Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sagan standard

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. Very clearly no consensus to delete here. Discussion on moving/merging/redirecting can continue at Talk:Sagan standard. A Train^talk 08:35, 15 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Sagan standard

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Not enough notability. This can be either deleted or simply be merged into Carl Sagan's article. Holy Goo (talk) 22:23, 29 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 02:02, 30 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 02:02, 30 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Keep The notion is important, particularly for Wikipedia editing. I think it could remain as a Wikipedia essay or policy guideline. Perhaps it needs to be renamed as Laplace standard. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:17, 30 September 2017 (UTC).Xxanthippe (talk) 02:17, 30 September 2017 (UTC).[reply]
delete/merge into Carl Sagan's article as per the nominator - Govindaharihari (talk) 04:46, 30 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
~~Delete~~. Fails GNG: it is not a topic that has received significant coverage in reliable sources. The quote, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", the fact that it is called the "Sagan standard", and the quotes from Tuzzi and Laplace are already in the Sagan article. There's no need to merge in the Jefferson quote or any of the other content. Scolaire (talk) 14:39, 30 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect to Carl Sagan#Personal life and beliefs, for the sake of getting some consensus. Scolaire (talk) 14:45, 14 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
~~Keep~~ [refining position to "Merge"', explained in new entry, below.] This is a well-known phrase and principle, widely cited in discussions of science and skepticism. It is completely appropriate to have a page discussing the phrase and the principle, separate from the page about Sagan himself. The idea that "it is not a topic that has received significant coverage in reliable sources" doesn't pass the laugh test. Perhaps someone can add some text to the article with cites of these^[1]^[2]^[3] three references?

^ Deming, David (2016). "Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?". Philosophia. 44: 1319–1331. doi:10.1007/s11406-016-9779-7. Over the past few decades the aphorism 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' (ECREE) has been popularized. It has been called 'a fundamental principle of scientific skepticism' (Voss et al. 2014: 893) and 'an axiom of the skeptical movement' (Goertzel and Goertzel 2015: 292). ECREE is frequently invoked to discredit research dealing with scientific anomalies or any claim that falls outside the mainstream.[...] ECREE has become so ubiquitous that there are instances in the scientific literature where it has been used as the title of a published article without any apparent relation to the content of that article (Light and Warburton 2005; DeVorkin 2010; Hauser and Johnston 2011).
^ Sauerland, Uli (2014). "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence (And Ordinary Ones Require Ordinary Evidence): On Experimental Linguistics For Less Well Studied Languages". Revista da Abralin. 13 (2): 121–149. The late physicist Carl Sagan, whom I quote in the first part of my title, skillfully phrased the common sense view on evidence in mature sciences. In linguistics, however, evidence has become a controversial issue, especially so when it comes to investigations of less well studied languages. In this paper, I argue that Sagan's principle should be applied to linguistics.
^ Voss, Robert S.; Helgen, Kristofer M.; Jansa, Sharon A. (2014). "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: a comment on Cozzuol et al. (2013)". Journal of Mammalogy. 95 (4): 893–898. doi:10.1644/14-MAMM-A-054. The late Carl Sagan's aphorism, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, expresses a fundamental principle of scientific skepticism.

-- Gpc62 (talk) 02:55, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect to Carl Sagan. The quote extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence redirects to Marcello Truzzi. I don't see evidence that this is well-known as the "Sagan standard", the discussion on Carl Sagan is sufficient. power~enwiki (π, ν) 19:58, 3 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

That quote now redirects to Carl Sagan#Personal life and beliefs. It makes no sense to have a quote be a redirect to someone other than the person quoted. Scolaire (talk) 14:45, 14 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, ansh 666 07:04, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Keep per 1 and other sources given above by Gpc62. Not sure about the title however, as I also agree with power~enwiki above on that point. Perhaps an article should be created at extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and this merged to there. --Pontificalibus (talk) 16:32, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The link you provided 1 mentions Sagan, but does not use the term "Sagan standard". Narssarssuaq (talk) 13:44, 14 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

[See below] Redirect to Marcello Truzzi. The term "Sagan standard" gives little or no relevant hits in Google Scholar. Narssarssuaq (talk) 13:40, 14 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Narssarssuaq, surely it should redirect to Carl Sagan? "Sagan standard" redirecting to somebody else's quote seems...strange. Scolaire (talk) 14:45, 14 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe the best place for a redirect is to Consilience. It may be Sagan's quote, but it's not really Sagan's concept, as Truzzi and apparently Laplace [1] have made equivalent statements. Sagan merely created the recognizable aphorism. Narssarssuaq (talk) 14:49, 14 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comment/refining position to get to consensus: I agree there's not much evidence (so far as I can see) of the term "Sagan standard" being used as a name for this concept. So I think it is reasonable to rename the page as Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Since that currently exists as a redirect, we would:

merge "Sagan standard" into Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence in place of the redirect currently at that page.

