3 ms·

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"

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.

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.