Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Parallel Universe Carl Sagan


For the uninitiated, this is a goof on Spiderman's motto "with great power comes great responsibility" and the saying popularized by Mr. Sagan "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." A wise mash-up brought to you by a parallel, if not perpendicular, universe.

11 comments:

  1. Ooh, that one I like! Well done!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like it, but will publicly admit my ignorance. I don't follow comics....so...when I first saw the pic, I thought it was just your "interpretation" of the quote. Then I read the blurb below.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I figured many wouldn't get the reference. Blurb was definitely needed.

      Delete
    2. You don't follow movies either? I never read a spiderman comic but I knew the quote.

      Delete
  3. By the way, that statement (Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence) is now thought to be false by all or nearly all philosophers and mathematicians, among others. The reason is that Bayes' theorem (the basic theorem in probability theory) makes it clear that all one needs to accept extraordinarily unlikely propositions is (not extraordinary evidence, but) evidence which it would be significantly less likely we would have if the proposition were false then if it were true.

    That's basic probability theory for you. That's also why epistemologists admit that it is possible to be justified in thinking that you won the lottery: (yes, you could be being punked, you could be reading wrong, [etc.] and all of those are on their own much much more likely than actually winning the lottery, but you can still take the ordinary evidence you have at hand to justify the extraordinary belief that you won).

    One doesn't need extraordinary evidence for an extraordinary belief, what they need is evidence which makes the belief more probably true than false.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Right...in most cases of extraordinary claims the evidence needed to make something more probably true than false would be extraordinary.

      Delete
    2. "Most"
      Hrm, that's interesting; a probability judgment about our probability judgments. I'm not sure.

      Delete
    3. Isn't this just semantics? For our intents and purposes, the evidence that you won the lottery (i.e. the winning numbers in front of you) is just as "extraordinary" as the claim that you won the lottery. What would you say qualifies as extraordinary?

      Delete
  4. Probability judgments about probability judgments seem appropriate to me, even if we're the case that no one has developed any mathematics to describe such two-tiered analysis. Peace.

    ReplyDelete
  5. grrr ... auto-correct ... > even if it were .... Not: "we're" ....

    ReplyDelete