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This article seems to twist the definition of “extraordinary” to something clearly not intended by the original quote about claims and evidence. Mark is a very
by pavlov 3y ago
This article seems to twist the definition of “extraordinary” to something clearly not intended by the original quote about claims and evidence.
Mark is a very common first name. Xu is a Chinese surname shared by over ten million people (according to Wikipedia). It’s entirely ordinary that someone would have this combination of names.
- mathstuf 3y agoSomeone, yes. The person in front of you? Unlikely. Analogy: someone has a winning lottery ticket. Is it the one in your hand? Probably not.
- pavlov 3y agoThat’s a good analogy for my point, because just having a lottery ticket isn’t extraordinary even though all of the tickets are unique. If somebody claims they are holding a winning lottery ticket and will sell it to me for a 50% discount because they are leaving the country in two hours and don’t have time to cash it out, that’s an extraordinary claim and I would need extraordinary evidence to take the deal. If someone says their name is Mark Wu, it’s like saying they are holding a non-winning lottery ticket with serial number 12345654321. It’s at best a curiosity.
- TomK32 3y agoDon't ask me why, but I had to urge to look up the number of Chinese surnames: About 2000 are currently in use, half the Han Chinese population uses just 19 surnames. Quite low compared to the 850 THOUSAND (another source has more than a million) surnames used in Germany, twice as much as in Spain bespite it have a tradition of double-names. I guess Germany being such a central state with many migration waves over the last 600~800 years since family names have become common.
- walthamstow 3y agoIt's even more concentrated in Vietnam. A very large chunk of the country is called Nguyen. Korea has similar with Kim/Park/Lee.