As I said above, I believe that you’re using the phrase “weak evidence” in a non-standard way, essentially violating Grice’s Maxim of Quantity. When something is as weak as in this case, people don’t call it weak, they call it trivial or negligible or exceedingly weak, or some other term to transmit the idea of just how very weak it is. When people say “weak evidence”, they mean that it’s definitely not strong or conclusive, but there’s nontrivial amount of it, it’s not vanishingly small.
You’re possibly right. I invite you to test your belief by consulting the search for “weak evidence” over LW. This probably sounds snarky, so let me quickly clarify that I don’t mean this in the sense “this search confirms I’m right”. I looked over the results briefly and saw that roughly half of them use further qualifiers like “astonishingly weak”, “very weak”, “extremely weak”and so on, which is consistent with what I’d said. But it’s also possible that many results use vanilla “weak evidence” to refer to what other results call “extremely/incredibly weak” etc., and then you’re right. I looked at a few “vanilla” uses in context and didn’t see that, but I didn’t look at enough.
As I said above, I believe that you’re using the phrase “weak evidence” in a non-standard way, essentially violating Grice’s Maxim of Quantity. When something is as weak as in this case, people don’t call it weak, they call it trivial or negligible or exceedingly weak, or some other term to transmit the idea of just how very weak it is. When people say “weak evidence”, they mean that it’s definitely not strong or conclusive, but there’s nontrivial amount of it, it’s not vanishingly small.
I do not believe it is non-standard for LessWrong. I admit I’m guilty of tailoring my posts to fit the LessWrong-specific audience.
You’re possibly right. I invite you to test your belief by consulting the search for “weak evidence” over LW. This probably sounds snarky, so let me quickly clarify that I don’t mean this in the sense “this search confirms I’m right”. I looked over the results briefly and saw that roughly half of them use further qualifiers like “astonishingly weak”, “very weak”, “extremely weak”and so on, which is consistent with what I’d said. But it’s also possible that many results use vanilla “weak evidence” to refer to what other results call “extremely/incredibly weak” etc., and then you’re right. I looked at a few “vanilla” uses in context and didn’t see that, but I didn’t look at enough.