[ExI] psi yet again

[Arthur Breitman]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 9:07 PM, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com>wrote:

> On 6/28/2010 3:47 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>
> Rafal, you invoke Bayes--but how does Bayes accommodate the experience of
> those Victorian scientists who went pretty much in one enormous, grudging
> jump from unquestioned Divine Creation of each individual and unchanging
> species to Darwinian evolution? Huxley famously commented something like, "I
> couldn't believe I'd been stupid enough not to see this myself." I suppose
> in Kuhnian terms it was a paradigm transition, but how does Bayes account
> for a jump from priors set at 99.999999% for God, then in a flash switch to,
> say, 86% for evolution?
>
>
Belief in God wasn't a Bayesian belief in the first place, given the
evidence. The theistic Victorian scientists you mention were not theists
because they were *ignorant* but because they were, if you will, *crazy*.
Some snapped out of it and updated their beliefs, not only with the new
findings of Darwin but also with the astronomical amount of evidence that
there is no god, evidence they had crazily discarded before. In the parallel
you draw, where is the astronomical, overwhelming, ironclad amount of
evidence for "psi" ?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20100629/bf389674/attachment.html>