Why do extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence?

I had a quick read of a couple of posts, so pleasure excuse me if this has already been said.

The statement itself is somewhat misleading. All claims require evidence. Accepting a given claim means it has attained a certain amount of evidence for a person to be confident it is correct. A claim that counters that needs to achieved that self same amount of evidence, accounting for all the same observations and making the fewest additional assumptions.

An extraordinary claim is one that seeks to counter rather solid (in that they have a large amount of supporting evidence) established belief. To do that, it must meet that large amount of evidence, account for it, and not add a pile of extra assumptions. In other words, this extraordinary claim requires a normal amount of evidence, taking into account that accepted claims already have that.

Make sense?

Athon
 
it's a built-in bias designed to maintain the status quo and protect vested interests
 
In what way does this:

The stakes are so high on whether it's true or false, that we must demand the more rigorous standards of evidence. Precisely because it's so exciting. That's the circumstance in which our hopes may dominate our skeptical scrutiny of the data. So, we have to be very careful.
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lead you to conclude this:

plumjam said:
it's a built-in bias designed to maintain the status quo and protect vested interests
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I think that evidence of the "paranormal" would be by definition pretty extraordinary, don't you? :)

I think it is a combination of a catchy phrase, and the idea that your evidence had better be a "home run" if it is going to overthrow conventional wisdom. It is fair to say that it has taken "extraordinary evidence" to establish modern science: most of the things we take for granted now, took an uphill battle to establish at the beginning.
 
But perhaps the subjects of our interests are wearing vests? I am quite a fan of the Die Hard movies, maybe that's what he/she/it means.
 
I've always thought of it this way:

Claim: I have dust bunnies in my closet.

Evidence needed: I'll believe it without any further evidence.

Caim: I have a pot of gold in my closet.

Evidence needed: I want to see it before believing. But if it looks like gold, I'll believe it. Unless the claimant wants to sell it to me, that is.

Claim: I have an alien artefact made of an extraterrestrial metal in my closet.

Evidence needed: I'd want to see it first; if it isn't a mundane terrestrial object that I recognize, I'd want a lab report on the material and a technical report on the artefact before I believe that it was made by aliens in another world.
 
plumjam said:
it's a built-in bias designed to maintain the status quo and protect vested interests
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plumjam, I levitated tonight, and stayed in the air over three feet above my loungeroom floor for 31 seconds (my fundamentalist son was here, timed it, and I can get him to post confirmation of this if you like - after all, that will constitute sufficient evidence, will it not?). I take it that you therefore accept this statement without extraordinary evidence?

Or are you willing to just take my word for it, since it has changed my sceptical nature forever, since something like this never happened to me before. So I am now a believer in levitation.

Of course, there is no way that you could possibly be sceptical of this claim, since that would then make you one of those maintaining the status quo and protecting vested interests.

Norm
 
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I still think it's the "extraordinary" bit which causes me the problem.

Extraordinary claims require perfectly ordinary evidence, exactly the same evidence as anything else. If ESP exists, it should be provable by perfectly normal criteria of evidence, for example. If goblins live in your wardrobe, normal scientific proof should count. :)


The extraordinary bit makes it sound like sceptics want more - and mkes us sound unreasonable. Mind you I have forgotten most of the discussions we had about it since i started it back in April! this thread rose from the dead pretty suddenly.
cj x
 
Extraordinarily GOOD evidence. It is still normal in the sense you are thinking of. Stop attaching a meaning to the word that it does not have in this context.

In this instance, extraordinary means: Repeatable, verifiiable, measurable, for anyone who looks. (as opposed to anecdotes, personal testimony, etc).
 
scotth said:
Extraordinarily GOOD evidence. It is still normal in the sense you are thinking of. Stop attaching a meaning to the word that it does not have in this context.

In this instance, extraordinary means: Repeatable, verifiiable, measurable, for anyone who looks. (as opposed to anecdotes, personal testimony, etc).
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I'm not. You are redefining extraordinary in a sense it does not hold in popular usage. This is a breach of terminological ethics (I've been reading Gardner, sorry!). Hence when you say

"Stop attaching a meaning to the word that it does not have in this context." I am confused, as it strikes me that you are the one doing so, as extraordinary does not usually mean any of the things you say it means here.

I'm confused now. :( Can anyone explain this to me?

cj x
 
scotth said:
In this instance, extraordinary means: Repeatable, verifiiable, measurable, for anyone who looks. (as opposed to anecdotes, personal testimony, etc).
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That is not extraordinary though- that is what is normally meant by "physical evidence".

cj x
 
plumjam said:
it's a built-in bias designed to maintain the status quo and protect vested interests
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'Tis true. The protectionism surrounding Special Relativity helped build the US GPS monopoly.

