Expert opinion, direct experience by judge, documents, testimony by witnesses, testimony by the accused.
So testimony is one type of evidence here.
In civil procedure it‘s the dame, just the terms differ slightly.
[Edit: Interesting replies, thanks!]
It's usually for common-sensical things that aren't controversial. Of course, judges could misapply this rule, but if a judge is sitting on a blasphemy trial you have more problems (with the legal system) than a dispute about whether "religion is real".
I suspect the rule is just to make things less "anal" for court procedings. Otherwise every small bit of fact needs to be proven. Things like "summer is hot", "Taylor Swift is a famous singer", "computers can be hacked", "smart phones can take photos", etc. etc. Surely you don't want to call expert witnesses for these, right?
And given that the judge ultimately calls the shots (since they're the ultimate interpreter of the law), you'd have a problem if a biased judge is appointed anyway, no matter what rules of evidence is adopted.
It means observing the accused, the witnesses, objects introduced into trial and so on. In the sense of experiencing something with one's senses. It does not mean "let me apply my world view".
Visual inspection by the court, Sections 371-372a of the Code of Civil Procedure
This consists of any direct, sensory inspection by the judge for evidential purposes. Contrary to the somewhat misleading term used, ‘Augenschein’, ‘visual inspection’, it may also include sensory inspection by touching, smelling, listening and tasting. Consequently, sound and video recordings and data storage media are also included.
Sometimes, people just saying something is extremely good evidence that it's true. My name is Stuart. I'm 22 years old.
This sounds like "Bayesian evidence". However, I don't think "scientific evidence" has a precise agreed-upon definition. I would take "there is scientific evidence" to mean "some scientists say they have significant evidence that they themselves obtained directly and that they have published or presented".
And here I have absolutely no idea if it is true or not. I don't know you, I can't see you. You could be a bot, a dog, a scammer, a teenager... Your evidence means nothing "evident".
Are you sure you're even awake right now? Are you sure that you've ever been awake? Are any of your senses evidently reliable?
Perceived reality can never be perfect evidence, and it's not possible to step outside of your own perceptions.
Evidence is just that. If you try really hard to achieve full epistemological rigour I think it's inevitable you'll wind up at the conclusion you don't know anything at all.
2. This gets back to the point Scott is making - now define "scientific evidence". For any reasonable definition of scientific evidence, there is a lot of evidence for almost everything. I can find scientific evidence for aliens if I want to - to a terribly low standard, true enough - although what Scott picked on was homeopathy which works a bit better.
People underestimate lies, damn lies and statistics. There are facts that back up any worldview, no matter how insane. Carl could find scientific evidence to back up his theory. There'll be anomalous weather station readings, weird sounds, academics papers published by crazy academics that kinda support him. We've all met monomaniacal people; they aren't shy of finding scientific evidence for their case. Still bunk though.
Slight tangent, but I've seen a similar thing when trying to decide which religion, if any, is true:
Every one I looked at had at least a few very intelligent, seemingly rational adherents. It seems like there's a subjective element to what evidence each person finds persuasive.
It's not like there is a "scientist" card that some people carry and some don't... and it's not like none of the hypothetical card-carrying scientists would ever have crazy opinions.
Imagine Carl ran an experiment where he put a sign in front of various groups of turnips asking for things like aliens, Bigfoot, or faeries to take the turnips.
After running this experiment, only the turnips with signs associated to aliens were taken.
In this scenario, Carl would have some scientific evidence suggesting aliens took his turnips. It'd be weak evidence that likely wouldn't be replicated, but still evidence.
An analysis of compounds in DNA finds that there are, within a small margin of error, identical quantities of adenine and thymine, and identical quantities of guanine and cytosine. You have not yet been able to experimentally verify your hypothesis of a base pair rule. It is nevertheless not true to say there is "no evidence" of a base pair rule.
Sufficient evidence to form a reasonable hypothesis, but insufficient evidence to elevate your hypothesis to a theory, is still some evidence, and it is a lie to say otherwise.
