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Yvain comments on The Skeptic's Trilemma - Less Wrong
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I admit that I remembered hearing about Charles Bonnet syndrome before, and linked to the Wikipedia page without reading it. 10 to 40 PERCENT?!
Looking at the literature, I find some evidence that the real prevalence rate is closer to 1%, and that the higher numbers are only true of people with impaired vision. That's still impressive, though.
If it is the case that incidence is notably higher in people with impaired vision, and it is the case that in pre-modern societies impaired vision was far more common, then that would seem to provide a plausible explanation for why so many more otherwise rational people saw supernatural events in pre-modern societies than societies with access to better medicine.
Contrast the alternative hypothesis: people in pre-modern societies were all gullible and stupid.