even if mainstream news fixed this "no evidence" problem, their headlines and articles are already playing too many games to be a good source of scientific knowledge.
I think the author is too nit-picky here, as the phrase "no evidence" has a superficially similar, but nuanced meaning based on the context - _and this is fine_. It can't be the burden of whoever writes something to cover all possible edge cases of understanding, depending on the medium you need to be able to rely on certain _a priori_ knowledge.
We have a lot of similar shorthands in journalism, the one that comes to my mind immediately is the phrase "the markets reacted", even though there is no living, conscious thing which is "the market" and can have a reaction. Similar to "no evidence", this phrase has a meaning which varies in detail but which is superficially the same and it's up to the reader to understand it.
I think your point is valid, but it is also the job of journalists to effectively communicate to the public, so if a turn of phrase is repeatedly misunderstood by a segment of the public, it may make sense to reevaluate it.
The status of something as evidence is partly down to a judgement about relevance.
If some random person in 1970 jokingly were to have said "Yeah, I killed JFK." That wouldn't have been considered "evidence" of that person's culpability in JFK's death. But if there were other evidence that established the plausibility of that person having possibly killed JFK (worked at the Book Depository, hated JFK, owned a rifle, expert markmsman, etc...) then the statement becomes a kind of evidence-- a confession.
So the status of something as "evidence" and not merely data can change based on the context.
Here's another example. There was water all over the floor of my kitchen. Initially, we suspected that I may have spilled some water while filling a humidifier. There was evidence for that in the form of my own memory that I had spilled some, a few hours earlier, and there were water streaks down the side of the humidifier. This seemed to be supprting evidence. But then my wife remembered that she had filled a pan to check for leaks in it and then forgot all about it. That pan was now empty. In light of that evidence, which was very compelling (we even verified that there was indeed a leak in that pan) the earlier "evidence" STOPPED being evidence at all.
Before even looking at the content of the article I agree. This phrase drives me nuts. It's so imprecise. How hard did you look for evidence? Did you discount evidence from "known deniers"? Do you count statistical anomalies as evidence? If not, what name should we use for those, because they're not _nothing_.
And this ambiguity, imho, is exploited politically all the time.
Having read it, I'll add that it seems like journalists would never adopt these suggestions because they're afraid (for better or worse) of letting the public think for themselves. They want to sound authoritative because they've made the decision for the public.
Another important meaning of the phrase is "we searched for evidence of X and failed to find it". In other words, we failed to reject the null.
I think Scott means to wrap that up in the second bullet point ('we have evidence X is false'), but of course, there are important distinctions there. Of which journalists may not be aware, or may not spend much time on.
This seems like a needlessly pedantic parsing of the phrase "no evidence". I agree with Scott that we should take a Bayesian approach to scientific claims. So what does "no evidence" mean to a Bayesian? It means that I don't have have any data that would cause me to update my priors significantly on a given claim. This is consistent with both the "low evidence" and "low probability" sense of the phrase.
Words and phrases can have different meanings in different contexts, and that's fine. It sort of reminds me of debates over the term "proof". It's perfectly legitimate to say that something has been "scientifically proven", as long as we understand that we're not talking about proof in the mathematical or logical sense, but in a probabilistic sense.
In general, I think Officious Phrase Use is usually evidence of bullshit. Applies equally to "no evidence", "some evidence", "stop resisting a lawful order", etc. It's usually a sign someone with little on their side is trying to sound official and legit.
The thing a lot of people here seem to still be missing is that "no evidence", coming from scientific authorities, carries an implication that there's no evidence.
But with science, we don't actually _know_ that to be true unless we look.
This is an important distinction because in popular culture, 'no evidence' seems to get a lot more headline space than 'we have an untested hypothesis'.
Over the past decade, it feels like the aspect of curiosity and hypothesis have disappeared from science, which has become much more institutionalized, compartmentalized, and formalized. It's 'peer review or gtfo'.
It is not literally correct to say there's 'no evidence'. We don't know! There could be! 'No evidence _yet_' at the absolute minimum.
There can't be evidence for something for which no evidence was sought.
Coming from academic physics background, the state of medical research boggles me. Let's start from so called "meta studies". Why are they needed? You'd think that if the individual studies were done carefully enough, a single study would be enough to establish a fact. Instead, you see meta studies with sentences like "we examined 142 studies on X for Y, out of which 76% showed statistically significant improvement". If we assume that the majority "vote" here is the correct result, what the hell did the 24% of the studies do wrong? Why aren't the people who made them expunged from the community for doing questionable research?
> what the hell did the 24% of the studies do wrong? Why aren't the people who made them expunged from the community for doing questionable research?
I think 'expunging people from the community' is a pretty risky path to go down. Perhaps they're looking for a small effect and doing a single study with high enough power is tricky? The real world is a messy place, there's loads of (perfectly innocent, as well as nefarious) ways those 24% of studies could have come to a different conclusion.
The article remind me years ago I was in a meeting where a developer had a presentation of his c++ thread factory that we were supposed to use instead of creating our own threads.