Really? The scientific method is flawed.
The OP had a funny alien example, so someone stretched and came up with a silly 'test' for a hypothesis of the alien ate the turnip.
That doesn't mean 'testing' is flawed way of determining 'evidence'.
Then of course there are gradations below that. Observational studies, are just observations after all.
But because I can say "there is 'no evidence' that there are no aliens" is then the lowest bar, it doesn't mean there 'are' aliens.
But the point here is that 'no evidence' is being used as a rhetorical technique to promote actually false findings.
Kind of along the lines of simply injecting doubt into a debate in order to detract from real evidence. Like what has been done for cigarettes, sugar, etc...
A publications doesn’t give you a free pass from scrutiny.
Sorry to seem pedantic, but I think it matters here since we're talking about specific meanings of terms.
(They probably didn't have turnips though, I hope that wasn't the point.)
The problem here isn't whether this is scientific evidence, but that the evidence isn't sufficient for scientists to form a reasonable hypothesis about what gives rise to the phenomenon (which could be (a) aliens are real, (b) some form of mass hallucination, (c) some form of synchronized fraudulent claim, (d) etc. etc. ).
I speculate that if somebody actually does a "literature review" of abduction reports they could pick out some signals to form some hypothesis, but presumably scientists have better things to risk their careers over.
No it isn't, it's a term of art and it tells you something very important: the second half of the phrase is still only a hypothesis and no one has tried or been able to prove it in a rigorous way. And if you understand that, it gives you a lot of context for how to interpret it.
Does it get misused by non-scientists to mean other things? Sure. But you get lied to every day with far more sophistication, so I guess I don't understand the huff about this particular bit of jargon.
This was a weak article, basically. Leave the scientists their jargon, if you don't like how it's being used, argue about the specifics of the point.
Can you restate the meaning of the term of art "No evidence"?
Can you cite any source that explains this fact you are relaying in greater depth?
Does science have a different term to communicate the nonexistence of evidence?
This is horrible sealioning[1], please stop. Surely if there's an entity responsible for rigorously defining and documenting the term under discussion, it's the linked article and not arbitrary commenters in a discussion about it. No one anywhere in this thread is using this term in a way inconsistent with the articles, so if you have a complaint please take it there. Demanding we all stop and define terms is just a way of evading discussion. If you have an alternative definition, you can propose it yourself.
So of course we can't rely on the writer, or the written words, of any 'linked article' to be authoritative and decisive in any sense or in any capacity.
i.e. Everything is only tentative until someone offers a better argument/proof/analysis/etc...
It isn't even Sea-lioning!
Never mind logic and epistemology, can you people even get your meme magic right?
> Demanding we all stop and define terms is just a way of evading discussion.
"Just" as in "only"? If so: incorrect again (there are other possibilities); if not: so what?
"no evidence of a difference" is fine so long as it's proceeded with "This study found", which when studies are translated to press reports often gets dropped, especially in headlines.
On this particular issue, even the original studies often screw things up unfortunately. Frequentist statistics works very differently from people's natural intuition, and the attraction of a binary decision tool (NHST) has led to a lot of lazy thinking and sloppy science.
What happens if I say that aliens did not abduct Carl's prize turnip, and instead it spontaneously combusted? Is there then 'conflicting evidence'?
Seems to be that the 'evidence' in both these cases is so vanishingly small as to not be evidence
If, you were actually someone involved with the turnip theft, and in a legal sense had something like standing to challenge Carl's statement, then your mutual testimony would probably be considered.
> If Crazy Carl says that aliens abducted his prize turnip, ...
Then, this is a piece of information like many other pieces. The question is only how I should process this. Maybe it will only strengthen my belief that Carl is, in fact, crazy. But who knows maybe I should factor in some more information. Is Carly really that crazy as commonly believed or was Carl taking some strange pills yesterday?
