[extropy-chat] Scientific standards of evidence

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Chris Phoenix wrote:
> 
> The final straw came a few nights ago, when I remembered something I'd
> been trying for a year to forget.  One evening last summer, my wife
> suddenly got a pain in her lower ribs, in a place she'd never had pain
> before, bad enough that we canceled our plans to go for a walk so I
> could rub her back (and this had never happened before either).  When I
> started the massage, she said, "How come the more you touch me there,
> the more I want to cry?"  A few minutes later, the pain went away.  And
> a few hours after that, we learned that her brother had been killed in a
> motorcycle accident within a few minutes of that time, and his lower
> ribs had been run over.

Chris, I would like to share a similar story to yours.

Not very long ago - just a couple of weeks, in fact - I got an instant 
message on my computer from a friend, asking me to call.  Just that, and 
nothing more.  For some reason, when I saw the message, I was filled with 
a terrible sinking conviction that something really awful had gone wrong.

I reminded myself that the probability that something had gone terribly 
wrong, conditioned on the text of the instant message, was just exactly 
the same as it would have been in the absence of any emotional reaction. 
Drawing on the strength of my knowledge of the genuine non-eerieness of 
the universe, I flipped open my cellphone and called.

Nothing was wrong.

That was *two weeks ago*.

Opportunities to generate eerie stories are much more frequent than one 
might think.  But the failures are not reported.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence