"Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Proof" (Meaning & Implications)

[marhawkman]

I read Robert Temple's The Sirius Mystery (his updated version) much in the spirit of Carl Grove's initial post above. That is to say that I approached it with the assumption (which is widespread) that here we have the Acceptable Face of the Ancient Astronauts advocacy.

I have never been so disappointed! I found his writing to be abstruse to the point of deliberate obscurantism. (I haver read a fair few complex texts in my time and think I am able to distinguish between the complexity of a text which has to be so owing to the ideas it is proposing and that of a text which parades its complexity the better to impress. With Temple I was too often getting a hint of the latter).

The guy has some kind of numerological monomania and manages to find the number 51 (or is it 52?) in just about everything - using uncalled for mathematical computations. (This number being the length of time it takes Sirius B to rotate around Sirius A, or something).

In remarks added in the new edition he: gives credence to the `Face on Mars`, claims he is being harassed by KGB agents, hints at interest in a Sirius worshiping new age cult which pre-existed his interest in the Dogons, gives a detailed science-fictional account of the life and times of the amphibian race which he believes visited earth, and tells us that he co-operated with the infamous BBC Horizon programme about Daniken, knowing full well that it was to be a detonation job on Daniken - and in the hope that it would promote Temple's ideas instead.

Temple is clearly one bright guy (kudos to anyone who is not only fluent in Chinese but able to translate Western texts into that language). But being intelligent is no barrier to being kooky. Indeed, history is littered with highly intelligent people who have become trapped in their own delusions (it is as if their very cleverness prevents then from being able to be aware of the more obvious flaws in their thinking).

Temple's work has the veneer of credibility about it because it is conveyed in an academic manner - in contrast to the commercial plainspeaking of Daniken and many of the others. However, if you do not allow yourself to be dazzled by this you can see that there is an awful lot of whimsy behind it - as well as just a little conceit and self-grandeur.

The real irony is that Temple's latest claims involve the idea that ancient societies had much more advanced telesopic technologies than we now give them credit for. So has he forgotten his once oft-repeated insistence that the Dogons could never have been able to see Sirius B?

Reminds me of an old saying "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". It's a great axiom as it applies to so many things.

 

[Carl Grove]

Reminds me of an old saying "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". It's a great axiom as it applies to so many things.

That saying is the best known comment by Carl Sagan and I actually think it is terrible! It sounds deep and profound but it doesn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny. The logical positivists would have ripped it to pieces.

 

[Endlessly Amazed]

That Sagan quote is possibly my least favorite popular take on science, because it is used so frequently to shut down critical thinking. “Extraordinary claims” and “extraordinary evidence” are both problematic, because no commonly accepted definition exists for either term. I have witnessed it used many times to reject sound conclusions and sound evidence.

In the mainstream scientific pursuit of knowledge, any and every claim requires sufficient evidence. The acceptance of evidence and claims is always provisional, and subject to change over time as new evidence arises which changes the interpretation (claims, hypothesis, theory) of the previous evidence.

The specification of sufficient evidence is best defined at the start of an inquiry (although this isn't always possible), and shaped to persuade a specific audience (journal peer reviewers, budget and policy makers, spouses , etc.). I sometimes wonder how much Sagan regretted the misapplication of his utterance, and sometimes I enjoy dwelling on his specific circle of hell.

 

[marhawkman]

That Sagan quote is possibly my least favorite popular take on science, because it is used so frequently to shut down critical thinking. “Extraordinary claims” and “extraordinary evidence” are both problematic, because no commonly accepted definition exists for either term. I have witnessed it used many times to reject sound conclusions and sound evidence.

In the mainstream scientific pursuit of knowledge, any and every claim requires sufficient evidence. The acceptance of evidence and claims is always provisional, and subject to change over time as new evidence arises which changes the interpretation (claims, hypothesis, theory) of the previous evidence.

The specification of sufficient evidence is best defined at the start of an inquiry (although this isn't always possible), and shaped to persuade a specific audience (journal peer reviewers, budget and policy makers, spouses , etc.). I sometimes wonder how much Sagan regretted the misapplication of his utterance, and sometimes I enjoy dwelling on his specific circle of hell.

My take is that the purpose of the quote is to highlight the need for "sufficient" evidence. "Extraordinary" is put in as a way to indicate the type of evidence needed has to match the claim presented.

IE the evidence for a claim needs to match the scope of the claim. Sagan used it as a way of explaining that you need to backup your claims and not just throw around ideas.

 

[Carl Grove]

That Sagan quote is possibly my least favorite popular take on science, because it is used so frequently to shut down critical thinking. “Extraordinary claims” and “extraordinary evidence” are both problematic, because no commonly accepted definition exists for either term. I have witnessed it used many times to reject sound conclusions and sound evidence.

In the mainstream scientific pursuit of knowledge, any and every claim requires sufficient evidence. The acceptance of evidence and claims is always provisional, and subject to change over time as new evidence arises which changes the interpretation (claims, hypothesis, theory) of the previous evidence.

The specification of sufficient evidence is best defined at the start of an inquiry (although this isn't always possible), and shaped to persuade a specific audience (journal peer reviewers, budget and policy makers, spouses , etc.). I sometimes wonder how much Sagan regretted the misapplication of his utterance, and sometimes I enjoy dwelling on his specific circle of hell.

Absolutely right. "Extraordinary" is an entirely subjective term, and surely the first attribute of a statement of scientific method should be that all terms should be precisely defined. "Claims" is also so broad a term that it might be referring either to a statement about results of a scientific study or some poor sap's innocent description of his UFO sighting, and I have heard the slogan used about both. "Require" is also ill defined: yes, a formal scientific experiment does require specific attributes, but there is a range of possible situations ranging from a desire to investigate something unusual through various data acquisition stages before you can get to that stage. And spontaneous phenomena cannot be treated experimentally, at least initially, but through data collection and statistical analyses.

 

[ChasFink]

I honestly don't understand the confusion over this statement. It's just a corollary of Occam's razor. To understand either, one must first accept that scientific inquiry doesn't really search for the truth, but for explanations that model the truth, in ever increasing levels of accuracy.

Occam's razor, "entities [of explanation, assumption, etc.] should not be multiplied beyond necessity", is usually simplified as "the simplest explanation is the best" but is better phrased as "the simplest explanation that encompasses everything in the observation is the best." As a Philosophy professor once explained it in a class I attended many years ago, you can explain the operation of a florescent light by saying invisible and intangible mice are carrying the electrons back and forth in the tube at very, very high speeds - but a better explanation eliminates the mice altogether. It doesn't absolutely mean the mice don't exist, it just means you can make an adequate explanation without even having to consider the mice.

We used to think that Newton's laws explained everything about motion and gravity, and they still work pretty well in most everyday applications. But Einstein showed that you actually needed a more complex model to explain some things that don't fit in with Newton's laws. Before Einstein, the discrepancies between actual planetary orbits and the calculated orbits using only Newtonian physics were tentatively explained in a number of different ways, often including as-yet undiscovered planets that affected the orbits of the known ones. This makes good sense in the context of Newtonian physics - but those planets don't exist. Einstein made extraordinary claims about the nature of time and space, and scientific experimentation showed that he was "right", in that those claims made for a better explanation, even though the explanation itself was now more extraordinary - that is, more complex.

Yes "extraordinary" is a subjective thing. But the saying associated with Sagan is simply describing - in a very simple way - the very nature of empirical science. You can claim, for example, that you saw an airplane fly overhead, and a reasonable scientist would probably take your word for it. You can claim you saw metallic, disc-shaped object fly by at close range, and a reasonable scientist would ask for more information, and probably more proof - photos if possible. You can claim that intelligent insectoids from Glarma-12 flew around your head in a flying saucer that used antigravity power, and that same scientist would have no way of evaluating the claim - even though some people would say it's not that different from the previous one - since

1. There are no known intelligent insectoids.
2. There is no place known commonly as Glarma-12.
3. There is no known process of actual antigravity, or even an agreed-upon definition.

That doesn't mean that intelligent insectoids from Glarma-12 didn't fly around your head in a flying saucer that used antigravity power, it just means that there's no way of proving it scientifically at the current time.

 

[Endlessly Amazed]

My take is that the purpose of the quote is to highlight the need for "sufficient" evidence. "Extraordinary" is put in as a way to indicate the type of evidence needed has to match the claim presented.

IE the evidence for a claim needs to match the scope of the claim. Sagan used it as a way of explaining that you need to backup your claims and not just throw around ideas.

Marhawkman, my interpretation of Sagan and his quote is different than yours. What follows is not directed at you.

I am not anti-science. In fact, just the opposite. Both professionally, before retirement, and personally, I was and remain a scientist. I have not read any of Sagan’s books for years, and so I may be misremembering some aspects. With that being said, my impression of Sagan is that he was a powerful and persuasive voice of sanity and reason.

