“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” said Carl Sagan; a dictum which asks us to use the scepticism of Hume to dismiss miracles and false claims. But what counts as extraordinary, and should common sense be our guide to it? An innate scepticism at the heart of science needs to be balanced and we should instead accept that the bizarre and counter-intuitive is what modern science is all about, argues Sean McMahon.
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Douglas Meier 12 September 2024
At the end of day, we need to remember the Sagan standard is just a heuristic (or "razor"), and not get to caught up in the semantics. While I can understand why someone would "need" to know the exact definition, that in itself is an fallacious appeal to definition when we should be applying "Grice's razor."
Look, I think you already view the standard as varying degrees of proof to the varying degrees claim (which is how perceive the standard), but like many before you throughout history, the undefined word extraordinary is throwing you all in a loop. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It likely means you're aware of confirmation bias and other cognitive bias (good on you), and you are also not wrong to be worried about people "abusing" standard (happens all the time). However, recognize and use the Sagan standard like all other decision making metal shortcuts and perhaps opposite to Occam's Razor.
Scott Anderson 14 January 2023
Interesting concept considering all of modern physics relies on "inference" which is NOT evidence, but a form of confirmation bias.
The math has holes, known as "ideal-states" imaginary starting positions with no grounding in reality. Time has never been observed to stop for an "inertial frame", the atoms have not ceased motion for absolute zero, and we have never reduced the mass of a vessel to zero, the perfect vacuum has never been achieved all attempts structurally fail.
Zeros in the math, when a zero has never been observed.
Ideal states are not useful. They poison the well. Seriously intelligent people blindly following the math to outrageous conclusions, looking for wormholes, timetravel, and other unobserved nonsense. It's been over a century, modern physics has failed at producing a congruent system top to bottom. Dark matter/energy represent the difference between prediction and observation, instead of starting over we doubled down folding them into the problem. Remove the fantasy, remove the ideal states. The answer is simpler than it seems but we have to get out of our own way first.... too far down the line too much momentum and pride in what we assume to know. Without a proper place for gravity we cannot claim to know anything for certain, everything is slightly incorrect. There is a significant difference between quantitatively accounting for the downward acceleration, and knowing what gravity is. Sure as hell isn't curved spacetime. If Einstein or Newton understood gravity we wouldn't need dark matter to make up the difference in galactic behavior, we must start over.
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