After the end of the presentation a developer asked a question about his own use-case that also reflected on the complexity of the proposed tools were asked to use.
The developer presenting took a pause looking at him and blurted by looking back at the slide in the screen:
"In your case, how to use the library, is evident by self-inspection"
These signal words act as a silent, passive test of competence in that once you hear them, you can be assured of the speaker's ignorance and discount their opinions accordingly.
I just assume all science communication is bad. (I think we are at that point)
Instead I keep a corral of trusted communicators on X. Since I’ve vetted them I can trust their takes a bit more.
Edit: since people seem to be interested. As a practical example, when that latest high temp super conductor news came out I immediately had two or three different deep dives on my feed with balanced takes and solid explanations.
We're sort of living through an epistemological crisis. Not only from the postmodern "there is no truth" perspective, but from the venal "truth by itself does not get clicks" perspective in media, as well as the related "incentive structures are not aligned with the rigorous, methodical, expensive accretion of truth" perspective in research. Maybe that's a slight overstatement, but is trending truer rather than falser as the days go by. We anxiously await a corrective we hope will come soon.
Instead of saying "there is no evidence that Covid is airborne", they should say "there is no evidence about whether Covid is airborne or not", in other words, there is no evidence one way or the other. Just saying "no evidence that X" omits the crucial detail -- whether there is evidence that (not X).
The place where this gets really entertaining is certain areas of Wikipedia. Sometimes I research natural medicine by consulting the relevant articles there, and you can really tell when a substance is efficacious, because Wikipedia has gone out of its way to flatly deny the existence of evidence for that, and "the lady doth protest too much" about said lack of evidence.
Of course there is abundant evidence that herbal/natural remedies work: thousands and thousands of years' worth, but said evidence has systematically been supressed, destroyed, and denied by that which came after it (many times, on behalf of the Catholic Church which sought to erase paganism in all its forms, which included herbalism and natural healing.) For example, the Aztecs used the poinsetta plant as an antipyretic, which may explain its quite widespread cultivation by the time that the Conquistadores arrived, who subsequently used it as a symbol of Christmas.
But it's hilarious to read the medical "experts" of Wikipedia hold their breath and stamp their widdle feet as they insist that stuff doesn't work, because nobody's dissected and tested it in a sterile lab over the last 50 years.
I think "evidence" of why I should or shouldn't believe something is a bigger possible red flag (and deserving of scrutiny) than "no evidence", to which I can remain skeptical and more confident that I'm not being manipulated.
"Science communication" is a label adopted by so many shills chasing ad revenue (and thus controlled by elite through algorithmic censorship) or outright direct paid shills by corrupted institutions (such as the WHO). The goal therefore was never to more effectively "communicate science," but rather to use the legitimacy of the label of science to promote approved conclusions. This article assumes a misunderstanding where intentional misrepresentation was involved.
Hi Chris. You don't know me, but I'd like to discuss something HN related by email. Could you write me at the address in my profile? No hurry, non-urgent.
this is succinctly captured by the truth table for logical implication. let p be the existence of evidence and q be the state. if p is false, the expression is true regardless of the value of q.
My (I think related) pet peeve: "There is no safe level of..."
I hate that phrase. It implies to many people that any level whatsoever of X is a danger to you.
Some examples: "There is no safe level of alcohol consumption" and "There is no safe level of lead".
These both may be technically true. That even one beer a year is worse for your body than complete abstinence. Or even a single fishing weight making incidental contact with your hand is worse then never having touched one.
But c'mon. The amount of risk posed by very low levels of consumption or exposure is so minuscule that we can safely (hah!) declare it okay.
I've seen people calling for lead to be banned from roofing flashing applications, and total bans on alcohol, citing these statements that "there is no safe level...".
You give me a reasonable definition of "safe", and I bet I can determine the safe levels of each of those things. The safe level of alcohol consumption is not 0.0000 units. It's somewhere above that. Same with lead exposure. You can have minimal exposure that results in no discernible difference in your quality of life. Where's that line?
I think it's to communicate that even if you think it's not that bad, it's never good: A single beer every month probably won't kill you, but there is a non-zero increase in risk. By definition, any amount is a danger.
I believe that kind of communication intends to combat the more laissez faire "a beer here and there won't kill you," which glosses over the fact that, yeah, it probably won't, but it's also not without statistical risk. Getting rid of that attitude reduces the risk of alcohol-related health complications across the population as a whole.
All this "science communication is bad" thinking is missing the forest for the trees; The public doesn't seem to know how to educate themselves (in a time with more possibility to actually educate yourself somewhat than ever before), doesn't understand how to read or interpret a piece of media in general (a high school level concept), seems to gleefully ignore things they WERE taught (like basic math), and often explicitly describes science and education in general as "liberal brainwashing"
Yeah, it's going to be impossible to "communicate" with someone who filled their ears with concrete and is shouting as loud as possible "I think you are the devil (literally)"
This has nothing to do with science communication. Entire swaths of the American public believe "My ignorance is as good as your evidence", or worse, that if they don't personally understand something, then it can't be true.