The papers I cited are some of the evidence that this concept does deserve its own page instead of being a minor piece of Sagan's page or Truzzi's page. (Those three papers happen to use the term in the title of the paper, as well as discussing it in the text. There are many more that discuss or refer to the term without including it in the title.)

Another point needs to be made about Truzzi's version ("An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof"). I think that Sagan's version is the one that everyone quotes and discusses not only because of the Matthew effect and because it is more pithy, but because Truzzi's version is objectively fatally flawed compared to Sagan's -- because of its use of the word "proof." First, science does not deal in "proof", it deals in evidence for hypotheses. Proof is relevant for mathematical theorems and logic, not for weighing the merits of scientific evidence for a claim (except in the case where the claim is entirely theoretical/mathematical/logical, such as "Newton's Laws imply conservation of momentum"). Second, the phrase "extraordinary proof" is incoherent in the sense that Truzzi is using it. A proof (of the logical, mathematical kind) is either valid or not. There are not shades of validity where one needs "an extraordinary proof" because a mere "ordinary proof" will not suffice. The first of my references above explicitly discusses this flaw of the Truzzi formulation.

And... the fact that there is this kind of published philosophical discussion of Sagan's term (and, to a lesser extent, earlier formulations such as Truzzi's and Laplace's) is further evidence that there ought to be a distinct page about this concept.

Personally I would also keep "Sagan standard" as a redirect to the new version of "Extraordinary claims..." But that could just be my tendency to err on the side of making things helpful for people seeking knowledge on Wikipedia. -- Gpc62 (talk) 17:11, 14 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Rename. As I've uncovered that Philip Abelson arguably coined the aphorism before Sagan, as mentioned in my recent edit of the original article, I change my position to suggesting renaming the article to "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". The first sentence can read: "In the philosophy of science, Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is a commonly used aphorism. It was popularized by Carl Sagan.^{[original research?]}" Narssarssuaq (talk) 21:15, 14 October 2017 (UTC) EDIT: Proverbs are not very different from aphorisms, and Wikipediahas a List of proverbial phrases. Apparently, some of them have own pages. Not sure what Wikipedia policy dictates here. I feel that it's a bit similar to the Correlation does not imply causation article, which also is a sceptic claim that does not have a term of its own, and which looks and feels a bit awkward as an own Wikipedia article.Narssarssuaq (talk) 21:22, 14 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I've corrected the information about Abelson on the page. You are correct he is quoted using the phrase in 1978, but that was in a US News & World Report article, not in a book by Abelson. (The title of the article matches that of the supposed book, which I can't locate.) I think Sagan also used the phrase in Broca's Brain in 1980. -- Gpc62 (talk) 00:25, 15 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

[1] Deming, David (2016). "Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?". Philosophia. 44: 1319–1331. doi:10.1007/s11406-016-9779-7. Over the past few decades the aphorism 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' (ECREE) has been popularized. It has been called 'a fundamental principle of scientific skepticism' (Voss et al. 2014: 893) and 'an axiom of the skeptical movement' (Goertzel and Goertzel 2015: 292). ECREE is frequently invoked to discredit research dealing with scientific anomalies or any claim that falls outside the mainstream.[...] ECREE has become so ubiquitous that there are instances in the scientific literature where it has been used as the title of a published article without any apparent relation to the content of that article (Light and Warburton 2005; DeVorkin 2010; Hauser and Johnston 2011).

[2] Sauerland, Uli (2014). "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence (And Ordinary Ones Require Ordinary Evidence): On Experimental Linguistics For Less Well Studied Languages". Revista da Abralin. 13 (2): 121–149. The late physicist Carl Sagan, whom I quote in the first part of my title, skillfully phrased the common sense view on evidence in mature sciences. In linguistics, however, evidence has become a controversial issue, especially so when it comes to investigations of less well studied languages. In this paper, I argue that Sagan's principle should be applied to linguistics.

[3] Voss, Robert S.; Helgen, Kristofer M.; Jansa, Sharon A. (2014). "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: a comment on Cozzuol et al. (2013)". Journal of Mammalogy. 95 (4): 893–898. doi:10.1644/14-MAMM-A-054. The late Carl Sagan's aphorism, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, expresses a fundamental principle of scientific skepticism.

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