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I do not understand. If you can't say "no evidence" when you can't find any strong evidence, then when can you? What should the article have concluded to make i
by skrebbel 7y ago
I do not understand. If you can't say "no evidence" when you can't find any strong evidence, then when can you? What should the article have concluded to make it OK for them to say "no evidence"?
Is it about the word "strong"? Because the way I understand it, the definition of "strong" in statistical analyses is "couldn't reasonably be coincidental". So then "no strong evidence" means the same as "all evidence we did find was so weak that it might've as well been a coincidence". I'm not a scientist, but it seems to me that "no evidence" conveys the right message.
I mean, the way I see it, let's I see two bees today and three bees tomorrow. This is weak evidence that the bee population is increasing. But "Weak evidence found that bee population is increasing" wouldn't be the more honest headline. It's no evidence at all, I saw some bees and that's it.
The way I see it, it's great that scientist report null findings and failures to reproduce as "no evidence found". The general public is not going to interpret "no strong evidence" the way scientists mean it.
- zdragnar 7y agoFrom the second half of the quote: > the evidence on spillovers and productivity effects of incentives appears mixed. Without digging through their methodology, it seems that an interpretation of "no evidence" is unwarranted as there is a likelyhood of confounding factors that were not taken into account. "No evidence" is a positive assertion and a misreading of what the paper indicates. This is not a critique of reporting a null result, but what appears to be a misinterpretation to make a catchier headline which is equally as bad as what we have now- uncritical acceptance of whatever gets published.