I appreciate you trying to write this up, but as other commenters have noted, there’s no contradiction here in the first place and you appear to have missed the point.
As far as I can tell, if you understand Yudkowsky’s point, Zvi’s follows directly. {No evidence of X} = {evidence of not-X}, but the speech act of claiming “There is no evidence of X” only occurs when there is some evidence worth claiming doesn’t count as evidence.
And Yudkowsky’s point also points out that essentially “no evidence” is not just vague but in virtually all cases just completely misleading. It would be better to say “the absence of any photographs or eyewitness accounts is evidence that this story was fabricated.”
There is evidence for and evidence againstbut there is no “no evidence”.
Well, apparently I decided to write this up as its own post.
I appreciate you trying to write this up, but as other commenters have noted, there’s no contradiction here in the first place and you appear to have missed the point.
As far as I can tell, if you understand Yudkowsky’s point, Zvi’s follows directly. {No evidence of X} = {evidence of not-X}, but the speech act of claiming “There is no evidence of X” only occurs when there is some evidence worth claiming doesn’t count as evidence.
And Yudkowsky’s point also points out that essentially “no evidence” is not just vague but in virtually all cases just completely misleading. It would be better to say “the absence of any photographs or eyewitness accounts is evidence that this story was fabricated.”
There is evidence for and evidence against but there is no “no evidence”.
Well, apparently I decided to write this up as its own post.