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Yvain comments on The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist - Less Wrong
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Sure, because there are other people around in the hotel. You probably would feel the same if you spent the night in the haunted mansion if it's full of people. Now take that hotel, put it in a remote location and without anybody except yourself. Scary, right?
Going alone into a dark forest at night is scary, going with a group of people can be quite fun.
Maybe this is a case of honestly different intuitions. My intuition is that if we control for everything except for one building having a reputation for being haunted and the other not, I would still be more scared in the haunted building.
I think if we ensured the complete "natural" (as opposed to supernatural) safety of the house, the fear would be equal.
So if the house had been checked out to ensure it was physically sound, it had been checked for hidden serial killers etc and was surrounded by an army cordon to ensure nothing dangerous could get in then I don't think the haunted nature of the house would make a difference to a skeptic.
In this totally controlled case, I think the levels of fear would be the same. Your intuition may differ in which case I suppose it's hard to come to a sense of the truth.