The easy solution is to stop arguing about the definition of evidence. This community uses it to mean one thing, you're using it to mean something else, and any sort of conflict goes away as soon as people make clear which definition they're using. Since this community already has an accepted definition, you would be safe in assuming that that definition is what other posters here have in mind when they use the word "evidence". By the same token, you should probably find a more precise way to refer to the definition of evidence that you are using in order to avoid being misinterpreted.

There may be sense in which this is common sense, but you were purposely using it tendentiously, which is why people responded in the technical way that they did.

Eliezer said that he read something "somewhere", obviously intending to say that he read it somewhere that he considered trustworthy at the time, not in a fairy tale.

So you would then agree that merely the fact that something is written SOMEWHERE, does not automatically qualify it as evidence?

You have to specify what it purports to be evidence of before I can give you an answer that isn't a tangent.

Edited to add: Maybe I can do better than the above sentence. I affirm that the existence of this book is negligible but not strictly zero evidence for the claims detailed therein.

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.

When a belief (hypothesis) is about reality, it responds to new evidence, or arguments about previously known evidence. It's reasonable to expect that as a result, some beliefs will turn out incorrect, and some certainly correct. Either way it's not a problem: you do learn things about the world as a result, whatever the conclusion. You learn that there are no ghosts, but there are rainbows.

The problem are the beliefs that purport to be speaking about reality, but really don't, and so you become deceived by them. Not being connected to reality through anticipated experience, they take your attention where there is no use for them, influence your decisions for no good reason, and protect themselves by ignoring any knowledge about the world you obtain.

It is a great heuristic to treat any beliefs that don't translate into anticipated experience with utmost suspicion, or even to run away from them in horror.

It does contradict that assertion, but not at first approximation, and not in the sense you took the issue with. You have to be very careful if a belief doesn't translate into anticipated experience. Beliefs about historical facts that don't translate into anticipated experience (or don't follow from past experience, that is observations) are usually invalid.

When I pick up a work of fiction, I do not spend time assessing its veracity. If I read a book of equally fantastic claims which purports to be true, I do spend a little time. You might want to peruse bounded rationality for an overview.

Let's not get bogged down in the specific procedure of getting to Oz. My point was that if you truly adapt merely seeing something written somewhere as your standard for evidence, you commit yourself to analyzing and weighing the merits of EVERYTHING you read about EVERYWHERE.

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.

See this comment on the first part of your question and this page on the second (but, again, there are valid beliefs that don't translate into anticipated experience).

The fact that something is really written is true; whether it implies that the written statements themselves are true is a separate theoretical question. Yes, ideally you'd want to take into account everything you observe in order to form an accurate idea of future expected events (observable or not). Of course, it's not quite possible, but not for the want of motivation.