The criterion for extraordinality seems often to be whether it contradicts someone's preconceptions. It seems precarious to apply different levels of scrutiny to claims based on such a basis.

That is what extraordinary means: that it violates our previous experiences, that it is "out of the ordinary". Human beings navigate reality based on previous experience, and most of the time it serves us really well.

Most people have a preconception that aliens do not exist, for example. That doesn't make it true, but it's a reasonable assumption to start at, because the vast majority of human beings (not all) have not had an experience involving extraterrestrials, nor do they trust another human being who has (i.e. secondary confirmation): so when a third party claims that this has happened to them, it's hard to take in, because it's "extraordinary".

The statement that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is nothing but an acknowledgement of the fact that human beings work this way, and that even though it's not a fail-safe way to reason, chances are that you'll end up with a correct conclusion more often than if you simply start every reasoning with "we have no idea what is true".

Primary confirmation of something you can observe or reproduce, or secondary confirmation of the same via someone you trust, are the two primary ways we reason about what we believe, because we are social creatures. In my opinion, when you go down the path of equating all secondary confirmations with each-other, disregarding expertise, consensus, or anything else that might give weight to that secondary opinion because "you can't trust anything anyway", I believe that you are walking down a dangerous and anti-intellectual route, and that this is the reason behind many of the things that are dividing societies worldwide today.

Obviously I'm not saying an expert is correct by definition, nor am I saying that the majority is always right, but both of those statements are more true than false: no wonder that when you flip those statements around, you end up with some "kooky" conclusions.

The only time that these claims can be anything other than gut feelings is the case where the speaker is somehow aware of all of the events in the set. Something like "I took 100 samples and 99 of them met the conditions".

This is going to seem pedantic, and I think you'll get a pass from people with the same preconceptions who don't habitually ask "do I really know this?".

> Most people have a preconception that aliens do not exist, for example.

Testable hypothesis, and one I might assume myself. Is it true? Realistically, I have no clue, and I have no reasonable way to judge whether you do either.

> the vast majority of human beings (not all) have not had an experience involving extraterrestrials, nor do they trust another human being who has

Same as above. I think it's incredibly difficult to know much of anything specific about "the vast majority of human beings". And then the ambiguity on what constitutes "the vast majority" makes it more of a quagmire. There are billions of us. A fraction of a percent is vast. The vast majority might as well be infinity when it comes to our ability to know things about it.

Would you agree? I think these claims would be much more robust if you put some constraints on them: ie the vast majority of people in my social circles/media consumption that I trust to have shown me what they really believe. But you'd sound a little kooky if you said that, and it wouldn't be that powerful of a statement.

All that said, I believe your conclusions. I just have a fascination with picking at people's (and my own) confidence in uncontroversial claims that are hard to substantiate.

[1] My favorite types of things to poke at, which probably does make me a bit of a kook.

Edit: I have tried to eliminate "most people x" and "the vast majority of x y" from most of what I write for these reasons. It still comes out inadvertently sometimes.

Edit2:I missed one: "most of the time it serves us really well". Same comment.

Hence, two opposing claims are both necessarily extraordinary when both parts disagree, or when each claim violates the other part experiences.

But since the world is not composed of two people, if one person fervently believes that the moon is made out of cheese and the rest of humanity does not, the anti-cheesers are not extraordinary, and the singular cheeser would likely be classified as mentally ill.

Have people who have been factually correct historically been classified as mentally ill, heretics and the like? Yes. But that doesn’t mean you should visit a mental institution to get the “truth” behind the invasion of Ukraine.

> Yes. But that doesn’t mean you should visit a mental institution to get the “truth” behind the invasion of Ukraine.

Good, then if the majority is right we just have to ask what the world thinks about the situation in Ukraine. Currently the large majority of the world disagrees with the western point of view. India is not siding with the west, neither does China, neither does Africa or South America.

What does that tell you?

See, the problem is that you could easily be wrong about what the majority of others believe. And in fact you are wrong on this point (at least for Americans) [1].

It's very easy to get the wrong idea about what the majority believes, due to something called the majority illusion [2]. A broadcast vocal minority can drown out the true majority.

Supposing you could identify the majority opinion, it certainly does not make it the truth, and counter claims are not by definition "extraordinarily" simply because they are the minority opinion. Science and truth are not determined by vote. 81% of Americans believe in god [3]. Does that make it an extraordinary claim that god does not exist?

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/06/30/most-americ...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/wonkblog/ma...

[3] https://news.gallup.com/poll/268205/americans-believe-god.as...

A kook can be spotted by the way they talk. They have knowledge others don’t. They don’t say, “I’ve read that…” or “It seems like this might have happened.”. They speak with certainty and argue by assertion. Making one claim after another all without evidence. They link together facts by claiming some cabal or powerful person is behind things and a refusal to agree means you are a victim of propaganda. The thinking is disorganized. They have a need to evangelize their ideas and tend to think coincidences can’t happen. Correlation is causation.

