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CuSithBell comments on I Stand by the Sequences - Less Wrong
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Agreed. The actually-written-up-somewhere arguments that I know of can at most move supernaturalism from "only crazy or overly impressionable people would treat it as a live hypothesis" to "otherwise reasonable people who don't obviously appear to have a bottom line could defensibly treat it as a Jamesian live hypothesis". There are arguments that could easily be made that would fix specific failure modes, e.g. some LW folk (including I think Eliezer and lukeprog) mistakenly believe that algorithmic probability theory implies a low prior for supernaturalism, and Randi-style skeptics seem to like fully general explanations/counterarguments too much. But once those basic hurdles are overcome there still seems to be a wide spread of defensible probabilities for supernaturalism based off of solely communicable evidence.
Essentially, yes.
That's a shame. Any chance you might have suggestions on how to go about obtaining such evidence for oneself? Possibly via PM if you'd be more comfortable with that.
I have advice. First off, if psi's real then I think it's clearly an intelligent agent-like or agent-caused process. In general you'd be stupid to mess around with agents with unknown preferences. That's why witchcraft was considered serious business: messing with demons is very much like building mini uFAIs. Just say no. So I don't recommend messing around with psi, especially if you haven't seriously considered what the implications of the existence of agent-like psi would be. This is why I like the Catholics: they take things seriously, it's not fun and games. "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." If you do experiment, pre-commit not to tell anyone about at least some predetermined subset of the results. Various parapsychology experiments indicate that psi effects can be retrocausal, so experimental results can be determined by whether or not you would in the future talk about them. If psi's capricious then pre-commiting not to blab increases likelihood of significant effects.
I just thought of something. What you're saying is that psi effects are anti-inductive.
The capricious-psi literature actually includes several proposed mechanisms which could lead to "anti-inductive" psi. Some of these mechanisms are amenable to mitigation strategies (such as not trying to use psi effects for material advantage, and keeping one's experiments confidential); others are not.
Indeed.
Ok, I feel like we should now attempt to work out a theory of psi caused by some kind of market-like game theory among entities.
Thanks for the advice! Though I suppose I won't tell you if it turns out to have been helpful?