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Maybe you're thinking of évident the adjective, not évidence the noun.
"évidence" the noun is just a shorthand for "obvious thing" (most typical usage is « C’est l’évidence même » = “It’s obvious”. « Ce n’est pas la peine d’asséner de telles évidences » = “Such obvious things are not worth stating”).
What did Laplace call it? He invented a lot of this stuff, and presumably wrote in French.
Great suggestion, I’ll look into that.
Anything wrong with l'évidence?
Yes, that means « obvious »/« self-evident »
In response to
Open Thread, Jun. 8 - Jun. 14, 2015
I’m trying to translate some material from LessWrong for a friend (interested with various subjects aborded here, but can’t read english…), and I’m struggling to find the best translation for “evidence”. I have many candidates, but every one of them is a little bit off relative to the connotation of "evidence". Since it’s a so central term in all the writings here, I figured out that it could not be bad to spend a little time finding a really good translation, rather than a just-okayish one.
English readers : - Could you find a few different sentences that would cover all (slighty differenrt) usages of evidence ? The objective is, if my translation fit well in all those propositions, there is good chances that it will fit well in everything i may want to translate. For example, from wiki : “Evidence for a given theory is the observation of an event that is more likely to occur if the theory is true than if it is false” “Generalization from fictional evidence” “Conservation of expected evidence”. I except that finding a translation that will cover equally well those three usages will basically cover any usage, but can you think of a 4th usage that may prove problematic even for a term that fit well for the 3 others ? - What would be the less bad synonym of “evidence” : clue, proof, observation, sign (that’s basically my best candidates, translated back in english). I dislike all of them, but that’s the best candidates I found, translated back in english. (substitute evidence in all the test sentences abole, and you will understand my problem. “Clue for a given theory…” is somewhat good, but “conservation of expected clue” less so…)
French readers, if any :
J’ai comme candidats : « preuve », « indice », « signe », « observation ». D’autres propositions ? Laquelle vous semble la meilleure ?
Thanks for your cooperation.
(and don’t get me started on “entangled with”, I think I will lose much hair trying to find an acceptable translation for that one. French sucks.)
Absent context, I notice I'm confused about which sense of the word "values" she's using here. Perhaps someone can elucidate? In particular is she talking about moral/ethical type values or is she using it in a broader sense that we might think of as goals?
Can’t tell for the Romantic Manifesto, but in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand uses the word “value” as a synonym of “rule of conduct”. For example, she argue that “rational evaluation” is a correct value for man in the same way that “flying” is a correct value for birds.
She calls her philosophy objectivism because the thinks that correct values, which means rules of conduct that leads to environmental fitness (in her words says : “survival”), are objective.
In response to
Stupid Questions February 2015
I still don’t understand HOW cancer kills.
I mean, we just have some additional cells who does not perform their normal functionality. But we still have a big bunch of normal, functioning cells.
In my (very very) distant family, someone died from lung cancer a few months ago. I still don’t understand the link between the few additional cells in his lungs and the acute hepatic failure that killed him.
I read somewhere that a primary cancer seldom kills ; most of the time the metastasic-induced does. Why ? There should be far more "bad" cells in the primary site, doesn’t it ?
(medecine illiterate there, sorry if half of my assumptions are wrong)
In response to
Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015
A few day ago, I saw an interesting article on a site somewhat related to lesswrong. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to read it, so I bookmarked it.
Computer crashed, lost my last bookmarks and now I spent 2 hours trying to find this article, without luck. Here is the idea of the article, in a nutshell : we human are somewhat a king of learning machine, trying to build a model of the “reality”. In ML, overfitting means that in insisting too much on fitting the data, we actually get a worse out-of-sample performance (because we start to fit the modeling noise and the stochastic noise). By carrying this ML idea into the human realm, we can argue that insisting too much on consistency can be a liability rather than an asset in our model-building.
Does that decription rings someone bells ? If yes, please link the article :)
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Of those four, I like "clue" the most. As Lumifer says, the word "proof" in English arguably connotes evidence supporting something; "sign" might have a similar problem; and "observation" feels a bit too vague to me, since an observation may be irrelevant to a hypothesis and hence not evidence at all.
The singular "clue" doesn't read well to me in the phrase "conservation of expected clue", but I think pluralizing it may help ("conservation of expected clues"). It might be feasible to invent a new word meaning something like "clueness", which might align better with the technical meaning of "evidence".
That said, if I examine how "preuve" is actually translated from French to English in official documents, the French "preuve" does sometimes seem to mean "evidence" in pretty much the English sense. So maybe "preuve" doesn't have the potential connotation (of evidence in support of a hypothesis) that Lumifer worries about.
Perhaps "intriqué avec"?
(It occurred to me that French quantum physicists must have had to deal with the phrase "entangled with" for a long time, so one could simply borrow whatever French translation those physicists use.
I went to English Wikipedia's "Quantum entanglement" entry to look at the sidebar's list of alternative languages. It links to the French entry "Intrication quantique", though that title isn't the answer, because "intrication" is a noun, not an adjectival phrase. However, the entry's second sentence mentions (in bold, helpfully) "état intriqué", which certainly looks like "entangled state", and when I Google the phrase "entangled with" along with "intrication" & "quantique", I see snippets of French like "intriqués avec" and "états quantiques intriqués". Googling "intriqué avec" confirms that the phrase is used in French discussions of quantum mechanics in contexts where it seems to mean "entangled with".)
Yes, "intrication" is the standard translation of "entanglement" in QM. But nobody else uses it, and therefore I fear there is an obvious failure mode where someone Googles it and start shouting "WTF is that?"