this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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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.