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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.
That a considerable amount of research has taken place doesn't actually tell anyone anything. Whether or not "thousands of lines of code have been written" is wholly independent of whether "the software performs to specification".
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Oh definitely, I just meant the change from one status quo to another isn’t scientifically relevant.
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