Not only is this ‘bad science communication’ it is also ‘not how this works, not how any of this works’ where ‘this’ is knowledge or actual science (as opposed to the brand the scientism of Science(TM)) and most importantly it is also evidence of bullshit, as per my proposed Law of No Evidence
I have a weird feeling that lots of smart people are angry about this “no evidience” thing for the wrong reason. Which is an evidence that I’m missing something, so I’d be glad if someone explained it to me.
Isn’t the main problem that people are using the same phrase in two completely different circumstances: 1) we haven’t find anything, despite looking into the matter 2) we haven’t looked yet. Then why are we freaking out about what exactly this phrase actually means, isn’t it basically arguing about definitions?
When I try to imagine a good reason for this I arrive to something like this: a layperson upon hearing “no evidence” assumes that there are literally no evidience in the bayesian sense. But I have troubles believing it. A layperson probably doesn’t know about Bayes and doesn’t think in this terms. When they see “No evidience of X” they probably translate to “Experts disapprove of X”. Nothing important would change if we had a different obscuring phrase, would it? The problem is not the phrase itself, the problem that the phrase is obscuring.
This is not an ‘honest’ mistake. This is a systematic anti-epistemic superweapon engineered to control what people are allowed and not allowed to think based on social power, in direct opposition to any and all attempts to actually understand and model the world and know things based on one’s information. Anyone wielding it should be treated accordingly.
I also have troubles with all the “deliberate misinformation superweapon” angle. I have a feeling that it once again shifts the discussion from the important “how we need to distinguish two completely different cases” to something else, namely “how everyone who uses a specific phrase is a bad person and how we are outraged about it!” This gives me huge culture war flashbacks and strikes me as not being helpful.
Here is my model how this state of affairs came into being.
In the first case:
Scientists, being ‘extremely virtious’, do not directly claim that X is false, instead they say that they do not have any evidence in favour of X, with some reasonable definition of “evidence”, leaving themselves line of retreat.
Journalists repeat the claim but do not make sure to explain what exactly scientists mean by “evidence” because it would be borring.
With time it became a cool snappy phrase in laypeople terms meaning “Scientists think that X is false and they have good reasons for it”
In the second case:
Scientists, when directly asked, agree that there is no evidence for Y, which is technically true, but misleading because they were underconfident in the first case.
Journalists ask exactly this because it’s a cool snappy phrase which everyone uses.
Laypeople become overconfident that Y is just as false as X because the same phrase is used in both cases.
Originally no one needed to be malicious here. People were just following their incentives. Now, of course, people can use this broken communication pipeline to push their narrative and this is a problem. But it will be automatically fixed as soon as we fix the pipeline itself. What’s the point of invoking conflict theory here?
I have a weird feeling that lots of smart people are angry about this “no evidience” thing for the wrong reason. Which is an evidence that I’m missing something, so I’d be glad if someone explained it to me.
Isn’t the main problem that people are using the same phrase in two completely different circumstances: 1) we haven’t find anything, despite looking into the matter 2) we haven’t looked yet. Then why are we freaking out about what exactly this phrase actually means, isn’t it basically arguing about definitions?
When I try to imagine a good reason for this I arrive to something like this: a layperson upon hearing “no evidence” assumes that there are literally no evidience in the bayesian sense. But I have troubles believing it. A layperson probably doesn’t know about Bayes and doesn’t think in this terms. When they see “No evidience of X” they probably translate to “Experts disapprove of X”. Nothing important would change if we had a different obscuring phrase, would it? The problem is not the phrase itself, the problem that the phrase is obscuring.
I also have troubles with all the “deliberate misinformation superweapon” angle. I have a feeling that it once again shifts the discussion from the important “how we need to distinguish two completely different cases” to something else, namely “how everyone who uses a specific phrase is a bad person and how we are outraged about it!” This gives me huge culture war flashbacks and strikes me as not being helpful.
Here is my model how this state of affairs came into being.
In the first case:
Scientists, being ‘extremely virtious’, do not directly claim that X is false, instead they say that they do not have any evidence in favour of X, with some reasonable definition of “evidence”, leaving themselves line of retreat.
Journalists repeat the claim but do not make sure to explain what exactly scientists mean by “evidence” because it would be borring.
With time it became a cool snappy phrase in laypeople terms meaning “Scientists think that X is false and they have good reasons for it”
In the second case:
Scientists, when directly asked, agree that there is no evidence for Y, which is technically true, but misleading because they were underconfident in the first case.
Journalists ask exactly this because it’s a cool snappy phrase which everyone uses.
Laypeople become overconfident that Y is just as false as X because the same phrase is used in both cases.
Originally no one needed to be malicious here. People were just following their incentives. Now, of course, people can use this broken communication pipeline to push their narrative and this is a problem. But it will be automatically fixed as soon as we fix the pipeline itself. What’s the point of invoking conflict theory here?