Or in a COVID context: So if a scientist says "no evidence that asymptomatic people transmit the disease", it might change your beliefs about the disease or on the person talking about related topics in the future as you lost trust in that person.
At least in the COVID context, they were worried that any nuance would confuse the public, so they simply gave the simplified, dumbed down version.
Of course it backfired a bit. I honestly don't know what's the optimal play for them, but it seems a bit revisionist to say that they assumed the public was capable of filling in the gaps...
But when policymakers say there's no evidence for ivermectin's ability to treat COVID, I don't fault them because I see their choice of words as being aligned with the truth. Therefore they are accurately communicating science and good policy.
As with all uses of language, we have to look at it on a case-by-case basis whether it's being weaponized wrongly or used appropriately. I will criticize it when it's used wrongly, and otherwise not criticize it.
Evidence for untrue things is still evidence, if it is verifiable. However, there is such thing as "no evidence". Crazy Carl's claim by itself would not be verifiable, therefore it is not evidence.
We should have different standards of evidence for different scenarios. If Bob ate a suspicious species of carrot and ended up in the hospital, that's a reasonable indication to not eat that type of carrot, even though it's not a controlled experiment and technically anecdotal evidence. You don't need N=10 people to end up in the hospital to listen to a story.
See, the 'no evidence' is used as a rhetorical device to make something 'appear' true.
Falling back on the old 'all evidence is questionable' because our eyes can deceive, and all perception is subjective, so all of reality is in doubt, is a rabbit whole.
Sure we live in a 'numinal' world. That doesn't mean we can't use thermometers to tell the temperature, even thought temperature itself is a construct.
Of course, you can absorb information, observations, into your brain, and make judgments, like the road is wet, the light is red. It is fairly subjective, not recorded. Whether you report to the police that you swear the light was green. or Crazy uncle says aliens ate his turnips.
They are really almost about the same level of verifiability. Then it is just probabilities that make us really dismiss the alien hypothesis.
That is a lot different from forming a hypothesis, performing a controlled experience and taking measurements to prove/disprove hypothesis.
When troubleshooting, I will take in all observations, no matter how strange. But I wouldn't say they are the problem without further verification.
I think there is evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ironmagma
Trolls would reasonably able to be detected by the contents of their posts/comments. Looking over the comment history, I see an absence of evidence that they are a troll and, in this case, absence of evidence is evidence of absence [because we can reasonably exhaust all of the "trials" [past comments]].
I've seen plenty of people watch the exact same debate, and each believes 100% that their side wont hands down. Of course "there is no evidence" one side won or not.
The point is that "there is no evidence" is being used to promote the opposite views.
So I can disparage ironmagma in a title of an article, and all the reader who flips through them is left with impression that "ironmagma must be a troll, lot's of good people think so, and there is no evidence he isn't".
I probably should have come up with better example. But there is "no evidence" that the outcome would be different.
That's also why we avoided eating non-poisonous tomatoes for centuries leaving food proverbably on the table. The world experienced far more rapid progression when we started demanding reproducible evidence for reproducible events.
The standard for that evidence should be very different than the standard for reproducible physics, chemistry and biology experiments.
Other times it's just an extrapolation of a preexisting data set. Running this query produced this result.
Don’t forget the likely bias that you are talking about scientific results in the press, which is a negligible subset of scientific work and which is biased towards humans, and sociological studies in particular.
From you comment I doubt you’re seeing much work in insect embryology or slippage in gravel pile formation (I don’t run across that stuff either)
> The standard for that evidence should be very different than the standard for reproducible physics, chemistry and biology experiments.
I don't really see why we should treat evidence coming from surveys differently than evidence coming from physics, chemistry or biology experiments as long as surveys are well constructed, fulfill the criterion of validity and reliability and are reproducible. Yes, they are not 'hard facts' but often the only option to measure latent variables or fuzzy constructs. If they do this in a reproducible way I don't see the issue here.
