"An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof."—
following Douglas Hume
in the tradition of P-S Laplace
After
a moment of thought, most of us will accept the truism that claims for
the truly extraordinary need to be backed up by very strong evidence.
For one thing, the actual existence of some varieties of truly weird
phenomena would require a major paradigm shift and reconsideration of
whole world-views; and, frankly, that's hard work, and unpleasant — and
probably unnecessary because most claims for the truly, weirdly,
sensational extraordinary don't pan out.
So early scientists were right to demand strong evidence for
cosmologies denying that the Earth was the center of the universe, and
Darwin was right to collect considerable data before publishing a theory
that species evolved over huge stretches of time; and there were good
commonsensical reasons to doubt that unseen and for a long time
unseeable particles cause diseases, or continents can move; and there
remains good reason to require extraordinary evidence for claims of ESP
or levitation or telekinesis or alien abduction or alternative-medicine
miracle cures.
There are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in any philosophy, and, indeed, as J.B.S. Haldane said, with no reference to sexual preferences, "the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." Very
weird shit happens, yes, but not often; the everyday world is mostly
pretty banal, and well, everyday, and we should be suspicious of any
specific claim for the truly unusual. A few seemingly wild claims hold
up; most don't.
That much is easy, as a general principle, at least for those of us not
convinced that a correct premonition or two proves something
significant or that the Silicon Creatures from the Tau Ceti System
abducted them. We may come down one way or another on whether some case
has been proved, but we can agree to demand strict scrutiny of the
evidence.
Or we can agree if we allow no "special pleading" and decline to, for a
relevant example, condemn out of hand testing purported scientific
claims in Genesis against scientifically-collected data, or (for a
balancing variety of special pleading) if we assert that scientific
claims should never be challenged for their implications, if true, for
ethics, human happiness, or the law.
A claim teased out of Hebrew Scriptures on the age of the Earth is
testable, and if the geologic evidence indicates a world billions of
years older than the Scriptural claim, that Scriptural dating has been,
as a scientific claim, falsified.
An attack on the notion of free will could begin with noting free will
as a strongly strange idea to start with — some hypothetical force
beyond the usual laws of nature — and moving on to demonstrate that free
will is an increasingly unnecessary hypothesis in explaining human
behavior. Denial of free will, however, is a problem pragmatically: in
terms of getting on in the world, we need to act as if we are free, and
take responsibility for our actions.
Denials of free will aren't extraordinary in the sense of implausible,
but they are extraordinarily mischievous in practical, pragmatic terms;
so they require very strong evidence: "extraordinary proof."
Anyway, as a general rule, the closer we get to human affairs the
greater should be our skepticism about claims extraordinary enough to
make it into the newspapers, and I want to suggest a couple of
human-sphere modifications to the good advice from Carl Sagan and his
predecessors.
The
more sensational or even just newsworthy the claim, the more we should
demand strong proof; the more an extraordinary claim reinforces
completely ordinary stereotypes about people or repeats exciting
folklore, the stronger should be our demand for strong proof.
As I write, one of the SHOCKING NEW TRENDS (THE MAIN-STREAM MEDIA IS [sic] IGNORING)!!! is "the knockout game," especially a version where Black male teens run up and slug some random White person on an urban street.
Yes, Virginia, we do have assaults in America, more than our share,
especially in failing cities; and some of it is random and felonious
assault and serious battery and some is Black on White. But a trend, an
increase in occurrences — some new problem to Fear and View With Alarm!?
Not really.
So let's break this claim down and examine it.
Adults have been complaining about wild, violent, over-sexed,
ill-mannered, irresponsible kids since at least the time of Satire 14 of
the Roman satirist Juvenal (who thought, by the way, the complaining
parental generation way worse than their kids). In English, the classic
statement is from early in the 17th century, by an old Shepherd in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale: "I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting" — and then the Shepherd moves on to more specific complains about "these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty" out hunting in a storm and scaring off a couple of his sheep (3.2).
Indeed, too large a cohort of unmarried, "masterless men" in their
twenties or "youth" are a problem, or a set of problems, for societies,
especially in cases where young men have just been released from
official military service and have time on their hands, and weapons in
them — and no better opportunities for advancement than banding together
and raiding the countryside: a major problem in Europe of the late
Middle Ages and Early Modern periods, with analogies today.
On the other hand, there's that long history of societies' alternating
between sentimental celebration of "youth" and a mean-spirited
denigration of the young. Add to this the banal fact of anti-Black
racism in American history and to that unholy combination add that stories of dangerous young Black men can serve high-stakes political agendas.
If the young and Black and male are sufficiently malicious and vicious
to attack total strangers for entertainment, the soundest and most
reasonable investment in them is in the criminal justice system for
keeping them under control. So we old folks can feel just fine spending
on prisons and prison-like schools for them and not much on their health
care, nutrition, actual education and/or job training, and well,
"general welfare." Which leave more money for old folks and our
increasing needs.
Be very suspicious of such claims.
Out in the various media-spheres there are conscious propagandists and
political operatives and semi-conscious reporters and gullible bloggers
and e-mailers and tweeters and posters. And such people innocently or
highly guiltily can take kernels of truth and wrap them in thick layers
of bullshit, and we get urban legends like an epidemic of random
muggings — or stories of snuff films or pink-cheeked country girls
kidnapped into White Slavery or legions of spat-upon troops returning from Vietnam.
Extraordinary and politically useful claims require strict scrutiny and a lot of proof.
Politically useful claims that reinforce well-established negative
stereotypes may indeed by true — but they require even stricter scrutiny
and proof.
So if you're told that slavery and sex trafficking have never been
worse than they are today, that schools have never been more violent or
that college campuses have developed cultures of rape — step back and
ask to see the numbers and the definitions. It is an extraordinary claim
that slavery today is remotely on the scale of slavery in the ancient
world or in the time of the perfectly legal and totally horrendous Atlantic slave trade of the 16th into the 19th
centuries. And the Atlantic trade was just one of the slave trades;
slavery in the American colonies and later United States was just one of
the systems of slavery: slavery enforced by law, with terror and rape
built into the system.
Moving down the scale from the horrific, it's an extraordinary claim
that schools today are more violent than in the past: the days when
schoolboys were routinely paddled, tawsed, caned, birched, and/or just
occasionally slapped around. We still have too much violence in schools
and too many school shootings — but we need to scrutinize carefully
scary claims and remember that state-sanctioned violence (and relatively
mild and occasionally useful violence) is still violence.
Finally, for me to court some trouble, consider two extraordinary and
newsworthy claims in reports on the high incidence of college rape found
in at least one study, that of the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault, and the assertion that "48.8% of college women who were victims of attacks that met the study’s definition of rape did
not consider what happened to them rape" (Bureau of Justice Stats.
“Sexual Victimization of Collegiate Women” 2000, US DOJ).
If the claims are for events sufficiently out of the ordinary to get
heavy coverage in the media, if the claims are politically useful to one
cause or another, if they fit neatly into your political views and
those of a number of other people, if they reinforce negative
stereotypes and get you scared or angry and/or upset — for one thing,
switch the channel from Fox News, but as a larger operating principle:
demand strong evidence.
