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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Your Strength as a Rationalist - Less Wrong
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No, you can acknowledge that something is evidence while also believing that it's arbitrarily weak. Let's not confuse the practical question of how strong evidence has to be before it becomes worth the effort to use it ("standard of evidence") with the epistemic question of what things are evidence at all. Something being written down, even in a fairy tale, is evidence for its truth; it's just many orders of magnitude short of the evidential strength necessary for us to consider it likely.
Vladimir, Cyan, and jimrandomh, since you essentially said the same thing, consider this reply to be addressed to all three of you.
Answer me honestly, when reading a fairy tale, do you really stop to consider what's written there, qualify its worth as evidence, and compare it to everything else you know that might contradict it, before making the decision that the probability of the fairy tale being true is extremely low? Do you really not just dismiss it offhand as not true without a second thought?
Immediate observation is only that something is written. That it's also true is a theoretical hypothesis about that immediate observation. That what you are reading is a fairy tale is evidence against the things written there being true, so the theory that what's written in a fairy tale is true is weak. On the other hand, the fact that you observe the words of a given fairy tale is strong evidence that the person (author) whose name is printed on the cover really existed.
All that is indisputably true. But you didn't really answer my question on whether or not you give enough consideration to what's written in a fairy tale (not whether or not it's written, not who it's written by, but the actual claims made therein) to truly consider it evidence to be incorporated into or excluded from your model of the world.
Evidence isn't usually something you "include" in your model of the world, it's something you use to categorize models of the world into correct and incorrect ones. Evidence is usually something not interesting in itself, but interesting instrumentally because of the things it's connected to (caused by).
That is because it is a bad question and one of a form for which you have already received responses.