Something that irritates me about people who are inclined to think rigorously about evidence is a tendency to lean a bit too hard on a high standard when it's convenient for them. They may even, quite often, dismiss all evidence as insufficiently strict, and then say there is no evidence at all. The criterion for calling something evidence is not that it is proof.

Why not simply say "There is no firm evidence, in my opinion, let alone proof"? This is more honest and accurate. It allows that others have cited what they believe is evidence and calls it into question without insisting that none of it can be real anywhere.

Evidence is suggestive. If you think it's evidence, call it a clue. Call it suggestive evidence to reinforce that it isn't proof.

Please don't call it "there's no evidence at all" just because you haven't been convinced by the so-called evidence you've seen, heard, or found.

When a claim is definitively disproven, the clues that hinted at it before, that were taken as evidence, are no longer evidence that the claim is true, but they remain evidence about how people think and perceive. In that sense, they are evidence *about* the claim rather than evidence *of* the claim. In hindsight, they become a different kind of evidence, but evidence they still are.

Part of listening to criticism is understanding that if you are doing something wrong, insensitive, or inconvenient, the resulting frustration may cause another person to become a bit irrational. And even if they are being highly irrational, hostile, or even just downright wrong, they may still have a point worth recognizing.

Criticism should be calm, coherent, rational, and compassionate. But when it fails at any or all of these, we should still be able to extract as much usable information as possible.

This does not mean we should stand around while people try to literally pummel us to death for getting their name wrong. But it does mean we should always be aware of the two-way responsibility in criticism.

There are some typical ways people moralize that strike me as weird.

"Holding to account" is all too rarely a discussion about *how*. Usually it's about *whether*, leaving "accountability" as some sort of blank check to the one "holding to" or else to a society's preconceptions. Just because a behavior is "unacceptable" does not mean that whatever retaliation feels preferred is automatically right. I often think of a hungry lion escaped from a zoo. We know this is very dangerous to humans (and other animals about our size), and the lion may already have injured or killed someone. Yet a tranquilizer dart is more practical and defensible than causing the lion suffering. I've yet to hear a convincing argument as to why dangerous humans are so different. Why do most of us seem not even to question our positions here? There are many ways to "hold to account," and sadism (including the normal amounts of it that make retribution seem appealing) is an extremely important force to consider with utmost caution.

"There are consequences" is particularly bizarre. Every conscious person knows that the universe is full of consequences. "Do actions have consequences?" is not a popular debate. To say "there are consequences" before creating a consequence is strange; this particular "consequence" may be your choice rather than a natural consequence. It actually sounds like a way to hide from accountability for the form of punishment a person chooses to apply. Yes, there are consequences. Many! Obviously! But no, if, as is implied, free will exists, then my free will to punish (and *how* to punish) an offender is not a natural consequence, but rather my (fallible) choice, for which I must take full responsibility. If free will does not exist, then every choice ever made has merely been a direct consequence of its inputs, and morality perhaps ought to take a different tenor as a commentary on the motions of particles and the complex results of these.

Everyone's told doubt is a dream-killer, doubt is cowardly. So everyone strives not to doubt, and they end up stupid.

The secret, if I know anything about the secret, is not to eradicate doubt at all. Invite doubt. Throw open your doors to not knowing entirely. Welcome so much doubt that you get used to it; learn to stop reacting to it with such panic or dismay or overwhelm.

Doubt is everywhere, forming crevices in every thought, belief, feeling, sensation.

You can't get rid of that any more than you can get rid of air.

Yet sometimes an airlock is good, sometimes a ziploc bag, sometimes a vacuum cleaner, and so on.

Give your immune system something to work on. Pick up dirt. Do a Tarot reading, read the science paper behind the findings. Talk to someone who has little idea what they're saying, but thinks you need instructing. Use Wikipedia and ChatGPT as if they're as good as a textbook, check a textbook as if you were embarrassed to include it as a source.

Mix it up.

Keep track of the fact you don't know, but a lot of stuff is true and a lot of stuff is false, and there's skill to making the bet which is which.

You think you can do better than that?

Probably not.

