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MugaSofer comments on Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence - Less Wrong
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The fact that you can't see them when you look outside is evidence against their presence, it's just extremely weak evidence. See also the Raven paradox.
To be fair, it's amazing how people will interpret "evidence" as "strong evidence".
But it's completely unamazing how many people will interpret "evidence" as "strong enough evidence to be worth taking notice of", because that is how the word is actually used outside circumscribed mathematical contexts.
Yup. To be honest, it's not actually that amazing that it's interpreted as "strong evidence", or "this thing is probably true", because arguments are soldiers and all that.
It's not about arguments being soldiers, but basic Gricean maxims. In everyday talk you don't call something "evidence" unless it actually matters that it is evidence, and it only matters if it is strong enough to be worth attending to.
Just because there is this other, mathematically defined concept called "evidence", according to which every purple M&M is evidence for the blackness and whiteness of crows, you don't get to say that everyone else is wrong for not using the word the way you redefined it. Instead, you must recognise that this is a different concept, called by the same name, and take care to distinguish the two meanings.
What next, insisting that black paint isn't black?
It's always better to rename overloaded terms, or at least to make clear which meaning (the colloquial or the technical) one defaults to. Quibbling over what to name which doesn't solve any issues and is mostly just kicking the can down the road, but allow me to say that if there's one place on which I always default to the technical definition, it's LW. Where else if not here?
I understand that the LW fraction which aims to prioritize accessibility and strives to avoid jargon, may also strive to avoid counter-intuitive technical definitions for the sake of commonly used interpretations. I just don't subscribe to their methods.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I agree that it's reasonable, except when discussing prob. math, to assume "evidence" means "evidence worth mentioning". I noted that, while not "reasonable" exactly, it's even natural that it tends to be interpreted as "this is my side, I offer evidence in tribute", from an evopsych perspective :/
Right, and in fact the very idea of "extremely weak evidence" is really only worth paying attention to because it resolves various seeming paradoxes of evidence, such as the extrasolar planets and raven problems above.