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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

It is not reasonable to not believe anything unless there is "evidence" (narrowly construed as an observation incompatible with the negation of some state of affairs). Beliefs have a wide spectrum of characterizations, and not all belief must wait until publicly corroborated evidence is available. Some events defy evidence and we can and should use experience and reasoning to infer unobservable states of affairs.

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This is olympic level mental gymnastics to justify believing things without evidence. The double negative with the word evidence in scare quotes is chef's kiss.

I believe the sun will rise tomorrow without "evidence" (again, narrowly construed). We all do. It's only those who abuse the idea of epistemic hygiene who claim otherwise, usually with ulterior motives.

The evidence is the history of the sun rising since time immemorial, as well as the science of physics and cosmology that models the sun's motion with respect to the earth.

Yes, reasoning with models and making inferences are perfectly acceptable forms of evidence. But you can model the world based on ones knowledge and experience and infer when some event doesn't fit the typical pattern, then form beliefs about what that means. Also perfectly fine from an epistemic perspective. The rejoinder "there's no evidence" to a belief based on such an inference does no work.

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