Sunday, December 19, 2021

"Breaking an Addiction To False Certainty Is as Hard as Breaking Any Other Addiction."

By Eugene Volokh - December 19, 2021 at 02:24PM

A nice line, I think, from a post at Astral Codex Ten; the rest of the post ("The Phrase 'No Evidence' Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication") strikes me as very good, too. An excerpt, though the article offers far more detail than that:

Science communicators are using the same term—"no evidence"—to mean:

  1. This thing is super plausible, and honestly very likely true, but we haven't checked yet, so we can't be sure.
  2. We have hard-and-fast evidence that this is false, stop repeating this easily debunked lie.

This is utterly corrosive to anybody trusting science journalism.

Thanks to Prof. Glenn Reynolds (InstaPundit) for the pointer.

The post "Breaking an Addiction To False Certainty Is as Hard as Breaking Any Other Addiction." appeared first on Reason.com.



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