On the other hand, 'hard sciences' such as neuroscience and medical science have a big problem with non-reproducible studies, even though they use more 'objective' measurement methods.
Scientific evidence needs to be repeatable.
If others perform the same experiment, they should get the same experimental result.
Once you start exploring the views of individuals and groups, you're more in the realm of the social sciences than hard science.
> Scientific evidence needs to be repeatable.
I think the GP comment had it right.
Consider I make some cosmological prediction based on Bob’ observational data (“stars with this spectrum mostly contain elements X and Y”). It does little good to repeat my analysis, which is entirely done on a piece of paper or in a computer program.
But Alice could say, “Well if that’s true, then this other thing would have to be true too” and go check that.
That’s the difference between “verifiable” and “repeatable”.
Sometimes “repeatable” is a sensible form of verification. Last year we spent 9 months trying to reproduce results from an important (to us) paper. Eventually we came up with a reliable process to reproduce the results of the paper — the hypothesis was correct — but it looks like the author just saw some signal a few times, and didn’t really demonstrate the principle they were trying to validate. We couldn’t use the same process described in the paper.
Since we can now get the result whenever we want we consider the theory valid.
This isn't even true. Suppose a supernova happens and you gather a bunch of data. That's not really repeatable.
Same goes for lots of things in evobio. Clinical reports of one-off events, etc.
If you gather a bunch of data on that supernova, you have evidence that supernova exploded. You don't have data on the nature of supernovas until you capture a wide range of them.
But so if you see something particularly unusual about that supernova (which happens a lot), it might be non reproducible, and you just have to live with that fact.
For example, multimodal observation of gravitational waves is still n=1
When 'intelligence' is involved it can be a little more tricky as we tend to pull some tricks that seemingly violate entropy at least on a local scale (that is systems at the local scale can become more ordered), which means it can take a lot of effort to the thermodynamic path a system took to get into its current configuration.
You could presumably check if Carl suffers from regular hallucinations, maybe run him through an fMRI to check if he's lying (assuming they can make that reliable), and so on. Each check increases confidence in the claim, even though it will never by itself be persuasive.
The equivalent statement is "extraordinary evidence doesn't necessarily imply extraordinary claims".
Lets say that somehow humans had not mixed baking soda and vinegar together before today. You decide to mix these things and get a mild foamy eruption that is cool. You do it twice and the same thing happens.
In this 'ordinary' example I would say you need less evidence to make your claims because the means of reproduction of the experiment and testing are within the reach of almost everybody. This could be quickly validated across the globe, and the reproducibility is evidence.
Now, if you require a billion dollar machine and a year of time to reproduce the experiment, you need to provide a lot of damned evidence so you don't waste a lot of scientists time and money that could be used for better things. Same with any experiments on people and/or the environment that can have effects that cannot be recovered from.
"true evidence" should probably be replaced with "scientific evidence". If you have 10 witness on the stand, all who say they saw Bob shoot Alice then that is evidence that Bob shot Alice, even if we can't actually reproduce the shooting.
Scientific evidence ought to meet the standard. If someone produces a video showing Bob shot Alice (let's assume faking the video is technically impossible), that would also constitute "true evidence". In that sense, I wouldn't consider witness' testimonies "true evidence".
It's a fact that legal evidence in court does not need to be "verifiable". There are rules for what counts as admissible evidence of course (complex rules at that), but AFAIK none of those requirements is "verifiable".
As I suggested in another comment, there's a big difference on how to evaluate scientific claims (which is required to be reproducible) and some random factual claim (eg. what did I have for breakfast). There is no way I can give "true, verfiable evidence" for what I ate for breakfast, but generally people take my word for it, and my word is "good enough" evidence.
There are other types of claims where, because the evidence is inherently hard to obtain, even "low quality" evidence is taken into account, eg. digging up a clay pot could be evidence of civilization or human settlement in an area. (Surely no one in their right mind would say to support such a claim you need to somehow independently verify it, right?)
This depends how far you are in the process of turning your breakfast into poop.
