amit comments on A Rationalist's Account of Objectification? - Less Wrong

43 Post author: lukeprog 19 March 2011 11:10PM

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Comment author: Will_Newsome 22 June 2012 12:54:11PM *  -2 points [-]

Fortunately this isn't that common but there is an occasional tendency by some prominent commenters to dismiss personal experience as anecdotes.

(On that note but totally unrelated to gay shit like "objectification": It's amazing how difficult it is to talk to someone sane, reasonable, intelligent, well-intentioned, honest, without obvious incentives to lie, &c. who reports an experience that, if it actually happened, could only be explained by psi. There are anecdotes where pseudo-explanations like "memory bias" just don't cut it—in order for you to confidently deny psi you have to confidently accuse them of lying, and in order to confidently accuse them of lying you have to have a significantly better model of human psychology than I do. I think not realizing that such people are in fact numerous is what kept me from even considering psi for Aumannesque reasons—like most LessWrong types I'd implicitly assumed all reports of psi were either fuzzy in their details such that cognitive biases were a defensible explanation, or were provided by people who were less than credible. Once you eliminate those two categories the skeptic is left with a lot of uncomfortable evidence just waiting to be examined. Of course the evidence will never be very communicable to a wide audience, per the law of conservation of trolling.)

Comment author: amit 22 June 2012 06:05:48PM *  1 point [-]

Of course the evidence will never be very communicable to a wide audience

Why not? First obvious way that comes to mind: take someone that the audience trusts to be honest and to judge people correctly and have them go around talking to people who've had experiences and report back their findings.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 22 June 2012 06:12:08PM *  0 points [-]

That's a multi-step plan: at least one of those steps would go wrong. By hypothesis we're talking about transhuman intelligence(s) here (no other explanation for psi makes sense given the data we have). They wouldn't let you ruin their fun like that, per the law of conservation of trolling. (ETA: Or at least, it wouldn't work out like you'd expect it to.)