He also was also rigid and narrow-minded about the sciences concerned with cognition, emotion, and the paranormal. He did not forthrightly acknowledge his limitations, any more than James Randi, Martin Gardner, and Richard Dawkins. May they all share the same a priori circle in hell. In contrast, Richard Feinman was an exemplar in this and so I trusted his opinions more.

Whatever Sagan really meant by extraordinary evidence: in my experience, his quote is used inappropriately and consistently by persons who are not scientists to stop critical thinking. This is in situations in which the non-scientists have already reached a conclusion which matches their pre-existing assumption set, and so they do not want to think about the particular topic anymore – and they apparently don’t want anyone else to think about it either! This is intellectual snobbery or laziness.

 

[Carl Grove]

I honestly don't understand the confusion over this statement. It's just a corollary of Occam's razor. To understand either, one must first accept that scientific inquiry doesn't really search for the truth, but for explanations that model the truth, in ever increasing levels of accuracy.

Occam's razor, "entities [of explanation, assumption, etc.] should not be multiplied beyond necessity", is usually simplified as "the simplest explanation is the best" but is better phrased as "the simplest explanation that encompasses everything in the observation is the best." As a Philosophy professor once explained it in a class I attended many years ago, you can explain the operation of a florescent light by saying invisible and intangible mice are carrying the electrons back and forth in the tube at very, very high speeds - but a better explanation eliminates the mice altogether. It doesn't absolutely mean the mice don't exist, it just means you can make an adequate explanation without even having to consider the mice.

We used to think that Newton's laws explained everything about motion and gravity, and they still work pretty well in most everyday applications. But Einstein showed that you actually needed a more complex model to explain some things that don't fit in with Newton's laws. Before Einstein, the discrepancies between actual planetary orbits and the calculated orbits using only Newtonian physics were tentatively explained in a number of different ways, often including as-yet undiscovered planets that affected the orbits of the known ones. This makes good sense in the context of Newtonian physics - but those planets don't exist. Einstein made extraordinary claims about the nature of time and space, and scientific experimentation showed that he was "right", in that those claims made for a better explanation, even though the explanation itself was now more extraordinary - that is, more complex.

Yes "extraordinary" is a subjective thing. But the saying associated with Sagan is simply describing - in a very simple way - the very nature of empirical science. You can claim, for example, that you saw an airplane fly overhead, and a reasonable scientist would probably take your word for it. You can claim you saw metallic, disc-shaped object fly by at close range, and a reasonable scientist would ask for more information, and probably more proof - photos if possible. You can claim that intelligent insectoids from Glarma-12 flew around your head in a flying saucer that used antigravity power, and that same scientist would have no way of evaluating the claim - even though some people would say it's not that different from the previous one - since

1. There are no known intelligent insectoids.
2. There is no place known commonly as Glarma-12.
3. There is no known process of actual antigravity, or even an agreed-upon definition.

That doesn't mean that intelligent insectoids from Glarma-12 didn't fly around your head in a flying saucer that used antigravity power, it just means that there's no way of proving it scientifically at the current time.

The examples you give are very relevant, and I think the person who saw a silver disc -- and we know of many thousands of such cases, of course -- is in a sense the most important. Because there is a huge difference between (1) a scientist putting forward a theory, and (2) someone reporting something that just happened to him. The latter is not trying to claim anything, if he (or she) is an honest witness and not a hoaxer then he is just stating what he saw. You can doubt what he saw, or try to explain it in a sceptical way, but his motivation is not that he wants to "claim" anything. I got into such a situation some years ago on another web site when someone innocently asked about energy healing. I had had some very interesting experiences in that field and I answered him as best I could, explaining what I had experienced. Within no time at all I was targeted by two hyper sceptical trolls who laid into me as though I was some monstrous anti-scientific hoaxer. (Since I spent most of my working life as a research psychologist that didn't go down well with me..) When I tried to answer them in a calm and sensible way they got even worse. They couldn't or didn't wish to make that key distinction between a "claim" and a simple description of a personal experience. Eventually I left the site for good and haven't been back since! In contrast, here on Forteana most people can see the difference and take a more reasonable line.

