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Comment by aredox | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I don't speak English well enough, but I thought that "evidence" and "testimony" were clearly different things. E.g. in a judicial setting, a testimony may need to be backed up by "evidence" - the latter implying "physical", "objective" objects (documents, fingerprints, pictures).

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In German criminal procedure there are five types of evidence, this list is exhaustive:

Expert opinion, direct experience by judge, documents, testimony by witnesses, testimony by the accused.

So testimony is one type of evidence here.

In civil procedure it‘s the dame, just the terms differ slightly.

"direct experience by judge" sounds like a can of worms. What if the judge believes religion is real based on their "direct experience", in a blasphemy trial?

[Edit: Interesting replies, thanks!]

I suspect that's so they don't have to prove obvious things like: cameras exist, cameras can take pictures etc. Or for stuff like the defendant attacking someone during the trial.

I don't know a good translation for "Inaugenscheinnahme". Literally "taking-into-eyeshine".

It means observing the accused, the witnesses, objects introduced into trial and so on. In the sense of experiencing something with one's senses. It does not mean "let me apply my world view".

This is what they are talking about:

Visual inspection by the court, Sections 371-372a of the Code of Civil Procedure

This consists of any direct, sensory inspection by the judge for evidential purposes. Contrary to the somewhat misleading term used, ‘Augenschein’, ‘visual inspection’, it may also include sensory inspection by touching, smelling, listening and tasting. Consequently, sound and video recordings and data storage media are also included.

In English common law, this is called "taking judicial notice".

It's usually for common-sensical things that aren't controversial. Of course, judges could misapply this rule, but if a judge is sitting on a blasphemy trial you have more problems (with the legal system) than a dispute about whether "religion is real".

I suspect the rule is just to make things less "anal" for court procedings. Otherwise every small bit of fact needs to be proven. Things like "summer is hot", "Taylor Swift is a famous singer", "computers can be hacked", "smart phones can take photos", etc. etc. Surely you don't want to call expert witnesses for these, right?

And given that the judge ultimately calls the shots (since they're the ultimate interpreter of the law), you'd have a problem if a biased judge is appointed anyway, no matter what rules of evidence is adopted.

Evidence in the scientific sense is something is any information which increases the likelihood of a claim being true. The fact that someone is willing to testify is evidence that the claim is true - not bulletproof evidence, but evidence.

Sometimes, people just saying something is extremely good evidence that it's true. My name is Stuart. I'm 22 years old.

> any information which increases the likelihood of a claim being true

This sounds like "Bayesian evidence". However, I don't think "scientific evidence" has a precise agreed-upon definition. I would take "there is scientific evidence" to mean "some scientists say they have significant evidence that they themselves obtained directly and that they have published or presented".

And scientific evidence is also a very different bar depending on what sort of science you're doing. In medicine the gold standard is a double blind RCT but a geologist can't reasonably conduct RCTs with volcanic eruptions so they aren't required, but thankfully rocks are much simpler than biological systems. Or for psychologists p=.05 is enough for a study to be good evidence but particle physicists require much lower p values than that for something to be official scientific evidence.

It's clearly not good enough to pass a border, or to buy alcohol.

And here I have absolutely no idea if it is true or not. I don't know you, I can't see you. You could be a bot, a dog, a scammer, a teenager... Your evidence means nothing "evident".

If you could see me, could you be sure your eyes and ears were not lying to you? Could you be certain I was not a fragment of a paranoid delusion created by your subconscious?

Are you sure you're even awake right now? Are you sure that you've ever been awake? Are any of your senses evidently reliable?

Perceived reality can never be perfect evidence, and it's not possible to step outside of your own perceptions.

Evidence is just that. If you try really hard to achieve full epistemological rigour I think it's inevitable you'll wind up at the conclusion you don't know anything at all.

Testimony is a form of evidence, and in a judicial setting is often enough to convict without any supplementary physical evidence.

Wikipedia describes testimony as a type of evidence, in a judicial context. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimony

I believe the opposite is actually true: in general, a physical piece of evidence means nothing unless accompanied by witness testimony tying it to the crime. A smoking gun is just a smoking gun unless a witness comes forward saying they saw the accused pointing it at the victim after the shot. Even for things like camera recordings, a witness of some kind must testify what it represents. The objects themselves merely serve to make the witness testimony more credible evidence, basically.

You are correct, the layman's version of "evidence" has a very different meaning from science and courtroom's version of evidence.

In the U.K. they even use the term "give evidence" for the act of testifying in court.

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