Quotes About Evidence

our preference for the anecdotal over the empirical.

We call this the problem of silent evidence.

the tendency to look at what confirms our knowledge, not our ignorance)

Siempre es preferible optar por aquellas cosas que funcionan desde hace mucho tiempo, pues es más probable que ya hayan alcanzado su estado ergódico. Y, de todos modos, en el peor de los casos, el problema sería que no sabemos cuánto durarán.* Recordemos que la carga de la prueba recae en quien perturba un sistema complejo y no en la persona que protege el statu quo.

Or take the health category. Adding is on the left, removing to the right. Removing medication, or some other unnatural stressor—say, gluten, fructose, tranquilizers, nail polish, or some such substance—by trial and error is more robust than adding medication, with unknown side effects, unknown in spite of the statements about "evidence" and shmevidence.

Since one small observation can disprove a statement, while millions can hardly confirm it, disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation.

Once your mind is inhabited with a certain view of the world, you will tend to only consider instances proving you to be right. Paradoxically, the more information you have, the more justified you will feel in your views.

We can also see from the turkey story the mother of all harmful mistakes: mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence

You take past instances that corroborate your theories and you treat them as evidence.

The way to remedy this is through meta-analyses of scientific studies, in which an überresearcher peruses the entire literature, which includes the less-advertised articles, and produces a synthesis.

Silent evidence is what events use to conceal their own randomness, particularly the Black Swan type of randomness.

absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, a simple point that has the following implications: for the antifragile, good news tends to be absent from past data, and for

It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view—and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite. Almost all of my non–Yogi Berra quotes are from people I disagree with.

The neglect of silent evidence is endemic to the way we study comparative talent, particularly in activities that are plagued with winner-take-all attributes. We may enjoy what we see, but there is no point reading too much into success stories because we do not see the full picture.

mistaking what we don't see for the nonexistent, a sibling to mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

withhold judgment in the absence of evidence

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds—so those who delay developing their theories are better off. When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.

shows no evidence that raising the general level of education raises income at the level of a country.

We have the illusion that the world functions thanks to programmed design, university research, and bureaucratic funding, but there is compelling—very compelling—evidence to show that this is an illusion, the illusion I call lecturing birds how to fly.

Cygnus Atratus In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

gravest of all manifestations of silent evidence, the illusion of stability. The

When we look at risks in Extremistan, we don't look at evidence (evidence comes too late), we look at potential damage: never has the world been more prone to more damage; never.

This is the same error as mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence

Theories that have not yet been known to be wrong, not falsified yet, but are exposed to be proved wrong. Why is a theory never right? Because we will never know if all the swans are white