5) What counts as good evidence for a claim?

Good evidence for a claim is definitely an evaluation system on a sliding scale. Since it’s already been mentioned what bad evidence is. I’ll leave this alone. But as for good evidence, I think it should contain some of the same things that make knowledge useful.

1. The better the evidence, the more it adheres to the scientific method of evaluating a claim, both in principle and in spirit.
• For example, evidence should have been gathered and analyzed with high efficacy by the research team.
• Well-documented evidence, large sample pools, repeatable experiments.
2. Evidence is data collected more often than not as quantitative data.
• One or several persons’ anecdotal evidence is not reliable.
• Yet, anecdotal evidence should be regarded as having some validity, especially among marginalized groups, since no science has let go of its discriminatory history and habits.
3. The best evidence is from an academically reliable source.
4. Even academically reliable sources need further investigation. The more familiar and literate you are in that field, the more you will be able to evaluate the study on the details it presents to figure out the efficacy of the study.
• Research and experiments in the social sciences are by nature far more qualitative than most of the hard sciences, so their studies are less objective in nature and that should be taken into account.
5. The more reliable sources the better. Everything should be confirmable.
6. The consensus of the academic or scientific community account for a lot. This should be our foundational understanding of reality.
• I likely wouldn’t trust them as much with social questions as with the hard sciences, but the humanities is not not most of their fields.
7. Having media savvy (literacy) is key to a lot of research too. Knowing what’s a good sources, what website is more reliable than other. Generally, not trusting almost all news outlets. Trying to go to primary sources when cited. Realizing that citations are needed.
8. As much as possible, a current or past history of logical fallacies and cognitive heuristic and biases should be accounted for.