wallowinmaya comments on Feed the spinoff heuristic! - Less Wrong

49 Post author: CarlShulman 09 February 2012 07:41AM

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Comment author: wallowinmaya 13 February 2012 05:50:30PM 1 point [-]

Kennedy actually recommends keeping self-experimentation to oneself and precommiting to telling no one about the results for these reasons.

Does Kennedy recommend a specific type of self-experimentation? What's the best way to test one's psi-abilities in your opinion?

Comment author: Will_Newsome 13 February 2012 06:02:12PM 3 points [-]

I don't remember if he has any specific recommendations. I don't know what the best way to test ones abilities would be but the REG (random event generator) paradigm seems highly conducive to rigorous and thorough experimentation. Alas, I forget what the literature says about pseudo-random generators. I can't in good faith recommend psi experiments; on the one hand if psi is for real then we're probably doing it all the time without realizing it (which is I think the typical Eastern perspective), on the other hand it seems like a generally bad idea to go out of ones way to play around with a little-understood perhaps-agentic process. Playing with Thor seems significantly dumber than playing with fire.