I see Carl Sagan, I upvote! But seriously, take a deep dive into this Wikipedia article and pretty much everything from Carl you can find online. You won't regret it. :)
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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I hate that quote.
It is idiotic, it mixes objectivity with subjectivity.
"Claims require evidence" is the proper way, you make an exraordinary claim, you simply need to provide evidence for it.
But crazy claims need more evidence
Yeah it's used to shut down the "alien built the pyramids" crazy (& al).
I can accept that, more is a quantative meassure, extraordinady is a subjective meassure
Technically correct is the best kind of correct
Your final paragraph is exactly what it's getting at. The level of evidence needs to scale with the size of the claim.
The actual problem with the quote is misuse. I might claim that I played chess in the park yesterday. This isn't particularly extraordinary, and most people would accept it at face value. But there's always that one asshole on the internet who comes along and whips out "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and won't go away until there's satalite imagery of me playing chess in the park.
No, the scale of the evidence does not need to scale with the claim, if you have evidence for a claim, and it can be verified, then you don't need more.
Yes, it does.
An "extraordinary claim" is a claim that is incompatible with our current understanding of the world based on a large body of prior evidence and belief.
Claiming someone walked on water requires substantially more, more persuasive evidence than claiming someone walked on a road. A video is extremely strong evidence of the latter and not meaningful evidence of the former, because the priors are different.
Yup, it does.
To add another example to what the other poster brings up, there is currently a crisis in cosmology. In short, there's a difference between different ways of measuring the expansion rate of the universe. Is this because one of the methods is wrong, or because our understanding of the physics is incomplete? Measurement error seems more likely, so that needs to be ruled out before saying there's brand new physics.
One of the possibilities for new physics is that the speed of light has changed throughout the history of the universe. That fucks with all sorts of things, so you better bring damn good evidence if that's what you want to advance.
You obviously need to bring evidence to back up your claims, that is not in dispute here, the issue I have is that for some reason the normal evidence isn't good enough, evidence that in any other point would be fine, but just in the arbitrary case it is deemed not enough.
Any evidence that prooves an extraordinary claim will by definition be extraordinary.
So as long as you submit the normal kind of evidence needed to describe how to reproduce the claim, and others can verify your claim, the evidence is fine.
I think you're saying the same thing by different routes.
It memorable and serves it's purpose to help inoculate lay people against pseudoscience. Something more objective but less catchy would not serve that purpose as well.