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Words sometimes have a technical and a colloquial meaning. Colloquially, "no evidence" means the thing that technically should be called "unconvincing evidence"
by codeflo 3y ago
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.
- andrewla 3y ago"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.