Vladimir_Nesov comments on Parapsychology: the control group for science - Less Wrong

62 Post author: AllanCrossman 05 December 2009 10:50PM

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Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 07 December 2009 08:39:28PM *  2 points [-]

Think about the alternative explanation

I'm not saying that psi must be real, only that it seems to merit a closer look than most people in this thread have been implying. Yes, it does seem rather unlikely that psi would exist, which is why I'm still undecided myself. But the fact that we can't come up with any physical explanation for it doesn't mean that it couldn't be real. As Yvain pointed out, Newton's theories may at the time have seemed like magical thinking as well. There could be some physical mechanism we're just not aware of, but which the brain has nonetheless evolved to take advantage of.

Or then it might just be a sign of our statistical methods being flawed, made worse by psi researchers being insufficiently rigorous in their methods.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 08 December 2009 10:33:13AM *  0 points [-]

I'm not saying that psi must be real, only that it seems to merit a closer look than most people in this thread have been implying.

This does mean estimating it to be much more probably real than seems reasonable at this point.