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I'd say using them interchangeably or incorrectly contributes to people's misunderstanding of the word hypothesis, which fuels more than a few baseless arguments against scientific theory in general.

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Even correct use of 'hypothesis' doesn't require any particular level of evidence, though. It's somewhat discipline-specific, but a hypothesis could be a complete guess with no real backing. It's just whatever the experiment is setting out to confirm or refute. Especially true in fields where it's cheap to run experiments, in which case the bar for a 'hypothesis' is nearly zero, amounting to just anything testable that you find interesting to design a test for.

Perhaps you're thinking of the debate with creationists and similar people over the term 'theory'?

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