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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 de

• Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  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.
  • roenxi 3y ago
    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.
    • wongarsu 3y ago
      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.
      • awwaiid 3y ago
        I think they call that chemistry and it is indeed an important part.
      • Almondsetat 3y ago
        100 + 2 doesn't exist in reality so...
    • CoastalCoder 3y ago
      > 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.
  • times_trw 3y ago
    [dead]
  • remram 3y ago
    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.
    • kortilla 3y ago
      No, scientific publications don’t change it unless those publications are about the claim. A publications doesn’t give you a free pass from scrutiny.
      • remram 3y ago
        Publishing a claim doesn't make it the scientific truth. Case in point, the many thousands of published studies about ESP.
        • CoastalCoder 3y ago
          What do you mean here by "scientific truth"? Sorry to seem pedantic, but I think it matters here since we're talking about specific meanings of terms.
          • remram 3y ago
            That is my point, yes. I am pointing out that there is no objective bar for a claim to be "scientific".
    • boomboomsubban 3y ago
      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.
  • throwitaway222 3y ago
    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.
    • hnfong 3y ago
      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.
    • mrguyorama 3y ago
      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.
• aredox 3y ago
  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).
  • Drakim 3y ago
    You are correct, the layman's version of "evidence" has a very different meaning from science and courtroom's version of evidence.
  • stuartjohnson12 3y ago
    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.
    • staunton 3y ago
      > 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".
      • Symmetry 3y ago
        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.
• ajross 3y ago
  > 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.
  • dml2135 3y ago
    I think the article is complaining about journalists much more than scientists.
  • mistermann 3y ago
    > 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?
    • staunton 3y ago
      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...
      • mistermann 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • ajross 3y ago
• empyrrhicist 3y ago
  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).
  • Mattasher 3y ago
    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.
    • empyrrhicist 3y ago
      > when studies are translated to press reports 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.
• sigzero 3y ago
  Your example is NOT evidence: the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.
• Angostura 3y ago
  That's cool. What happens if I say that aliens did not abduct Carl's prize turnip, and instead it spontaneously combusted? Is there then 'conflicting evidence'? Seems to be that the 'evidence' in both these cases is so vanishingly small as to not be evidence
  • araes 3y ago
    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.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • thfuran 3y ago
      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?
• mo_42 3y ago
  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.
  • hackerlight 3y ago
    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.
    • hnfong 3y ago
      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...
      • hackerlight 3y ago
        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.
• RyEgswuCsn 3y ago
  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.
  • brightball 3y ago
    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.
    • gumby 3y ago
      > 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)
    • plastic_enjoyer 3y ago
      > 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.
• juped 3y ago
  it's not even super weak evidence, just the prior against turnip-abducting aliens is so strong
• andrewla 3y ago
  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.
  • RandomLensman 3y ago
    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.
  • hnfong 3y ago
    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.
• CoastalCoder 3y ago
  > 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.
  • hnfong 3y ago
    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?
• lelanthran 3y ago
  > 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".
  • throwawaymaths 3y ago
    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?
    • lelanthran 3y ago
      > nonetheless, the point stands. 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'".
  • soerxpso 3y ago
    > 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).
• npteljes 3y ago
  Consider that 'no evidence' is a contraction of the phrase 'no verifiable / scientific evidence'.
• snowwrestler 3y ago
  > 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.
  • pi-e-sigma 3y ago
    In high school they measure gravitational acceleration, not gravitational constant which is actually much harder to measure
• taeric 3y ago
  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."
  • MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Courts would consider it to be 'evidence' if 'Crazy Carl' was saying it on the witness stand, just very low quality and unpersuasive 'evidence'.
    • taeric 3y ago
      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.
    • alexvoda 3y ago
      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.
      • MichaelZuo 3y ago
        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.
• sjhdjshdjskhds 3y ago
  > - an authority figure saying something is quite strong evidence. If you were in 15th century, you would believe everything Church says which is the authority figure at that time. If you are in North Korea you would believe everything the Party says. So an authority figure saying something is not really evidence isn't since the meaning of the word should stand the test of time and location.
  • roenxi 3y ago
    It is still evidence. However it is evidence for something that turns out to be untrue.
    • sjhdjshdjskhds 3y ago
      No. If you are the person yo don't know whether it's true or not. It's just noise. There is no evidence.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• wholelotta 3y ago
  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.
• andrewflnr 3y ago
  > 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.
  • __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    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.
    • andrewflnr 3y ago
      Ok, but the criminal is probably a squirrel.
• psunavy03 3y ago
  No, if Crazy Carl says aliens abducted his prize turnip, that is an allegation, not evidence. Evidence is used to prove or disprove allegations.
• tqi 3y ago
  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.