[gus_massa]

I agree that all the reading-in-the-dark ability is fake (or at least extremely exaggerated). Someone posted a skeptical link with more info in another thread about the same boy. http://www.livescience.com/18209-china-cat-eyed-boy-night-vi...

It's very difficult to debunk completely this kind of "discoveries" but a very big red flag is the lack of independent confirmation. In particular they site as a source an article from "worldrecordacademy". (I prefer to not even paste the link here). After reading that I am even more convinced that this is not legit. (If it were confirmed at least by the Guinness World Records, I would start to look for more information, but still be very skeptical.)

[lutusp]

> It's very difficult to debunk completely this kind of "discoveries"

Sometimes true, but this one is easy. There are too many impossible claims packed into a single account. By itself, the claim that the boy can function without any source of light in a completely dark environment falsifies the account.

Also, in science, the default assumption is that it's false (null hypothesis) and the entire burden of evidence rests with the claimants to offer evidence.

> but a very big red flag is the lack of independent confirmation.

Not very important by itself. Any number of astrologers will independently confirm the accounts of other astrologers, and Bigfoot investigators back each other up all the time. And psychologists are famous for circling the wagons when confronted by skeptics.

> After reading that I am even more convinced that this is not legit.

Again, it's not up to the scientific skeptics to doubt and disprove. It's up to the claimants to offer evidence. The burden of evidence rests entirely with those making extraordinary claims.

[gus_massa]

I agree that this is fake and that they should give indisputable evidence to convince me that this is true.

The problem is how to explain this to the non scientific people. Most people can't understand the difference between the scientific evidence behind quantum entanglement and Bigfoot. Everything that is in a newspaper is true.

The problem is that pseudoscientific news gets rehashed. It's a nice (false) story and I'm afraid it will get resubmitted from different sources until one of them gets 50+ upvotes, and we both will be unhappy. I only hope this story is not nice enough, or not technology related enough.

From another point of view: How do a layman reading the newspaper evaluate if a story is "true"? It's a good sign that the story the source is someone from a well known university. It's a bad sign that the only source is a video in Youtube. The problem is that this is very close to an appeal to authority argument, and the second problem is that for an advertisement it's enough to put an actor with a lab coat to backup the claims.

And even if you have a scientific background, you can't retest every result, so you must evaluate and weight the sources. Is this published in a well known journal? Is this against some well known result? Have anyone reproduced the experiment? Is there a strike of similar claims that were proved wrong/fake/scams? Have you ever measured the mass of one electron? Do the neutrinos have mass?

[lutusp]

> The problem is how to explain this to the non scientific people. Most people can't understand the difference between the scientific evidence behind quantum entanglement and Bigfoot. Everything that is in a newspaper is true.

Yes, sad but true. That's a problem with education -- the kind of education that tells people what to think but doesn't teach how to think. And in a society like this one, the skepticism necessary for science comes into conflict with its diametric opposite, religious faith.

> It's a good sign that the story the source is someone from a well known university.

No, that's false -- if that were true it would replace understanding with an empty respect for authority, but authority has no standing in science. "Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion." — Richard Feynman

In science, evidence means everything, reputation means nothing. The greatest amount of scientific eminence is trumped by the smallest amount of scientific evidence.

It's important to understand the role of the null hypothesis in scientific thinking. The null hypothesis is a precept that assumes a claim is false until evidence forces us to a different conclusion. This contradicts the more common unscientific outlook, in which things are true unless proven false.

> And even if you have a scientific background, you can't retest every result, so you must evaluate and weight the sources.

But without a direct understanding of a claim and its background, educated people don't just abandon skepticism, they remain skeptical of everything they can't personally investigate. The motto of the Royal Society, the world's oldest scientific society, is "Nullius in Verba" -- don't take anyone's word for it.