I'm not saying I've said what there is to know about dealing with doubt, about using critical thinking, about checking sources.

But I think you need to embrace doubt, not run from it.

Society will try to make you think you're worth less. And you'll have trouble dealing with the feeling society is right.

But you're on a better track than the usual one, and it'll show.

Today I want to talk about consilience versus rumors.

For example, compare two claims - both of which might be true or false.

1) Haitian immigrants have been eating their neighbors' dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.

2) A Big Bang occurred at the start of the universe.

Both of these claims may be maintained as beliefs by the frequency of bumping into the claim. That is, multiple sources seem to make the claim, and these sources might be independent. When we hear something repeatedly, especially from different sources, we often, perhaps gradually, begin to vibe with the belief.

I do not know for a fact, personally, whether either of these happened.

So how can we proceed beyond admitting what we don't know for sure?

First, ask yourself why you believe - or don't believe - each of these two claims. If you can, put a number to each one, a percentage probability.

Here are my spur-of-the-moment numbers:

1: 25%

2: 67%

I don't claim any correctness. It's just how I'm feeling at the moment.

Ok, so we have numbers, but we haven't really justified them, so they might as well be random digits.

I'm sure some of you think my number for 1 is high, and my number for 2 is low. I know you're thinking that.

The point is I have no first-hand evidence about 1, so I have to contend with multiple professional fact-checkers versus the former president and an actually reasonably articulate mob on Twitter who say they have seen "dozens of videos" that "prove" claim 1. Many were initially skeptical but became convinced. I do not want to dive through such videos (some are gruesome). If it matters either way, I'd rather wait for the wisdom of crowds and the wisdom of experts to reach a consensus. This is a case where I really do not want to do the research myself. It's more about curiosity than about proving a point; I don't think the validity of claim 1 makes a significant difference, but there may always be some value in accurate verification or falsification.

Generally, I would consider someone describing all fact-checkers as in cahoots to be an addle-minded paranoiac. But amid claims that everyone has become too polarized (which I agree about) and that leftists have our heads in the sand about immigration and the truth of what Trump says (well, on the immigration, that might apply to me), I want to be cautious.

Simply ridiculing the idea that Haitians are eating cats and dogs provides zero evidence. People who are trying to dismiss the claim on the basis that it sounds absurd - sounds just like the usual, hateful tripe out of Trump, only a bit worse this time - are not making solid evidence-based statements. They're mainly persuading others and themselves.

I do not find it implausible that Haitian immigrants have eaten pets in this country, given that this is done in Haiti. And if it could well have happened somewhere in this country, it could have happened in Springfield, Ohio.

Now, I've looked at the original post that got JD Vance's attention and then Trump's and then, regrettably, everyone else's. That post was traced back to a woman who admitted she'd heard a rumor and was speculating, and has since felt bad and made an apology. Still, to be thorough, just because it's no more verifiable than a rumor doesn't mean it *didn't* happen. It just means that we essentially have to acquit for lack of solid evidence.

There are multiple other leads with varying degrees of believability, including verified incidents that involved pet eating (by a white person) but not Haitians. We must admit that if a white person can eat a pet, a Haitian might have. I can't rule that out, however wacky it sounds or hatefully motivated the debate moment was.

The fact checks tend to amount to "there have been no credible claims," meaning that nothing has been proven - we can't prosecute the case further, in a metaphorical sense, unless we can find better evidence one way or the other. While the burden of proof lies on the claimant for reasons like the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle (aka, less amusingly, Brandolini's Law), absence of evidence is still not evidence of absence.

Ok. Phew. We're getting to my point now.

For many, the *number* of *seemingly plausible* stories or leads will amount to *definite proof*. Even though each one may, on inspection, fail to amount to solid evidence, taken as a constellation of data points, they will strongly suggest that something's going on. "Where there's smoke, there's fire," many people like to say.

This does resemble how science works.

However, to really appreciate how science works, we need to tease the details apart a little more.

Many scientific theories have essentially been "proven" by what's called "independent, converging lines of evidence." A simpler way to say that is "consilience."

