TheOtherDave 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: TheOtherDave 22 June 2012 07:38:08PM *  3 points [-]

For convenience, call T a threshold such that if someone clears T I can reliably trust that their reports of a phenomenon I otherwise consider unlikely ought to be either believed or classed as a lie. That is, when you describe someone as "sane, reasonable, intelligent, well-intentioned, honest, without obvious incentives to lie, etc. " we understand that to mean that the person clears T.

I have low confidence in my ability to recognize people who clear T because of the numerous incidences in my life where, for example, two people who appear to me to clear T give me mutually exclusive accounts of the same experience, or more generally, where people who appear to me to clear T give me accounts that turn out to be false, but where I discern no reason to believe they're lying.

The conclusion I reach is that ordinary people say, and often genuinely believe, all kinds of shit, and the fact that someone reports an occurrance isn't especially strong evidence of it having occurred.

If that's not actually true of ordinary people, and I've simply been unable to distinguish ordinary people from the people of whom that's true, it would be awfully useful to learn to tell the difference.

Edit: I should add that I also have plenty of evidence that I don't clear T, and I might also be generalizing from one example.

Comment author: siodine 24 June 2012 08:55:47PM *  2 points [-]

These surveys were conducted by telephone and explored mental disorders and hallucinations (visual, auditory, olfactory, haptic and gustatory hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations). Overall, 38.7% of the sample reported hallucinatory experiences (19.6% less than once in a month; 6.4% monthly; 2.7% once a week; and 2.4% more than once a week). These hallucinations occurred, (1) At sleep onset (hypnagogic hallucinations 24.8%) and/or upon awakening (hypnopompic hallucinations 6.6%), without relationship to a specific pathology in more than half of the cases; frightening hallucinations were more often the expression of sleep or mental disorders such as narcolepsy, OSAS or anxiety disorders. (2) During the daytime and reported by 27% of the sample: visual (prevalence of 3.2%) and auditory (0.6%) hallucinations were strongly related to a psychotic pathology (respective OR of 6.6 and 5.1 with a conservative estimate of the lifetime prevalence of psychotic disorders in this sample of 0.5%); and to anxiety (respective OR of 5.0 and 9.1).

http://www.psy-journal.com/article/S0165-1781%2800%2900227-4/abstract

Reminds me of an experience I had as a kid where I woke up in the middle of the night, and was unable to move, with a ghost asking me for help. I ran to my parents' room, and I knew what I was about to say would make me look stupid or confused, but I also knew I was right -- I saw and heard that ghost. So, I made the story as convincing as possible; I left out any little details that might have drawn suspicion to my experience.

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