Linda
 
cj.23 said:
I still think it's the "extraordinary" bit which causes me the problem.

Extraordinary claims require perfectly ordinary evidence, exactly the same evidence as anything else. If ESP exists, it should be provable by perfectly normal criteria of evidence, for example. If goblins live in your wardrobe, normal scientific proof should count. :)


The extraordinary bit makes it sound like sceptics want more - and mkes us sound unreasonable. Mind you I have forgotten most of the discussions we had about it since i started it back in April! this thread rose from the dead pretty suddenly.
cj x
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Yes--we do want more, but it is perfectly reasonable.

My ex-wife (a botanist), might hypothesize a certain revision in the phylogeny of a group of plants. In testing the hypothesis, she might gather measures of a number of characters, maybe even use DNA markers. No one is overly strict about making sure she doesn't cheat when she does these things.

But, if someone is making an extraordinary claim (one that would require the re-writing of major branches of accepted science) like remote viewing, you can bet we will require extra precautions against fraud.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
Yes--we do want more, but it is perfectly reasonable.

My ex-wife (a botanist), might hypothesize a certain revision in the phylogeny of a group of plants. In testing the hypothesis, she might gather measures of a number of characters, maybe even use DNA markers. No one is overly strict about making sure she doesn't cheat when she does these things.

But, if someone is making an extraordinary claim (one that would require the re-writing of major branches of accepted science) like remote viewing, you can bet we will require extra precautions against fraud.
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Interesting. the problem comes then that we are judging by the sensationalism or impact of the claim. Now I remember as few months back the fun discussion of the Tomb of Jesus claims - which would have had very significant impacts on both our understanding of history and religion is proven true. At the time i remarked that the sensationalism of the claim had no relationship whatsoever to it's veracity - it could still be true. So why is this different?

I don't actually think that we would have to throw our science out of the window if some Remote Viewer managed to achieve success -- we would just start looking for a mechanism within the existing models of science. I'm going to guess any alteration in our models would be fairly minor -- but this is entirely theoretical. After all, science works by adding and revising existing models, and I don't see anything intrinsically impossible about the claim -- I can "remote view" various webcams at any time. Still let's not get sidetracked on to that - there is a discussion of Remote Viewing in the Dawkin's Enemies of Reason thread, and i know almost nothing about the subject. I just don't see why the existence of naturalistic ESP would require much more revision than say the recent discovery of independent centres responsible for volition in the brain did -- we'd just add it to our models, and move on?

So I'd say the evidence required should probably remain exactly the same as any other question. So far we have not seen sufficient evidence in favour of Remote Viewing to consider it proven, or conclusively disproven it would seem?

j x
 
cj.23 said:
Interesting. the problem comes then that we are judging by the sensationalism or impact of the claim. Now I remember as few months back the fun discussion of the Tomb of Jesus claims - which would have had very significant impacts on both our understanding of history and religion is proven true. At the time i remarked that the sensationalism of the claim had no relationship whatsoever to it's veracity - it could still be true. So why is this different?
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It's not any different. A sensational claim could be true. But it will require more evidence for people to believe it.

The more evidence we already have for a belief, the more evidence we would need to reverse ourselves and believe against it. For example, I have no idea whether or not you're a man or a woman. If you send me a picture of yourself, I can probably come to a conclusion.

But if you then later tell me differently, I will expect not only evidence, but also something further before I believe you. At a minimum, I'd want to know why you lied the first time -- and why I should believe you the second time over the first. The more evidence I have for belief A, the more I want to see before I abandon A and move on to B.

In the case of something like Remote Viewing, I've got a lot of evidence supporting the idea that it doesn't work. I need to have at least as much evidence in favor of it before I accept that Remote Viewing is a possibility.
 
Mojo said:
What vested interests?
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e.g. the prestige of those in the highest academic positions, corporations that may suffer from new evidence coming to light, the military, academic reputations... basically anyone who has a valuable stake in the status quo, which in practice will tend to be those in authority.
 
fromdownunder said:
plumjam, I levitated tonight, and stayed in the air over three feet above my loungeroom floor for 31 seconds (my fundamentalist son was here, timed it, and I can get him to post confirmation of this if you like - after all, that will constitute sufficient evidence, will it not?). I take it that you therefore accept this statement without extraordinary evidence?

Or are you willing to just take my word for it, since it has changed my sceptical nature forever, since something like this never happened to me before. So I am now a believer in levitation.

Of course, there is no way that you could possibly be sceptical of this claim, since that would then make you one of those maintaining the status quo and protecting vested interests.

Norm
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haha

what you wrote was a complete non-sequitir from what I wrote
 
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