 

[marhawkman]

The examples you give are very relevant, and I think the person who saw a silver disc -- and we know of many thousands of such cases, of course -- is in a sense the most important. Because there is a huge difference between (1) a scientist putting forward a theory, and (2) someone reporting something that just happened to him. The latter is not trying to claim anything, if he (or she) is an honest witness and not a hoaxer then he is just stating what he saw. You can doubt what he saw, or try to explain it in a sceptical way, but his motivation is not that he wants to "claim" anything. I got into such a situation some years ago on another web site when someone innocently asked about energy healing. I had had some very interesting experiences in that field and I answered him as best I could, explaining what I had experienced. Within no time at all I was targeted by two hyper sceptical trolls who laid into me as though I was some monstrous anti-scientific hoaxer. (Since I spent most of my working life as a research psychologist that didn't go down well with me..) When I tried to answer them in a calm and sensible way they got even worse. They couldn't or didn't wish to make that key distinction between a "claim" and a simple description of a personal experience. Eventually I left the site for good and haven't been back since! In contrast, here on Forteana most people can see the difference and take a more reasonable line.

Yeah, there's a HUGE difference between saying you saw lights you can't explain in the sky, and claiming you saw a fleet of invading starships from the Sculptor Galaxy. One is a simple testimony. The other requires a lot more information than just what you saw at a glance.

And this is what Sagan was getting at. The nature of a claim made determines what constitutes adequate supporting evidence.

In a way it's the explanation that requires most scrutiny. Why? Because an explanation requires you to predict what will happen in the future. And this is something I agree sometimes gets done wrong. The scientific method is to collect information, then analyze the information in order to come to a conclusion. If you start with a conclusion you're doing it wrong, but the nature of the information used for analysis can come from other analyses.

But some claims you see getting talked about basically don't have supporting evidence. For example, there are UFO conspiracy theories where the only traceable evidence that specific theory uses are web posts made by what are functionally anonymous individuals. And nothing but empty claims.

 

[Cochise]

I still think it is a very unfortunate phrase. Let us take the person who saw a fleet of alien ships. Maybe he/she did. Maybe there is something wrong with their perception and that is genuinely what they thought they saw. That darn phrase then gets used to treat them as a fraud and nutter when actually they may be telling the absolute truth from their point of view.

We seem (the human race, I mean) to be bizarrely inconsistent in what we will allow to be questioned and what we won't, and the phrase in question , being capable of inconsistent interpretation, gets used to reinforce that inconsistency.

It doesn't help, maybe, that I was never terribly impressed with Carl Sagan, despite having read some of his books. I can't remember exactly why I took against him now, but he wasn't the actual originator of the concept anyway.

 

[ChasFink]

The more I think about it the more I realize that, as @Carl Grove said, it's incidents that have too many preliminary assumptions made about them, by witnesses or (more likely) by those hearing their story, that get the most ridicule.

When someone like Billy Meier goes into detail about his experiences, but offers evidence that includes photos of saucer occupants that look exactly like blurry snaps off the TV of a Dean Martin show, he should be subject to scrutiny and criticism. But it's Meier's explanations and assumptions, not the strangeness of his story, that's the problem. I listened to a presentation by Father Gill, witness to the very odd Papua New Guinea sighting where the "saucer" occupants waived at the witnesses. While he clearly believes he saw something extraordinary, when asked if he could eliminate the possibility that he saw an optical illusion involving a boat on the water, he matter-of-factly said he could not. To me this makes Gill's story much more worthy of investigation than all of Meier's.

But the problem is people do make assumptions about other people's claims. I don't know how many times I've heard a radio or TV show on UFOs where the host politely asks someone if they "believe" in UFOs, but means "do you believe we're being visited by aliens from another planet" - as if no other explanation is possible. This is the kind of thinking that makes all unexplained phenomena subject to ridicule, and that shouldn't be.

I'm reminded of the old "hippie" joke:

"Do you believe in baptism?"
"Sure do, man - I've seen it done!"

 

[charliebrown]

Researcher Paola Leopizzi-Harris claims Carl Sagan worked with J. Allen Hynek on Project Blue Book.

Supposedly Carl told Hynek that he knew UFOs were real, but he had to remain silent because he would lose all financial support for his research and become an outcast in the college world.

 

[Mythopoeika]

Researcher Paola Leopizzi-Harris claims Carl Sagan worked with J. Allen Hynek on Project Blue Book.

Supposedly Carl told Hynek that he knew UFOs were real, but he had to remain silent because he would lose all financial support for his research and become an outcast in the college world.

Yes, I had this impression of Sagan that he really did believe in aliens, but walked a fine line to retain his scientific credibility.

 

[Carl Grove]

Researcher Paola Leopizzi-Harris claims Carl Sagan worked with J. Allen Hynek on Project Blue Book.

Supposedly Carl told Hynek that he knew UFOs were real, but he had to remain silent because he would lose all financial support for his research and become an outcast in the college world.

