2 ms·
Extraordinary claims require legitimate evidence. "Extraordinary" cannot describe evidence; all evidence is ordinary. What happened here is that the evidence wa
by angiosperm 3y ago
Extraordinary claims require legitimate evidence. "Extraordinary" cannot describe evidence; all evidence is ordinary. What happened here is that the evidence was so bad as to be incapable of supporting any claim.
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y agoI'm not disagreeing hard, and we're just discussing words at this stage. But I wouldnt object to calling less commonly ocurring data points extraordinary.
- matthewdgreen 3y agoThe phrase I used is “extraordinarily precise.” When you’re conducting a medical trial of 10,000 patients there’s always a high probability (virtually a certainty) that one measurement will be inaccurate. You can live with this minimal error rate because there’s so much data that a small amount of error doesn’t invalidate the results. If you’re conducting an experiment involving a single asteroid, then every link along the chain of evidence had better be airtight, and validated to a level that wouldn’t be cost-effective or practical in other circumstances. There can’t be a 0.1% or a 1% or a 10% or (god forbid) a 50+% chance that the substance you’re presenting is something other than what you claim it is.