The true thing that Sagan’s line might be interpreted to mean is “A claim which is very unlikely on priors needs very strong evidence to end up with a posterior probability close to 1.” “Extraordinary evidence” would ideally have been stated as “extraordinarily strong evidence”, but that makes the line a bit clunkier. Unfortunately, there is often a tradeoff between accuracy and pithiness. Many pithy sayings require a bit of interpretation/reconstruction to get the correct underlying idea. I think anyone who invokes a catchphrase should be aware of this, though I don’t know how many people share this perspective.
Are there in fact a significant number of people who take it at the face value of “extraordinary evidence” and think it must mean it was obtained via super-advanced technology or something?
Strong evidence is incredibly ordinary, and that genuinely doesn’t seem to be intuitive. Like, every time you see a bit string longer than a kilobyte there is a claim in your corpus that goes from roughly zero to roughly one, and you are doing that all day. I don’t know about you, but I still don’t think I’ve fully digested that.
The true thing that Sagan’s line might be interpreted to mean is “A claim which is very unlikely on priors needs very strong evidence to end up with a posterior probability close to 1.” “Extraordinary evidence” would ideally have been stated as “extraordinarily strong evidence”, but that makes the line a bit clunkier. Unfortunately, there is often a tradeoff between accuracy and pithiness. Many pithy sayings require a bit of interpretation/reconstruction to get the correct underlying idea. I think anyone who invokes a catchphrase should be aware of this, though I don’t know how many people share this perspective.
Are there in fact a significant number of people who take it at the face value of “extraordinary evidence” and think it must mean it was obtained via super-advanced technology or something?
Strong evidence is incredibly ordinary, and that genuinely doesn’t seem to be intuitive. Like,
every time you see a bit string longer than a kilobyte there is a claim in your corpus that goes from roughly zero to roughly one, and you are doing that all day. I don’t know about you, but I still don’t think I’ve fully digested that.