The Volokh Conspiracy

Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent

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

"But the first step is admitting you have a problem."

|The Volokh Conspiracy |


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.

Eugene Volokh is the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA and a Visiting Fellow (Senior Fellow starting May 2024) at the Hoover Institution (Stanford). Naturally, his posts here (like the opinions of the other bloggers) are his own, and not endorsed by any educational institution.