Hmm, how’d you design (in the same sense) that? Seems to me you’d run into the problem of having to expect the unexpected…
I think I’m kinda sympathetic to this view – there can be organized behavior emerging from essentially random, directionless dynamics, see things like swarm intelligence etc. Also, somewhat more mundanely, there’s the ‘wisdom of crowds’-effect: as long as we’re equally likely to be wrong in all directions alike, the mean will tend to be dead on.
For another nother thing, perhaps this is just an indication that ultimately, one has to kick away the ladder – that in the end, there’s no consistent method to arrive at some element of truth, and that all the method there is can be at best applied to judging the validity of beliefs; i.e. that justification is not sought in how one comes to a belief, but rather, in how well that belief holds up. Most of the contentious issues of method, in particular the scientific one, lies, I think, in the generation of hypotheses; maybe one can escape this by instead focusing on validation.
How do you know why it gets recycled. I had heard the phrase many times before hearing it attributed to Sagan.
I would assume it is somewhat idiomatic, like head over heels. You can point out that the words don’t make sense as they’re arranged, but shorthand can be very useful. If we can readily exchange the more verbose version for the idiomatic version then the pithy version is useful in conveying the meaning quickly and memorably.
I think I see what you’re saying, and while I don’t have a litmus test I do think there is a common sense distinction to be made.
Imagine two pieces of evidence. The first: A pile of rat feces found in a basement. The second: A verbal transmission from extraterrestrial life forms.
The first would seem to be ordinary and the second extraordinary.
You seem to be doing a lot of mind reading.
I think people keep using the phrase because it adequately describes the fact that there is a difference between claiming one’s tea has gone cold and claiming that Jimmy Hoffa was an alien and has been living in one’s attic since 1975.
It’s perfectly ordinary evidence, just for an extraordinary hypothesis. Of what other kind would you expect evidence for the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life to be? It would all seem quite Earth-shattering, but not because of any special quality of the evidence.