In the absence of evidence for their innocence, to say that the absence of evidence for their guilt is evidence of their innocence may not be applied. If you do not have evidence for their innocence, then you DO have evidence of their guilt (by virtue of the absence of evidence being evidence of absence) and therefore you do not have the required absence of evidence for their guilt that was used to draw the initial conclusion regarding innocence.
The converse is also true.
In the absence of evidence for their guilt, to say that the absence of evidence for their innocence is evidence of their guilt may not be applied. If you do not have evidence for their guilt, then you DO have evidence of their innocence (by virtue of the absence of evidence being evidence of absence) and therefore you do not have the required absence of evidence for their innocence that was used to draw the initial conclusion regarding guilt.
You may only say that, given the presence of evidence of innocence, a lack of evidence of guilt would provide further evidence of innocence. But if you have neither evidence of guilt nor evidence of innocence, the rule may not be applied.
In that case, the two cancel each other out, and both types of evidence are worthless.
You can run it through Bayes Theorom.
This is like a test that predicts an outcome 70% of the time, but has a 70% false positive rate. The end result is a coin toss that is weighted to be 70% on one side, it doesn’t help you find the truth in any way.
In the absence of evidence for their innocence, to say that the absence of evidence for their guilt is evidence of their innocence may not be applied. If you do not have evidence for their innocence, then you DO have evidence of their guilt (by virtue of the absence of evidence being evidence of absence) and therefore you do not have the required absence of evidence for their guilt that was used to draw the initial conclusion regarding innocence.
The converse is also true.
In the absence of evidence for their guilt, to say that the absence of evidence for their innocence is evidence of their guilt may not be applied. If you do not have evidence for their guilt, then you DO have evidence of their innocence (by virtue of the absence of evidence being evidence of absence) and therefore you do not have the required absence of evidence for their innocence that was used to draw the initial conclusion regarding guilt.
You may only say that, given the presence of evidence of innocence, a lack of evidence of guilt would provide further evidence of innocence. But if you have neither evidence of guilt nor evidence of innocence, the rule may not be applied.
In that case, the two cancel each other out, and both types of evidence are worthless.
You can run it through Bayes Theorom.
This is like a test that predicts an outcome 70% of the time, but has a 70% false positive rate. The end result is a coin toss that is weighted to be 70% on one side, it doesn’t help you find the truth in any way.
Can you create an example in which you would draw a different conclusion by your procedure than by the procedure outlined in the post?