I understand now.
The causally primary reason for my belief is that while I was growing up in a TM-practicing community, I was told repeatedly that there were many scientific studies published in respectable journals demonstrating this effect, and the "square root of one percent" was a specific point of doctrine.
I've had some trouble finding the articles in question on academically respectable, non-paywalled sites (though I didn't try for more than five or ten minutes), but a non-neutrally-hosted bibliography-ish thing is here.
(Is there a general lack of non-paywalled academically respectable online archives of scientific papers?)
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(Edited to add: if anyone decides to click any of the videos on that page, rather than just following text links, I'd assign Fred Travis the highest probability of saying anything worth hearing.)
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(Edited again: I was going to say this when I first wrote this comment, but forgot: The obvious control would be against other meditation techniques. I don't think there are studies with this specific control on the particular effect in my top-level comment, but there are such studies on e.g. medical benefits.)
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(Edited yet again: I've now actually watched the videos in question.
The unlabeled video at the top (John Hagelin) is a lay-level overview of studies that you can read for yourself through text links. (That is, you can read the studies, not the overview.)
Gary Kaplan is philosophizing with little to no substance in the sense of expectation-constraint, and conditional on the underlying phenomena being real his explanation is probably about as wrong as, say, quantum decoherence.
Nancy Lonsdorf is arguing rhetorically for ideas whose truth is almost entirely dependent on the validity of the studies in question and that follow from such validity in a trivial and straightforward fashion. Some people might need what she's saying pointed out to them, but probably not the readers of Less Wrong.
Fred Travis goes into more crunchy detail, about fewer studies, than any of the others, but still not as much detail as just reading the papers.)
Wow that was a super in depth response! Thanks, I'll check it out if I have time.
Please read the post before voting on the comments, as this is a game where voting works differently.
Warning: the comments section of this post will look odd. The most reasonable comments will have lots of negative karma. Do not be alarmed, it's all part of the plan. In order to participate in this game you should disable any viewing threshold for negatively voted comments.
Here's an irrationalist game meant to quickly collect a pool of controversial ideas for people to debate and assess. It kinda relies on people being honest and not being nitpickers, but it might be fun.
Write a comment reply to this post describing a belief you think has a reasonable chance of being true relative to the the beliefs of other Less Wrong folk. Jot down a proposition and a rough probability estimate or qualitative description, like 'fairly confident'.
Example (not my true belief): "The U.S. government was directly responsible for financing the September 11th terrorist attacks. Very confident. (~95%)."
If you post a belief, you have to vote on the beliefs of all other comments. Voting works like this: if you basically agree with the comment, vote the comment down. If you basically disagree with the comment, vote the comment up. What 'basically' means here is intuitive; instead of using a precise mathy scoring system, just make a guess. In my view, if their stated probability is 99.9% and your degree of belief is 90%, that merits an upvote: it's a pretty big difference of opinion. If they're at 99.9% and you're at 99.5%, it could go either way. If you're genuinely unsure whether or not you basically agree with them, you can pass on voting (but try not to). Vote up if you think they are either overconfident or underconfident in their belief: any disagreement is valid disagreement.
That's the spirit of the game, but some more qualifications and rules follow.
If the proposition in a comment isn't incredibly precise, use your best interpretation. If you really have to pick nits for whatever reason, say so in a comment reply.
The more upvotes you get, the more irrational Less Wrong perceives your belief to be. Which means that if you have a large amount of Less Wrong karma and can still get lots of upvotes on your crazy beliefs then you will get lots of smart people to take your weird ideas a little more seriously.
Some poor soul is going to come along and post "I believe in God". Don't pick nits and say "Well in a a Tegmark multiverse there is definitely a universe exactly like ours where some sort of god rules over us..." and downvote it. That's cheating. You better upvote the guy. For just this post, get over your desire to upvote rationality. For this game, we reward perceived irrationality.
Try to be precise in your propositions. Saying "I believe in God. 99% sure." isn't informative because we don't quite know which God you're talking about. A deist god? The Christian God? Jewish?
Y'all know this already, but just a reminder: preferences ain't beliefs. Downvote preferences disguised as beliefs. Beliefs that include the word "should" are are almost always imprecise: avoid them.
Additional rules: