[extropy-chat] Scientific standards of evidence

[Samantha Atkins]

On Wednesday 05 November 2003 03:17, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> Chris Phoenix wrote:
>
> I don't ask anyone not to catalog these kinds of incidents, or not to
> investigate them, or not to try and repeat them under experimental
> controls.  Nonetheless, I am willing to assert flatly that nothing
> paranormal happened.
>
> What is the ordinary-world explanation?  Well, for all I know, you are
> posting this story as a test to see if anyone tries to explain it away,
> give it a pseudo-rational explanation when in fact you just made it up and
> there *is* no explanation for why that sort of thing would happen under
> the laws of physics, because it didn't.  I do not need to try and give
> your story an ordinary-world explanation; even if I can't think of any
> ordinary-world explanation at all, I am nonetheless confident enough in my
> understanding of the universe to not feel discomfited. 

That is a huge cop-out.  It doesn't fit your worldview so the first choice is 
to believe it never happened, heh?    Convenient but not very relevant.


> This world is my
> home, and I know it now, and I know the world doesn't work that way.

You *know* no such thing.  You believe it doesn't work that way.

> There are a few things left that I don't know yet, but the remaining
> uncertainty does not have enough slack in it to permit ESP.  This world
> could easily be a computer simulation, but if so it is a simulation of a
> world without ESP.

I see no way you could have complete enough knowledge or sufficiently vetted 
theory of knowledge to make such a statement meaningfully.

>
> Supposing that I try to think of an "ordinary" explanation for your story,
> what springs to mind?  Several things.  I don't know if the name
> "Elizabeth Loftus" rings any bells; but human memory is far, far more
> pliable than people like to think.  It is possible for a researcher, by
> asking leading questions, to create a memory completely out of fabric -
> for example, of being lost in the mall as a child - and later the person
> will not remember that it is a false memory.  Did your wife really have a
> pain in her lower ribs, or her back?  Did you learn about her brother's
> death a few hours later, or a day?  "How come the more you touch me there,
> the more I want to cry?" sounds to me like not at all the sort of thing
> that is said spontaneously, but very easily the sort of thing that might
> be "recalled" afterward.

The story has to be assumed accurate for the questions raised to be even 
seriously addressed.  What you have done looks like more disowning of 
inconvenient data.  We all know most of the things you are bringing up here 
and yet this nagging residue that doesn't fit remains.

> What permanently zaps the paranormal explanation is not studying physics,
> or studying the history of science, or reading the accounts of debunked
> psychics - it's studying the cognitive science of human error.  The
> literature on this has to be seen to be believed.  The human mind is so
> wildly fragile, so wildly wrong on so many simple problems, that our
> physics is simply more reliable than any anecdote that can be cited
> against it.  *Any* anecdote.  Yes, even anecdotes that really, really seem
> like they can't be explained away.  The human mind is genuinely that weak;
> physics is genuinely that strong.
>

What if there is some non-paranormal explanation for such ESPish events that 
doesn't start by denying they actually happened?   

> It doesn't matter whether the explanation I gave is correct.  There's no
> ESP in the universe, no paranormal phenomena, no gods, no demons.  It's
> just us within the laws of physics.  That's the upshot, whatever the
> explanation is - whether you made up the anecdote as a test, or whether
> human memory is horrifyingly (and replicably) pliable, or whether some
> other ordinary event happened.

You are frothing at the mouth in support of your pre-existing belief 
structures.   The book is far from closed on what is and is not possible in 
reality.  Our physics today is not known to be utterly comprehensive of all 
phenomenon possible in reality.   It is simply what we have found to date 
with reasonable rigor.  

>
> If you haven't reached that point of confidence, then by no means should
> you attempt to convince yourself of it artificially.  It took me a long
> time to reach the point where I was ready to say that, and it is not at
> all what I was thinking when I started out.  But you know... it really is
> normal.  It's all normal.  And if you look at it long enough, there's
> enough evidence to see that it's normal.  I hope that helps.


No, it does not help.  It looks like one more closed mind in the world to me.

- samantha