EngineerofScience comments on Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence - Less Wrong

54 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 August 2007 08:34PM

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Comment author: EngineerofScience 03 June 2016 06:18:14PM 0 points [-]

So is there ever a time where you can use absence of evidence alone to disprove a theory, or do you always need other evidence as well? Because is some cases absence of evidence clearly does not disprove a theory, such as when quantum physics was first being discovered, there was not a lot of evidence for it, but can the inverse ever be true will lack of evidence alone proves the theory is false?

Comment author: ChristianKl 03 June 2016 07:02:46PM 1 point [-]

The idea of Bayesianism is that you think in terms of probability instead of true and false.

Comment author: g_pepper 03 June 2016 09:20:02PM 0 points [-]

From the OP:

The absence of an observation may be strong evidence of absence or very weak evidence of absence, depending on how likely the cause is to produce the observation.

So, yes, absence of evidence can convincingly disprove a theory in some cases (although, as ChristianKI points out, Bayesians typically do not assign probabilities of 0 or 1 to any theory).

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