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Zubon comments on Rationality Quotes July 2013 - Less Wrong
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xkcd explains that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence .
Given the amount of drones that fly around these days the question of UFO is settled. There are plenty of objects that fly around which nobody can accurately identify.
Especially when it comes to hobbist drones there are models that really look like flying saucers.
Except some of this footage does in fact record what's claimed to be flying saucers, lake monsters, ghosts, and Bigfoot. Don't confuse "there is no evidence despite people looking", with "there is no evidence but no one has looked", or worse "I'm so sure there is no evidence I'm not even going to bother checking whether anyone else has found any".
You think Randall Monroe is making this mistake?
Yes, a combination of this and him suffering from the bias that makes it hard to notice flaws in arguments whose conclusions one agrees with.
My impression is that people have expended roughly constant effort searching for Bigfoot from 1960 to now. Based on advances in modern camera technology (especially ubiquitous smartphones), evidence collection is cheaper and easier now than in 1960 (or even 1980).
I understood Monroe to be asserting that easier evidence collection and constant levels of effort imply that we should expect higher quality evidence now than in the past (if Bigfoot exists). In fact, the quality of evidence for Bigfoot is substantially similar now and in 1960. That's pretty strong evidence that Bigfoot does not exist.
There is only an absence of evidence if you ignore all the pictures that are purportedly of those objects.
No, it’s absence of evidence if you notice that we have ready access to high-resolution videos of innumerable rare events and elusive animals.
And yet the best footage of UFOs, ghosts, and Bigfoot still consists of some blurry, hazy, shiny, or dark blob smeared somewhere in a couple of frames of a shaky video at the absolute limit of the camera, exactly the same as forty years ago. Which is exactly what you’d expect to see if these were in fact normal things and optical artifacts that are perfectly explainable when they’re actually close enough to see.