The mere fact that people claim A is not in itself evidence for A, because people are not pure truth-seekers, and if I acknowledge any claim as itself constituting evidence, they will proceed to claim lots of things without evidence behind them.
Technically, this would only be true if claims for A were perfectly independent of the truth of A. Your argument, as written, seems to imply radical skepticism, at least for some topics.
And you seem to be falling into the trap of thinking of things as being members of a simple binary set of mutually exclusive categories of ‘evidence’ or ‘not evidence’. The generally held view of the users of this site tho is that it’s better to expand the size of the set of ‘evidence’ categories, e.g. standard probabilities. (I don’t think it’s particularly necessary to use real numbers (versus your implied ‘0’ or ‘1’ binary values), but it sure is useful to use at least more than two categories.)
It’s not true that there’s literally no evidence of Bigfoot, it’s that the evidence is very weak.
As another commenter pointed out, a big part of this ‘disagreement’ is really people ‘talking past each other’ and a big part of that is the ‘evidence’ means different things to different people.
Technically, this would only be true if claims for A were perfectly independent of the truth of A. Your argument, as written, seems to imply radical skepticism, at least for some topics.
And you seem to be falling into the trap of thinking of things as being members of a simple binary set of mutually exclusive categories of ‘evidence’ or ‘not evidence’. The generally held view of the users of this site tho is that it’s better to expand the size of the set of ‘evidence’ categories, e.g. standard probabilities. (I don’t think it’s particularly necessary to use real numbers (versus your implied ‘0’ or ‘1’ binary values), but it sure is useful to use at least more than two categories.)
It’s not true that there’s literally no evidence of Bigfoot, it’s that the evidence is very weak.
As another commenter pointed out, a big part of this ‘disagreement’ is really people ‘talking past each other’ and a big part of that is the ‘evidence’ means different things to different people.