I think this is actually a really dangerous meme, because it can be used to rationalize almost any belief. For example, a religious person could easily say, "Some claims are just too extraordinary! There's just no extraordinary evidence that could convince me that God doesn't exist; it just isn't going to happen." Many of the other ideas in the Sequences are powerful tools because they can't be applied to fake explanations. So while this post might be useful to people with a fair amount of rationality training, I think it's far too risky to give to people without any prerequisites.
Judging by the existence of this later post, it appears Eliezer eventually changed his mind about this.
Today's post, Some Claims Are Just Too Extraordinary was originally published on 20 January 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was A Fable of Science and Politics, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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