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This Looks Like a Job for Occam's Razor!
Feb. 12th, 2020 10:09 amhttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-calment-the-oldest-person-who-ever-lived-or-a-fraud?
Interesting article—among other things, I think it kind of illustrates how the idea that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” can be misused:
When I pushed Zak about the inconsistencies in his theory, he became annoyed. “You misunderstand the whole thing about the validation of extreme age,” he said. “Everybody agrees that the burden of proof in extreme age is on the claimant and the validators, not on the skeptics.”
Except that when one claim is that Jeanne Calment lived to be over 120 years old, never moved from the city of her birth and thus can be pretty easily tracked through the local archives; and the other claim is that she died in the 1930s and her daughter Yvonne began impersonating her? In a small city where lots of people knew both women by sight? It’s the second claim that’s the extraordinary one.
Interesting article—among other things, I think it kind of illustrates how the idea that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” can be misused:
When I pushed Zak about the inconsistencies in his theory, he became annoyed. “You misunderstand the whole thing about the validation of extreme age,” he said. “Everybody agrees that the burden of proof in extreme age is on the claimant and the validators, not on the skeptics.”
Except that when one claim is that Jeanne Calment lived to be over 120 years old, never moved from the city of her birth and thus can be pretty easily tracked through the local archives; and the other claim is that she died in the 1930s and her daughter Yvonne began impersonating her? In a small city where lots of people knew both women by sight? It’s the second claim that’s the extraordinary one.