As for the digging up of the pots... it depends on the exact nature of the claim.
Digging up of the clay pot does mean there where humans with clay pots at that place some time in the past. The settlement claim is a larger claim, if they were travelers that lost their pots there, that's a lot different than the pots being buried in a basement of a permanent building. Finding lots of the same kind of pots over a wide area and scale of time show that a certain civilization (may?) have existed in that area.
1. the facts, signs or objects that make you believe that something is true 2. the information that is used in court to try to prove something
I was talking about sense 1, you were talking about sense 2.
I think the article is also about sense 1 of the word "evidence".
[1]: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
What is worse, the media manipulators know that distinction. They do not actually confuse it - they know "without ultimate proof" and "without evidence" are different things. They never use it interchangeably, as it would happen if they, like you, were confusing the two. Instead, they use "no evidence" when they should have said "no ultimate proof" or "evidence, insufficient to make a definite conclusion" - to confuse you and present the matter as if there's actually only one possible conclusion, and you shouldn't even try to inquire about what it's based on, since there's literally nothing - "no evidence" - that you could look at. This is usually false, because if there was truly nothing, there would be little point of them trying to convince you. What they are trying to do is to prevent you from considering the evidence there exists, by falsely claiming "there's no evidence" and thus you should accept the conclusion pre-made for you. It doesn't mean if you consider the evidence you'd necessarily arrive at the opposite conclusion - but they are not willing to take the risk, they do not trust you. You can take that as another piece of evidence for how strong their argument actually is.
I am not sure about that. If someone claims that you had stole something from a store, which you know you didn't, responding with something like "where is your evidence/you have no evidence" sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
> Is there "no evidence" for alien abductions? There are hundreds of people who say they've been abducted by aliens! By legal standards, hundreds of eyewitnesses is great evidence! If a hundred people say that Bob stabbed them, Bob is a serial stabber - or, even if you thought all hundred witnesses were lying, you certainly wouldn't say the prosecution had “no evidence”! When we say "no evidence" here, we mean "no really strong evidence from scientists, worthy of a peer-reviewed journal article". But this is the opposite problem as with the parachutes - here we should stop accepting informal evidence, and demand more scientific rigor.
For something purported to be factual and experienced personally (eg. did the accused assault the victim? did person experience alien abduction?), there's arguably no better way to handle these kinds of evidence except through witnesses and their testimony (and maybe cross examination).
Note that whether a single person experienced alien abduction is not a scientific question per se, it is simply a question of a person's subjective experience or memory. There's no hypothesis for this specific factual question, and no laws of nature are involved (yet).
On the other hand, questions such as "what is the gravitational constant", or "why do people report alien abductions?" is a scientific question. For the latter, scientists could hypothesize that (a) aliens are real (b) there's some kind of mass hallucination going on (c) some other weird phenomenon, etc. I think it's actually arguable that we don't have enough evidence to provide a convincing hypothesis about the general phenomenon (of abduction reports), but people confuse this lack of scientific hypothesis with the phenomenon not being real.
If you actually think about it, there's no reason any scientist could authoritatively say whether a particular person actually experienced alien abduction or not, just like no scientist could say whether a particular person had been assaulted or not. We might not have theories to explain the phenomenon, but that doesn't mean the reports are not true.
I've encountered a similar issue in arguments for / against various religious claims.
Even when people are arguing in good faith, there's sometimes a disagreement about what evidence is considered valid.
For example, I have personal "spiritual" revelations that I acknowledge nobody in their right mind would believe unless they witnessed/experienced something similar themselves. (And I make this claim in good faith.)
And this is actually fine. People hold different views because they have different experiences. And while communication can narrow the gap, it doesn't eliminate it completely.
I think it's an actually interesting thought experiment to suspend your disbelief about whatever you currently believe about alien abductions, and imagine that you actually experienced it yourself. What could you have said to convince people it actually happened? Is there a way to not become Crazy Carl besides pretending it didn't happen?