When people encounter many reports of cat-snacking on Twitter and feel that therefore claim 1 must be correct, they probably feel that they are responding to "independent, converging lines of evidence." Multiple stories from different people who don't know each other (independent lines) are consistent with the same overall picture (converging evidence).

For this extremely effective method to work, though, we need to be extremely careful about what we call "independent" and what we call "evidence."

For example, if most of the stories are coming up by way of Trump supporters, they may come from different people, but those people do happen to share a motivation, and these days, someone might even have deep-faked the video.

Similarly, if we watch video evidence that someone was eating a pet, how sure are we that it is occurring in the time and location asserted? If someone in the video looks Haitian... do we know they are?

If we watch 100 videos of people who seem Haitian appearing to eat pets, any of our assumptions could be off about any or all of them.

For any piece of evidence that cannot be confirmed, it is a mistake to assume that it brings a fractional, cumulative amount of truth. It might bring none at all. Each one might bring none. True evidence might not be accumulating while rumors and reports and "proofs" accumulate.

If after consideration we deem that each of 100 videos is 1/20 likely to be real, this does not mean that, after watching all of them, we are (100)(1/20)=5, or in other words completely certain 5 times over, that claim 1 is true. Not how it works!

When each story is no more fully confirmable than a rumor - and, yes, even video evidence can match this description, given that we do not know what part of space and time, if any, the video depicts - then we cannot say that the many rumors add up to proof. Many rumors can easily add up to nothing, no matter how many there are.

I understand this mistake in thinking, because I know that thinking in a technical way is tricky and error-prone. But it's better if we're all aware of that.

Again, I don't actually know about the truth of claim 1, and my 25% guesstimate is just an easy number to toss out there. It includes (for example) the possibility that just one Haitian immigrant ate just one pet in Springfield Ohio at some point this century, it was never reported, and the rumors we are hearing are separate and false, but this thing still happened in the last 24 years (I'm making up that time limit to stay specific). It might have! Just saying. (Arguably if it happened just once, "They're eating the cats and the dogs..." is false, as it implies many incidents, but we'll let that go and be as generous as possible to the claim.)

As for the Big Bang, sometimes laypeople - and lately, increasingly scientists, I think - will observe that we don't have any definite proof that the Big Bang happened, even though we have many pieces of evidence that range from hinting to strongly suggestive.

The evidence for the Big Bang takes many forms (or so I'm led to believe, having seen a few). These arguments can allegedly be made independently of each other (and they at least seem independent to me as well).

It's important to remember that science does not actually prove any claims directly. All it can do is vigorously fail to disprove claims.

We cannot prove that no (0) pets were eaten by Haitians in Springfield. Proving a negative is famously nigh impossible. The best we can do here, along the lines of proving nothing happened, is vigorously look into it, as well as we can, yet despite our earnest and thorough efforts continue failing to disprove that nothing happened (double negative, eep). That's the closest we'll ever get to proof: we looked really hard and didn't find any fire behind the supposed smoke.

The same goes for science and the Big Bang. We probably can't indisputably prove it happened. But we can vigorously fail to disprove it for a long while, via many approaches, until we're kind of exhausted and we shrug and accept that the Big Bang does seem to have happened.

If the claim of pet eating had been accurate, we might have expected any of these:

• The person who made the meme gave details about when and where the pet was eaten, and by whom.
• JD Vance defended the claim as definitely true.
• Springfield police and other city officials such as the mayor acknowledged it.
• Fact checkers reported it happened or the jury was still out.
• Reliable news agencies reported on the story as a fact.
• The Ohio governor, who is from Springfield, said it did happen or might have happened.

These are likely results of a real incident along these lines that draws attention.

Yet none of these things are happening (though I can't vouch for all news stations with Fox News at large).

We look for the smoking gun behind the smoke, and we keep coming up blank.

Now, maybe some of the reports and video evidence is real.

Once again, I insist I do not ultimately know. But I can talk a bit about how evidence combines.

Multiple independent, converging lines of evidence - if this is taken very seriously - provide the closest science gets to proof.

But what we humans often do informally when we hear multiple reports is not that. When we aren't super careful, our belief can amount to nothing more than magical thinking.

