>>10668689As far as I can make out, it's just mincing words. Logical negation is not a good representation of what "absence" means. I'll assume that it is standard to describe the observation of A as "evidence"; given the conditions of the poster this seems to be at least somewhat reasonable. However, then "absence of evidence" does not mean observing ¬A. It simply means that we're not observing A -- which could be because both A and ¬A are events that cannot be, or have not been, observed directly.
"Absence of evidence" can also be taken to describe the situation that we can identify no random observable that is even (provably) dependent of B. This too is very different from observing such a variable and find that it doesn't support B.
In essence, the author is committing the very fallacy he's denying. He's assuming that the phrase "absence of evidence" ought to be modeled mathematically as a construction that actually models presence of evidence to the contrary.
Or, in modal logic terms, ¬?A is not the same as ?¬A.
(Since no post is complete without a bad analogy: Consider A="it is raining" and B="the train will be crammed full". A is indeed "evidence" of B in the poster's sense, because when the weather is bad more people will be likely to take the train instead of cycling to work. Then "evidence" would be looking out the window and seeing it pour down, in which case could validly conclude that the risk of a full train is higher than usual. "Absence of evidence" would be being in a windowless basement and not knowing how the whether is. You can't reason from "I'm in a basement" to "the train is probably not full". The poster seems to be claiming that "absence of evidence" implies being certain that the weather is dry).