Interesting, because one sensed a certain ambiguity in his approach to the subject. But there were plenty of people, including Vallee and Hynek himself, who were immersed in ufology and yet still managed to keep their official careers going without becoming outcasts. I never made anything like that kind of career, but I certainly never made a secret of my interest in UFOs and it never had any effect on my more modest work in psychology.

 

[EnolaGaia]

Supposedly Carl told Hynek that he knew UFOs were real, but he had to remain silent because he would lose all financial support for his research and become an outcast in the college world.

Yes, I had this impression of Sagan that he really did believe in aliens, but walked a fine line to retain his scientific credibility.

Sagan was reasonably clear about his stance on the subject.

- He did believe in the UFO phenomenon (people seeing unexplained things aloft).

- He did believe in life - probably including technologically advanced alien civilizations - elsewhere in the universe.

- He did not believe the ETH - i.e., the hypothesis that UFOs observed on earth represented visits by alien spacecraft - was an explanation that recommended itself as possible, much less probable.

Above and beyond these three key points, Sagan argued that the biggest and most frustrating issue with UFOs was the human inability to accept ambiguity and keep an open mind pending additional data.

 

[ChasFink]

As Sagan was sometimes billed as an astrobiologist or exobiologist, I would think he believed in the likelihood of alien life and intelligence. While I'm sure he did not believe in the traditional ETH, I sense from some of the more esoteric aspects of his novel Contact that he could accept the idea of "indistinguishable from magic" technologies, which might have something to do with UFOs.

 

[marhawkman]

As Sagan was sometimes billed as an astrobiologist or exobiologist, I would think he believed in the likelihood of alien life and intelligence. While I'm sure he did not believe in the traditional ETH, I sense from some of the more esoteric aspects of his novel Contact that he could accept the idea of "indistinguishable from magic" technologies, which might have something to do with UFOs.

Yeah, my impression was that he was a proponent of the "pics or it didn't happen" sort of approach to claims about aliens.

I earlier alluded to this with this 100% theoretical example.

Yeah, there's a HUGE difference between saying you saw lights you can't explain in the sky, and claiming you saw a fleet of invading starships from the Sculptor Galaxy.

The first claim is simple: "I saw something".
The second is: "I saw something.... which was X" < you need to provide evidence for why you think it was a specific thing.

 

[Carl Grove]

Yeah, my impression was that he was a proponent of the "pics or it didn't happen" sort of approach to claims about aliens.

I earlier alluded to this with this 100% theoretical example.

The first claim is simple: "I saw something".
The second is: "I saw something.... which was X" < you need to provide evidence for why you think it was a specific thing.

My impression is that the overwhelming majority of witnesses will say they saw something that they can't explain. Some will say it is something with performance characteristics beyond those of our technology (albeit in less technical jargon). Very few will describe contact with spaceships from Mars or whatever. I don't believe that Sagan ever really studied the phenomenon. The articles he wrote are all lacking in detail or even references to actual sightings. It is all hypothetical stuff.

 

[charliebrown]

I always believed that Sagan was paid by the government to spread as much disinformation about UFOs as possible.

This is what Project Blue Book did, paid Hynek to spread as much disinformation as possible to confuse the American public.

In the UK, this is what Rudloe Manor did.

 

[marhawkman]

My impression is that the overwhelming majority of witnesses will say they saw something that they can't explain. Some will say it is something with performance characteristics beyond those of our technology (albeit in less technical jargon). Very few will describe contact with spaceships from Mars or whatever. I don't believe that Sagan ever really studied the phenomenon. The articles he wrote are all lacking in detail or even references to actual sightings. It is all hypothetical stuff.

I'm not disagreeing, merely stating why I feel that is the correct way to do it. The real kicker is the theorists who.... don't stick to the facts.

I always believed that Sagan was paid by the government to spread as much disinformation about UFOs as possible.

This is what Project Blue Book did, paid Hynek to spread as much disinformation as possible to confuse the American public.

In the UK, this is what Rudloe Manor did.

Hmm so if they were a cover then the reality was? this is one of those things where the implication seems obvious(It was aliens), but it's hard to be sure.

But... now I haz a curious... which statements made by those three individuals do you feel were incorrect? And to follow up what do you think was correct?

 

[charliebrown]

Carl Sagan was so high up the academic ladder, that NASA honored him by asking him to design the Voyagers I and II gold information records along with Jon Lomberg.

These records told aliens what we were and how to find us.

There was no way Sagan could ever let it get out that in believed in UFOs !

Voyagers launched in 1977 and are still going strong.