A checklist for claim evaluation: independent confirmation, genuine debate, quantification, falsifiability, and Occam's razor.
From Sagan's 1995 The Demon-Haunted World. Its practical value is as a sequence: most bad claims fail at independent confirmation before the harder tests are needed.
In practice
- An investment claim is checked for independent confirmation first, which disposes of it before anyone has to evaluate the returns model.
- A health claim survives quantification and falsifiability and fails at debate, because no critic has ever been allowed to test it.
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- Rules for weighing claims