I have the impression that people nowadays are completely infantilized. They will believe anything that supports their worldview and be heavily skeptical of whatever hurts their sensibilities. It's not even to the point of communication anymore, even with proper communication a large part of the population will behave like a 6 years old boy throwing a tantrum.
Quick example, we had creationism before 2010, after 2010 something even worse(terraplanism) appeared.
I like that, in this age, science tries to keep statements factual. "No evidence" is an objective statement of fact to counter the millions of examples of baseless conspiracy BS getting algorithmically hyped into people's news diet. It's a good thing. As new evidence appears that fact is corrected, and people can act accordingly. Without positive claims of truth, science can try to stay objective.
Can you link to a scientific article that explicitly explains how science has discovered a way to determine nonexistence perfectly (zero possibility for error) in all cases?
I have a link to such an article but unfortunately its contents only renders legibly in a browser using a more modern epistemology than the one you are currently using, sorry.
It's such a weird standard to hold. Why does "there is no evidence" have to be perfectly true? It's a falsifiable claim that anyone is free to disprove, so do your own meta analysis and present the counterclaim. Science has to try to be objective and thorough and that gives it credibility.
Compare that to the unfalsifiable claims of conspiracists like "China engineered the virus but covered it up so well we have no evidence". And then the same people accepting suggestions of a much weaker claim that it escaped from a lab, as proof that what they said all along has been proven correct.
"No evidence" is a perfectly acceptable scientific claim, as open to refutation as any other.
First of all, the authors of the declarations in the example headlines are not "scientists and journalists", they are authorities and journalists. People like CDC officials or the director general of the WHO are of course scientists, but they are not speaking as scientists in those news pieces. They are speaking as politicians.
Secondly, I don't think they used the "no evidence" template so much with COVID because they were "fundamentally confused". Most of the headlines in those examples are clearly politically motivated: authorities wanted people not to panic, to keep working, and above all, to keep consuming. Hence the proliferation of "no evidence" headlines for things like the virus being airborne (inconvenient for bars, restaurants, shops, etc. - in fact one headline explicitly mentions bars and gyms); kids spreading the virus (inconvenient for parents taking their kids to school and therefore being able to work as ususal), etc. Each and every one of the headlines was very convenient to keep the wheels of "business as usual" spinning, what a coincidence, right? So no, they were not "fundamentally confused", they just were trying to bias the public towards a certain direction, and a great way to do that is to use the "no evidence" narrative which, as the post author explains, is ambiguous so no one can accuse them of outright lying.
Note that I'm not saying there aren't examples where such headlines do stem from confusion. I just don't think it's the case of the particular examples in this post.
A politician is an elected official or somebody who is active in party politics. The WHO director is elected, and the current CDC director who founded Doctors for Obama is active in party politics.
> Secondly, I don't think they used the "no evidence" template so much with COVID because they were "fundamentally confused". Most of the headlines in those examples are clearly politically motivated
Whence motivating the popular reaction that understands an authority claiming "no evidence" as strong evidence of the thing.
It's a correct reaction way more often than it's wrong. But it steals the possibility from scientists to claim that despite several studies looking for it, there's no evidence (e.g. of vaccines causing autism).
Or, in other words, what those politicians did is an irresponsible society-destroying act. They should be held accountable for it.
He's saying that in a politicized world (like the one we live in) the use of the phrase "no evidence" is a sign that the author is lying to you. He's claiming that if you if read a story by someone in power which claims "No evidence for X", you should update toward "X is probably true but politically inconvenient".
He's not claiming this is logical, only that empirically it's a good strategy.
A parallel might be that if the board of a company in the midst of a scandal puts out a statement saying "We have full faith in the CEO", your actual conclusion should be that the CEO is on their way out. This isn't what the words mean, but in practice it often turns out to be the right bet to make.
Hanlon's Razor being to be applied here. People like to point to conspiracy by politicians, but what I really saw were people trying to get the call right, jumping to conclusions, and then failing to realize it. If there were any semi conscious ulterior motivations, they were probably related to personal success.
Hanlon's razor would lead to the acquittal of almost every criminal defendant if applied consistently. Somehow, it only gets applied consistently to politicians, especially those the person invoking it tends to agree with.
Politicians absolutely do not get the benefit of the doubt by default. We must assume they are corrupt and mendacious all the time and put mechanisms into place to force them to not be by punishing them when they don't comply. They have to earn trust, and we always have to keep verifying.
I have noticed that the assumption that politicians are corrupt and mendacious is actually quite empowering to the corrupt and mendacious politicians. It is remarkably effective at steering honest people away from politics, however.
Having evidence for untrue things also turns up naturally because of statistical mirages.
"No evidence" is a phrase that gets used in untruthful ways. There usually is evidence, of everything. True, false or irrelevant - there will be evidence of it in some form or another. The question is what standard the evidence reaches, not whether it exists.