I’ve always thought ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ is flawed for material truths because of the second law: presence of X, X being at different entropy from background, would necessarily produce evidence.
No fire without smoke basically en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_
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Yeah true, but as with all things Bayesian it seems to miss the point by letting the universe of discourse be effectively unbounded
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This is the intellectual basis to Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” - there’s no evidence for x but our paranoia dictates that we must act as if x is possible, maybe even likely.
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I think you're trying to make a logic argument out of a semantic argument. When that phrase was coined, "evidence" was taken to mean "direct evidence", which is different from indirect evidence (what a thermodynamic signature may produce, e.g.).



