It’s important to distinguish between different kinds of evidence. There’s never no rational evidence, but there might be no scientific evidence. The issue comes in when people conclude that there’s no rational evidence because there’s no scientific evidence.
The problem with the “no scientific evidence” line of thought is it devolves to:
“We know nothing at all unless a credentialed scientist conducted a blind RCT at the cost of millions of dollars and years of time. And the only information we learned from the RCT was a probability update for a binary question. And the results had to be reviewed by peer scientists, manually, and then published in a high impact journal or they are not credible”.
Otherwise we are going to pretend we know absolutely nothing and will continue to do things per decades old tradition. (Even though those traditions were never checked with the same algorithm)
This is not a system that will develop effective treatments for aging and human disease.
Moreover the math says it is morally evil and kills millions.
My proposed fix is we develop automated systems to do all the above and we have the algorithms reviewed by all of the above but then reuse the same automated systems for thousands of experiments. And instead of explicit rcts we usually find the data by mining or proxy experiments.
I definitely share your concern that evidence which isn’t “scientific” matters, but I still think whether or not there is scientific evidence isn’t entirely irrelevant to decision-making when we care about creating organizations that consistently make good decisions.
Currently, we definitely care far too much about scientific evidence, but I disagree that the concept is entirely bullshit.
I am not saying it is bullshit. But failing to consider information also has a cost. And for some fields, “consistently good decisions” may not even be possible.
Yes, but I think making the distinction that way is going to be much harder for many people outside this community. I know very few people who don’t read this website who even have any sort of probabilistic conception of “evidence” and “belief,” and I have had (very conventionally well educated in STEM fields) people get angry at me for talking about things that way.
We are familiar with the ideas of rational evidence, scientific evidence, legal evidence, and so on, screening off some types of evidence for certain purposes, but most people aren’t, at least not explicitly, and as far as I can tell have no idea that that’s what our societal institutions are doing or why.
Things you would refer to when writing a paper about the subject? When it comes to a question like whether COVID is airbone I doubt that there’s no prior art that you would cite that point into the direction.
Eliezer isn’t given an exact definition but it seems to me like he’s pointing to scientific knowledge being knowledge that comes from scientific papers.
There’s weak evidence for most scientific statements that you could make that comes from scientific papers.
The fact that most published papers about homeopathy find that homeopathy is effective is a type of scientific evidence. On the other hand the fact that most high quality trials that are published show that it has no effect suggests that overall we should believe that it has no effect. Especially, if we combine the evidence from the high quality trials with evidence we have about published physical theories.
I can’t think of good examples that are revelant for this discussion where there’s no scientific evidence (nothing is published in a paper that’s Bayesian evidence).
It’s important to distinguish between different kinds of evidence. There’s never no rational evidence, but there might be no scientific evidence. The issue comes in when people conclude that there’s no rational evidence because there’s no scientific evidence.
The problem with the “no scientific evidence” line of thought is it devolves to:
“We know nothing at all unless a credentialed scientist conducted a blind RCT at the cost of millions of dollars and years of time. And the only information we learned from the RCT was a probability update for a binary question. And the results had to be reviewed by peer scientists, manually, and then published in a high impact journal or they are not credible”.
Otherwise we are going to pretend we know absolutely nothing and will continue to do things per decades old tradition. (Even though those traditions were never checked with the same algorithm)
This is not a system that will develop effective treatments for aging and human disease.
Moreover the math says it is morally evil and kills millions.
My proposed fix is we develop automated systems to do all the above and we have the algorithms reviewed by all of the above but then reuse the same automated systems for thousands of experiments. And instead of explicit rcts we usually find the data by mining or proxy experiments.
I definitely share your concern that evidence which isn’t “scientific” matters, but I still think whether or not there is scientific evidence isn’t entirely irrelevant to decision-making when we care about creating organizations that consistently make good decisions.
Currently, we definitely care far too much about scientific evidence, but I disagree that the concept is entirely bullshit.
I am not saying it is bullshit. But failing to consider information also has a cost. And for some fields, “consistently good decisions” may not even be possible.
Yes, but I think making the distinction that way is going to be much harder for many people outside this community. I know very few people who don’t read this website who even have any sort of probabilistic conception of “evidence” and “belief,” and I have had (very conventionally well educated in STEM fields) people get angry at me for talking about things that way.
We are familiar with the ideas of rational evidence, scientific evidence, legal evidence, and so on, screening off some types of evidence for certain purposes, but most people aren’t, at least not explicitly, and as far as I can tell have no idea that that’s what our societal institutions are doing or why.
What’s “scientific evidence”?
Things you would refer to when writing a paper about the subject? When it comes to a question like whether COVID is airbone I doubt that there’s no prior art that you would cite that point into the direction.
Is the explanation in the linked sequence post insufficient?
Eliezer isn’t given an exact definition but it seems to me like he’s pointing to scientific knowledge being knowledge that comes from scientific papers.
There’s weak evidence for most scientific statements that you could make that comes from scientific papers.
The fact that most published papers about homeopathy find that homeopathy is effective is a type of scientific evidence. On the other hand the fact that most high quality trials that are published show that it has no effect suggests that overall we should believe that it has no effect. Especially, if we combine the evidence from the high quality trials with evidence we have about published physical theories.
I can’t think of good examples that are revelant for this discussion where there’s no scientific evidence (nothing is published in a paper that’s Bayesian evidence).