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What do they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

This is extremely ordinary 'evidence'



The claim is that the material in the video is the result of a replication attempt by the team at HUST and not something else, like an iron flake. This is their second attempt. Their first attempt failed. They’ve been posting about it all week.


> This is extremely ordinary 'evidence'

Claims don't require special evidence whether they are extraordinary or not. "Extraordinary" claims can be proved with the same kind of evidence as other kinds of claims. Relativity was first tested by taking pictures of an eclipse, pretty pedestrian evidence relative to the cosmic scale of it's implications.

What is true is that, the higher the confidence of your prior belief, the less impact new evidence will have. So extraordinary claims simply require more evidence, because our prior is that they aren't true with fairly high confidence.


The point of that quote is of course not that the evidence must have some mythical flavor or whatever - that would be absurd, but rather that if your prior is a strongly held belief that something is not possible and thus the claim to the contrary is extraordinary, then the evidence sufficient to overturn that prior belief must naturally also be extraordinarily convincing.

It's just standard Bayesian reasoning (apologies if I'm misusing the terminology).

Given how much prior research has been done on superconductors, how attractive a target they are for research, and the demonstrated history of fraud in the field - it's not unnatural to retain skepticism concerning this story.

Doesn't mean the story is fraudulent or falsely believed to be fraudulent; it simply means that more evidence is needed to settle this convincingly. I'm sure will get that soon enough - either way.




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