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FiftyTwo comments on Rationality Quotes April 2012 - Less Wrong
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Why Psychologists Must Change the Way They Analyze Their Data: The Case of Psi
Eric–Jan Wagenmakers, Ruud Wetzels, Denny Borsboom, & Han van der Maas
I don't see why the first hypothesis should necessarily be rejected out of hand. If the supposed mechanism is unconscious then having it react to erotic pictures and not particular casino objects seems perfectly plausible. Obviously the real explanation might be that the data wasn't strong enough to prove the claim, but we shouldn't allow the low status of "psi theories" to distort our judgement.
One good thing about Bayesian reasoning is that assigning a prior belief very close to zero isn't rejecting the hypothesis out of hand. The posterior belief will be updated by evidence (if any can be found). And even if you start with a high prior probability and update it with Bem's evidence for precognition, you would soon have a posterior probability much closer to zero than your prior :)
BTW there is no supposed mechanism for precognition. Just calling it "unconscious" doesn't render it any more plausible that we have a sense that would be super useful if only it even worked well enough to be measured, and yet unlike all our other senses, it hasn't been acted on by natural selection to improve. Sounds like special pleading to me.
FiftyTwo wasn't arguing that the sense was plausible. He was conditioning on the assumption that the sense exists.
OK, point taken. However, there being no proposed mechanism for precognition, it can hardly be called "plausible" that it operates inconsistently and that the experiment just happened to pick one of the things it can do out of all possibilities.
After all, if nobody knows how it's supposed to work, how does the experimenter justify claiming his data as evidence for precognition rather than quantum pornotanglement? You could say I just made that up on the spot. It doesn't matter: precognition isn't necessarily a thing either.
How exactly does "quantum pornotanglement" and why doesn't it count as a type/mechanism for precognition.
Now I'm thinking of pin-up Feynman diagrams.
(Does Rule 34 apply?)
Analogously, if someone told me they had a magic rock that could pick up certain pieces metal and not others, and couldn't explain why. it might be they are wrong it can pick up any metals, or there may be an underling effect causing these observations that we don't understand. In the analogy magnetism can be observed long before its is understood, and why some metals are and aren't magnetic isn't a trivial problem.
Similarly it may be that some psychic phenomena exists which works for some things, and not for others, for reasons we're not aware of. The fact we can't fully explain why it works in some cases but not others doesn't mean we should outlaw evidence of the cases where it does.
I would at least expect them to be able to demonstrate their magic rock and let me try it out on various materials.
If they had a rock that they claimed could pick up copper but not brass, based on only one experiment, but the rock now doesn't work if any scientists are watching, I'd be disinclined to privilege their hypothesis of the rock's magic properties.
Nobody is outlawing the evidence. I'm saying the evidence is unconvincing, and far short of what is needed to support an extraordinary claim such as precognition. It is for example much less rigorous than the evidence there was for another causality-violating hypothesis: FTL neutrinos. That turned out to be due to an equipment defect. Many were disappointed but nobody was surprised. Same reference class if you ask me.