Multiple doubtful pieces of evidence do not automatically add up to credibility. Yet our minds often want to believe they do, for reasons that have to do with how we evolved and the very real power of what's called Bayesian statistics, the statistics of uncertain contingencies based on networks of evidence.

This is the best explanation I can give at the moment of an extremely important aspect of thinking about the "facts" you're given.

Remember: rumors versus consilience. They're not the same. What you're trying to find is actual consilience. That means different, unconnected sources using different methods - as many and as different as possible, including, crucially, if possible and relevant, actual large controlled, double-blinded, peer-reviewed experiments - pointing, perhaps uncertainly but with thorough credibility as to what they do have, to the same conclusion.

A lot of what's wrong in the human world occurs in the simple act of careless accusation. As the modifier "careless" suggests, there are good and bad ways to accuse. In politics, perhaps most are bad.

Politicians compete, so they try to make their competitors seem like utter nitwits and maniacs.

We already have a tendency to handle blame with too much hyperbole. Politics energizes this into a frenzy that all too often (throughout history) has become socially harmful and then violent.

The good news is this is simply not necessary.

If a person is causing serious harm, we should remember that the person is one of millions. There is no way that person cannot be overpowered and safely contained.

Even Vladimir Putin, for example, is only such a danger because he is surrounded by people who let him.

Fighting bad decisions rarely involves actual fighting - or, rather, rarely requires that.

Even in a real emergency, a tranquilizer dart can take care of most craziness.

We have this attitude that to face up to what we really don't want and cannot accept, we must become extremely accusatory. We must show - nay, prove - that we are against vileness itself.

We don't like inflation? We must call Biden - or Trump - a total disaster.

It doesn't work like that. Balanced, fair criticism is much more effective than judgmentality verging on demonization.

Now, one place this can get more complicated - so far, I think the message is uncomplicated, though not necessarily easy to follow - is with ideas themselves. There are some common ideas that simply aren't accurate or helpful. It can be frustrating to see so many people fall prey to these ideas and their promoters.

I personally think it's totally fine to attack an idea as false, misguided, delusional, nonsensical, etc.

Many people, though, will take these attacks as personal and maybe even kind of vicious. They will feel you are calling them idiots.

If you have a chance to interact with them, you can show that it's the idea you oppose, not particular people.

But this is a point of nuance that takes a lot of care.

(It's something I do not usually find difficult, but it has taken practice.)

It would be straightforward enough to advise pretending that even ideas are people and have some feelings - this is sort of true by proxy, because people out there will identify with them, and feel attacked and disliked if you treat the ideas harshly.

Maybe that's even the best approach.

I might not be the best person to take that approach; I have an ethic that says you are absolutely allowed to attack my ideas if you do not attack me personally, and I'll even do my best to appreciate seeing ideas I believe in roasted.

Do unto others: I think it's fair, and I expect others to think it's fair enough.

But I know many don't feel that way, or haven't thought about it quite as I'm portraying. And that's understandable. We certainly can't all expect to have all the same thoughts.

Instead of vilifying people, attack ideas. And instead of making war on ideas, imagine they are people with some feelings, and be a little more compassionate and balanced in your critiques. Idea, behavior - same thing, more or less.

Bad behavior is comparable to a stupid idea that someone happens to strongly believe.

Try to treat them similarly in terms of your mental engagement.

We usually have to allow people to maintain stupid ideas because they are free to think what they want. And if bad behavior is not outright illegal, we often have to allow it to some extent, though we may object, call it out, etc.

But both of these rules have limits.

Sometimes we need to intervene and save someone from a stupid idea.

Sometimes we need to get in the way of a behavior so it doesn't happen, or can't continue.

Do you see the difference between this description and how people accuse political leaders, coworkers, etc, whenever they're unhappy about some result?

I would like this more precise, more effective mindset to spread.

When one political party becomes opposed to truth, as a general theme, with ignorance and stubborn denial appealing to its adherents more, it ceases to be a party worthy of participation.

It is no longer the formidable counter to another interpretation. It is simply a dead weight around its own neck. It's a carcass slowly rotting in a closed room from which other members of society desperately wish to escape.

That is today's Republican party.