Dear fellow atheists and skeptics,

[lonelocust]

These are some things that we should stop saying, in my opinion, part 1.

"I don't BELIEVE in evolution. I accept it."
The common usage of the word "believe" does not in fact imply believe without cause, nor believe without evidence. It means you think that's how things are. I believe my hair is green. I believe I will not start eating steak any

Comments

[ravenblack]

"Burden of proof" also frequently annoys me in non-religious science contexts, where a claim has been made about something working for someone, and then somehow the burden of proof is on that person to show that it works in expensive clinical trials.

I understand not wanting to just wantonly accept every claim, but the guy with the claim is generally in no position to run expensive peer-reviewed clinical trials, and he's frequently already provided a small evidence. I would say that in the presence of some evidence, the burden of proof shifts to the other party to show something that refutes that evidence (and "well that wasn't a clinical enough trial!" is not really a refutation.)

"It's not good enough to convince me" is fine, but "the burden of MORE PROOF is on you" is frustrating.

Especially aggravating example - for one treatment the cancer center of America [or some org like that] looked at the book of the person making the claim, and from that stated "there is no clinical evidence that this works". That then telephones onto quackwatch.org and morphs into "the Cancer Center of America has found that it doesn't work." I really really hate "there is no clinical evidence that it works" when they mean "no clinical trial has ever been conducted" because it really strongly comes across as "a trial has been conducted and showed no significant results." Sufficiently that their original 'study' gets frequently used as a citation 'showing' that the remedy in question doesn't work! (I have no position on whether it works or not, I am just made angry by meticulously following the chain of "counterevidence" to its source and finding nothing there. Worse still, they ran the same "study" four times over the course of 30 years - four times they read the same book and determined that it didn't talk about any clinical trials! Who'd have thought a book wouldn't change!)