Absence of evidence is the dark matter of inference. It’s invisible yet it’s paramount to good judgement.
It’s easy to judge X to be true if you see some evidence that could only come about if X were true. It’s a lot more subtle to judge X to be false if you do see some evidence that it’s true, but you can also determine that there are lots of evidence that you would expect to have if it were true, but that is missing.
In a formalized setting like a RCT this is not an issue, but when reasoning in the wild, this is the norm. I’m guessing this leads to a bias of too many false positives on any issue where you care to look deeply enough to find and cherry pick the positive evidence.
EDIT: Correcting the opening sentence to say “absence of evidence” rather than the original “negative evidence”.
Absence of evidence is the dark matter of inference. It’s invisible yet it’s paramount to good judgement.
It’s easy to judge X to be true if you see some evidence that could only come about if X were true. It’s a lot more subtle to judge X to be false if you do see some evidence that it’s true, but you can also determine that there are lots of evidence that you would expect to have if it were true, but that is missing.
In a formalized setting like a RCT this is not an issue, but when reasoning in the wild, this is the norm. I’m guessing this leads to a bias of too many false positives on any issue where you care to look deeply enough to find and cherry pick the positive evidence.
EDIT: Correcting the opening sentence to say “absence of evidence” rather than the original “negative evidence”.