Prior probability and reproducibility
[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org] Physicist Carl Sagan famously said “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I think its useful to extend this to the distinctly less elegant “surprising findings are less likely to be true, and thus require a higher standard of evidence.” I started thinking more about what influences the reliability of a scientific result when analyses of my post-doc data weren’t lining up with published findings from other studies of the same species.