Does anyone know of a good resource that helps people understand the different types of evidence and what should be considered reliable sources of evidence (that apply to everyday life)? We see a really poor grasp of evidence especially in place like Facebook. If people could be pointed to an easy to use and understand resource, people might benefit. Any ideas?
Or failing that such a resource exists. What should it include? Lets make one (aimed at the FB generation)...
At first I think people have to learn more to understand the different types of evidence because those (different types of evidence) are not same.
Thanks krash661 ! Actually I thought about it like this that May be sometimes DNA sample is evidence, but if I don't know what the DNA is, and how can it show me evidence ! So then the evidence is not evidence to me.
Evidence is one type of information. Everyone has different cognitive skills, augmented by their educational experiences, and by the things they have learned in the course of living on this planet. So it stands to reason that each of us has the ability to understand certain types of information, but not other types. Obviously, to study things like DNA requires an enormous investment in education--not to mention thousands of dollars worth of electron microscopes and other equipment. This is why there are millions of people who have the skill to help us understand new kinds of things.
Thanks for your description. It's important. And another thing.. AI can take information(of evidence and about evidence) faster(high speed data transfer) than humen to understand evidence. So they(AI) can understand it(evidence) faster than humen. May be one day humen will be able like AI to do it.....because I don't know where the DARPA is going on !
AI may be able to process faster, but very few of us would trust it to explain something complicated and important to us. Surely the day will come when AI is comparable to human reasoning, but that day is not today. By the way, the plural of "human" is "humans." There's no such word as "humen." English is not a logical language: Man -- men Woman -- women Human -- humans
Perhaps the easiest place to find discussions of evidence is in law. There are law-school classes in evidence and those classes have evidence textbooks. But legal evidence isn't the only kind of evidence and the law concerning evidence and its admissibility in courtrooms might not be relevant to scientific evidence, historical evidence and other uses of the word. Here are some more philosophical discussions of the kinds of things evidence might be: http://www.iep.utm.edu/evidence/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evidence/ Since evidence is typically used to confirm (or disconfirm) various hypotheses, attention needs to be paid to how evidence is put to work in confirmation theory: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/confirmation/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/conf-ind/ http://patrick.maher1.net/preprints/ctk.pdf I'm not sure that such a thing exists. I suspect that any attempt to produce such an account might end up oversimplifying things.
Better than a primer on evidence would be a primer on critical thinking. But I think you're fighting a losing battle. Those who wish to think critically, do so. Those who do not wish to, will not be interested in learning.
Agree. Nobody who is unable to think critically will devote the time to some "resource" to improve their situation - because they will not see what is wrong with the way they think in the first place! We see that illustrated daily on this forum. Development of critical thinking requires first some interaction with people, in discussion. Only that way do people experience the effect of sloppy thinking that collapses under challenge, and so work out how to develop their ideas in a more robust way. Even then, some are so thick-skinned (or thick-headed?) that they will not or cannot improve.
