p.s. I see that this comment is getting a lot of up-votes and down-votes. The reason I made it is that I have discovered that my non-scientist friends, especially my smart engineer friends, really need this important principle repeated.
Maybe the reason is that you keep repeating this meme which – although technically true – oversimplifies things and doesn't help with resolving unexplained experimental results. Sure, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, but now what? Should further experiments be funded in order to provide that proof, or should the unexplained results be buried, since there is no conclusive proof?
Proclaiming "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is a way to immediately block this discussion.
The purpose of the phrase is to be a reminder that the results are mostly likely experimental error. It doesn't block anything, it just reminds everyone what the most likely explanation is.
If you want to see a good example of this in action, look at the folks who thought they showed neutrinos went faster than light. They constantly kept in mind that the most likely explanation for the data was experimental error, and eventually showed that their experiment had an error. Nothing was "buried", nothing was "blocked", and good science was eventually done.
