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It can absolutely be abused, but that really just proves the point of the statement, that people tend to make biased and wrong decisions when they don't apply t
by ewzimm 10y ago
It can absolutely be abused, but that really just proves the point of the statement, that people tend to make biased and wrong decisions when they don't apply thorough logic. For clarity, it could have been "absence of evidence is not sufficient evidence of absence," but it just doesn't sound as nice. But it in that form and how it's intended by logicians, it's perfectly valid.
- mikeash 10y agoMy point is that it is never anything but abused. Does a statement really have a point that's independent from how people use it? Especially when that use agrees with the statement's literal meaning?
- ewzimm 10y agoThis seems like a case where something completely legitimate got so abused that it lost its meaning to many people. It does have a point. It's a classic phrase used in teaching logic to rebut the logical fallacy of an argument from ignorance. I think what you've seen is a lot of people using the authority of something from formal logic to back up their own fallacious arguments. "The phrase "the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence" can be used as a shorthand rebuttal to the second form of the ignorance fallacy (i.e. P has never been absolutely proven and is therefore certainly false). Most often it is directed at any conclusion derived from null results in an experiment or from the non-detection of something. In other words, where one researcher may say their experiment suggests evidence of absence, another researcher might argue that the experiment failed to detect a phenomenon for other reasons." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance