Created: January 27, 2022
Modified: February 10, 2022
Modified: February 10, 2022
ask for evidence
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- In a work context:
- Consider a junior engineer and a senior engineer. The junior engineer says, 'I think doing X will be better than doing Y, for reason Z". The senior engineer says, "okay, but do we have any evidence that X is better than Y"?
- From the senior engineer's point of view: many positions have plausible-sounding arguments that fall apart when you actually test them, and junior engineers are wrong about stuff all the time. And even if the senior engineer agrees in principle, someone else might question the choice in the future, and evidence will help explain why the decision was made and how robust the group's position on this decision should be to future change.
- From the junior engineer's point of view: X is obviously better than Y. If I say 'Broccoli is healthier than the just-released new flavor of Doritos', that statement is obviously true, based on models of the world that come from past experience and previous evidence, even though of course no one has any direct evidence regarding the new Doritos, because they've just come out. Asking for 'evidence' on this claim would be admitting that the asker doesn't have the intellect to see its obvious truth, and it wastes everybody's time. Senior engineers are further from the day-to-day reality of the work, so they often are genuinely clueless about things that are clear to junior engineers.
- Many organizational and political disputes have this form. Some people have mental models in which X is clearly the right thing to do; other people don't have those models, and ask for evidence. The first group sees the second group as holding them back; the second group sees the first group as irresponsible.
- Asking for evidence can be weaponized as a political tool. There's no randomized controlled trial evidence that parachutes prevent fatalities when jumping out of planes, but it's obvious from a common sense model of the world. Not everything can or should be the subject of a randomized controlled trial.