Isn’t this the Heap paradox? Enough absence of evidence probably should be considered to be evidence of absence, but it’s not obvious where that cutoff should be, and it can vary from one situation to the next.
I think you’re right that there’s an interesting connection to the “heap paradox” (sorites paradox, where ‘sorites’ is derived from the Greek word for ‘heap’).
Absence of evidence is always (to some degree) evidence of absence, but you’re right that there’s no context-free cutoff where one can always ‘safely round down’ from some arbitrarily small probability to ‘effectively zero’.
But the main point is that claims of “no evidence” are technically incorrect (based on the understanding of ‘evidence’ shared by many/most of the users of this site, and similarly inclined people).
A more charitable interpretation of “no evidence” might be ‘no good evidence’, but as Zvi points out, even that’s almost always false – because there’s no cutoff between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ evidence.
Isn’t this the Heap paradox? Enough absence of evidence probably should be considered to be evidence of absence, but it’s not obvious where that cutoff should be, and it can vary from one situation to the next.
I think you’re right that there’s an interesting connection to the “heap paradox” (sorites paradox, where ‘sorites’ is derived from the Greek word for ‘heap’).
Absence of evidence is always (to some degree) evidence of absence, but you’re right that there’s no context-free cutoff where one can always ‘safely round down’ from some arbitrarily small probability to ‘effectively zero’.
But the main point is that claims of “no evidence” are technically incorrect (based on the understanding of ‘evidence’ shared by many/most of the users of this site, and similarly inclined people).
A more charitable interpretation of “no evidence” might be ‘no good evidence’, but as Zvi points out, even that’s almost always false – because there’s no cutoff between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ evidence.