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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

> Just as the teamsters tried to ban cars to protect horse carriage drivers

Is that true?

So a random poster makes an assertion and rather than Google it and verify it yourself you throw out a request for another random poster to concur? And that concurrence you will take at face value and then believe the original assertion?

I did google it and couldn’t find anything backing up the claim.

I think it's reasonable to request the person making the assertion to back it up. It's not on the audience to either only debunk or accept the assertion. It can just be rejected.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Why is an anodyne factual claim an “extraordinary claim”? What makes that particular claim extraordinary? They didn’t claim to have discovered perpetual motion or something you can’t prove or disprove yourself, just shared a historical fact you can easily just check up on if you choose not to believe them.

>Why is an anodyne factual claim an “extraordinary claim”? What makes that particular claim extraordinary?

FWIW I tried to get AI to substantiate it and came up empty. Maybe it's not as "extraordinary" as "Obama was a reptilian alien" or whatever, but for everything else what counts as "extraordinary" depends on your prejudices, I suppose. Regardless of whether it's "extraordinary" or not, it's definitely not common knowledge and needs to be substantiated rather than asserted without evidence.

No. Quite the opposite if these first search results I'm reading are any indicator.

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