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Notes -
I'm having trouble understanding the idea that "the onus is on the person making the positive claim to provide sufficient evidence to prove their case". It looks obvious why this is a good idea, but it seems completely open to the rhetorical trick of putting the onus on the other party to prove you wrong even if your own case is unproven (perhaps because the question is a hard one and whoever is tasked with proving anything will have a hard time).
What got me thinking about this was an internet argument on immigration and crime. Half a century ago the status quo was restricted immigration and the onus would be on the person advocating for more to prove that it was a good thing, nowadays the status quo is liberal immigration and the onus is on the person advocating restrictions to prove that it is a bad thing. No scientifically relevant change has taken place, only a change in government policy, but one side can now quote a basic principle of science to bolster their case in an argument even if they know nothing more than the other party.
The due diligence question is obviously is this actually a fundamental aspect of science as stated or is it misrepresenting a more nuanced principle?
This is because most people don't understand formal reasoning. Proposition A being unproven doesn't mean Not A is assumed to be true. The "default" is agnosticism. This is a little more complicated in practice because most of the things people are arguing are not brand new subjects, so there's probably preexisting evidence which would skew our conclusions one way or the other if we could agree on what it means.
A considerable amount of research has taken place; however, that is mostly irrelevant to internet debates on immigration since those debates are overwhelmingly normative, with a couple of ablative empirical arguments for when you don't want to lead with your normative objection.
Oh definitely, I just meant the change from one status quo to another isn’t scientifically relevant.
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