You're correct, evidence exists on a spectrum from "highly implausible" to "highly plausible".
> People like to believe that "someone says" isn't evidence, which is wildly disconnected from how human society works.
Human society is multi-faceted.
In the sciences, "someone says" is the lowest form of evidence there is. It is so close to "no evidence" that we simply disregard it without further thought.
In the legal system, "someone says" is the highest form of evidence there is - witness testimony can, and routinely does, trump any other evidence.
These are the two extremes. Other human societal systems use the word "evidence" to mean anything in between these two extremes.
You are conflating the science's usage of the word "evidence" with the legal usage of the word "evidence".
Not really. "Someone says they conducted an experiment in a certain way and the data they gathered was as follows:" is still a form of "someone says You're trusting that they aren't lying about their data (and they often are).
Actually, it really depends on: - who says it - is the statement within their field of expertise - do they have known or likely personal incentives - does the topic carry significant political, religious or ideological implications - is the topic politicized - is the field itself heavily ideological or activism oriented, hard science or somewhere in the middle - is the statement consistent with statements from most other trusted experts
hmmm. So citations in scientific papers are really disses? Interesting!
It's important, because all of our evidence flows through subjective interpretation and a human reporting mechanism. Even if a computer mainlines some numbers to a data store, there's a subjective force: why did the experimenter choose to focus on those measurements?
I'm not contending the point (I'm in slight agreement with you, I believe). I'm only trying to point out that people are often talking past each other, because each person in that two-way conversation are often using different meanings of the word "evidence".
There is too much nuance to call either end of the spectrum "wrong for the meaning of 'evidence'".
In the U.S., at least, this is not true. Middle school and high school physics curricula include experiments to measure gravitational acceleration, so in theory (to the extent curricula are followed and students are present), almost everyone has measured it at least once.
And pushing that "alleged facts" boil down to "someone says" is ignoring some methods of science. Some people have recorded what the value of gravity on earth is. They have also recorded an analytic equation to calculate it, with the argument that it would work in other locations. They have then worked examples validating the equation in other locations. They have also given directions for how you can, personally, validate the value where you are. This is all very different than "someone says."
If you were in 15th century, you would believe everything Church says which is the authority figure at that time.
If you are in North Korea you would believe everything the Party says.
So an authority figure saying something is not really evidence isn't since the meaning of the word should stand the test of time and location.
For thousands of years society “worked” propagating religious babble then it didn’t. It’s low quality evidence society works on propaganda.
If we say the trucks are on their way with food and they don’t show, the words meant nothing and the literal reality will dictate next steps.
Society doesn’t “work” on propagation of symbolic logic. It works when material outcomes are stable and equitable for the aggregate.
When society relies on functionally illiterate ossified minds propagating nostalgia babble, whether the babble is religious or statistical mirage that ignores the material stability of the aggregate (socializing a communal upside to a small cohort of mega rich rent seekers helicoptering us) societies fall apart.
Humans have real needs and when they’re met, society works. When they’re not due to over reliance on belief and philosophy society fails.
There’s plenty of high quality evidence to refute society works due to propagation of rhetorical statements. Real things need to occur too. Pre-language nomadic tribes built shared material stores, all based on the obvious physical reality. There is zero evidence society works on rhetoric at all and plenty the rhetoric propagates nothing but mirage.
Even as someone who has made a similar point recently, I think this is going too far. Carl claiming aliens is evidence of something weird going on with Carl, but there's still no reason to take his claim at face value. More likely Carl has a screw loose (good to know!) or is pulling a con.
I think that was a mistake because of the erosion of trust, but to be totally honest, I'm not sure where I stand on this overall.
Having evidence for untrue things also turns up naturally because of statistical mirages.
"No evidence" is a phrase that gets used in untruthful ways. There usually is evidence, of everything. True, false or irrelevant - there will be evidence of it in some form or another. The question is what standard the evidence reaches, not whether it exists.