"Ukraine bombing its own cities to make Russia “look bad” is such a claim. "

Individual false flag military operations are not uncommon, but widespread destruction of one's own country for propaganda purposes would be extraordinary.

There are many historical examples proving that false flag military operations in themselves is not a conspiracy theory, it's something that has happened and will continue to happen.

What is extremely important though is context. A famous false flag operation from history, for example, is the "Gleiwitz incident": Nazi Germany attacked its own radio station in 1939 to justify attacking Poland.

Even at the time, it was obvious that something about this was fishy, because anyone could understand that Poland did not have anything to gain by starting a war with Germany -- a Germany that by the way had annexed Austria and the Sudetenland the year before.

Of course, nobody in the German political leadership actually cared what people believed, much like Russia today spreads misinformation about Ukraine that is borderline laughable. It's not always about the information being believable, it can also be a show of force: I'm lying to your face, we both know it, but what are you going to do about it?

That does not imply that it is not a conspiracy theory. It implies that it is a correct conspiracy theory.

Smart people often make dumb choices.

If by "intelligent" we mean the conventional thing -- learns new things easily, capable of reasoning through complex tasks, would do well in med school/law school/phd programs/finance/engineering, picks up creative disciplines quickly, etc -- then are we sure it's not exactly the other way around?

People become invested in cults and conspiracies for emotional reasons, not rational reasons, and conventionally intelligent people are extraordinarily good at post hoc rationalization. More importantly, they're often better at mitigating or managing some of the downsides (eg, maintaining good-enough status in a cult, avoiding talking about the conspiracy in certain circumstances, etc.).

At least, this has been my experience with some extended family who fell into a cult: the ones I could consider "smartest" were stuck in the cult the longest, because they could rationalize their way into an answer for everything.

At least in my experience.

Most other people make claims or may appear to be but in practice do not demonstrate it on a broad basis, as in your example.

Maybe a different terminology is needed to describe the latter case, 'selectively smart'?

From the Wikipedia:

> No True Scotsman, or appeal to purity, is an informal fallacy in which one attempts to protect their generalized statement from a falsifying counterexample by excluding the counterexample improperly.

So I think it's a No True Scotsman argument to make to say "well, if they joined a cult, they must not have been intelligent in the first place."

But now I suppose we're arguing over the definition of the No True Scotsman fallacy and that's just a bit too meta for me on a rainy Sunday afternoon, so I'm going to go walk my dog. :-)

It's not some abstract speculation. Even HN comments often demonstrate it one way or the other.

Most conspiracies theories are extremely implausible. However there is a conspiracy theory about Covid that is so extremely plausible that it's the claims that it's not that should require extraordinary evidence.

That theory is that the perfectly pedestrian hypothesis that a lab studying dangerous pathogens could have experienced an industrial accident resulting in a pandemic was covered up by both a totalitarian government and other individuals with a personal interest in the matter.

Where am I going with this? Well, I posit that years of throwing around accusations of "conspiracy theorism" and promoting dodgy "fact checking" that typically involves mere opinions rather than incontrovertible facts has made downright demented ideas like Ukraine bombing itself more palatable. In other words, "they lied to us about Wuhan, they must be lying about Ukraine" or something.

Look at the man in the background: he stole a water tube from BSL4 lab. Guess why this video is deleted by Russians.

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/17/health/russia-lab-explosi...

https://iser.med.unsw.edu.au/blog/explosion-vector-hoping-be...

Following an explosion, first responders and firefighters entered a building to inspect (break into) every room on every floor for signs of fire. It has been reported that some Russian firefighters have been known to steal items during these inspections, as they can deny responsibility after a door lock is broken. The video shows a soldier pouring out water from a stolen water bottle while the director of the BSL4 lab speaks.

There were several investigations conducted by independent Russian reporters into this incident and the subsequent outbreak of an unknown virus in Siberia that occurred shortly after, but I am unable to locate them now.

Extraordinarity is subjective. For you those claims might be extraordinary, for others they may be logical. I can guarantee you a time will come when the positions will be reversed.

Failing to understand this shows you're also having a hard time navigating a scientific and methodological way of finding out the truth, as pretty much everyone else. The problem is that you seem more interested in attacking the intelligence of people who disagree with you than in understanding what makes their claim ordinary for them.

Easy way to trigger the phenomenon: introduce the notion of complex causality (as opposed to justification) into a Ukraine war discussion, and observe with fascination the highly probabilistic responses from humans (perform 100 experiments, aggregate the ensuing responses, and you will have a normal distribution, gee, a lot like how ChatGPT works). I have LOTS of practice doing this (on a variety of topics, religion is another easy one) on platforms where longer and finer grained arguments are socially acceptable (they tend not to be on more intellectual sites like HN).

This very thread has numerous artifacts of various associated phenomena, but it's all normal so goes unnoticed.

“Extraordinary” is always judged in regard to the judging party’s priors, and people have wildly different priors (and people on both sides will say – with some accuracy on both sides, though very much not equal accuracy – that this is because the other side has priors that are influenced by disinformation spread as propaganda by the other side.)