gwern comments on How confident are you in the Atomic Theory of Matter? - Less Wrong

0 Post author: DataPacRat 19 January 2013 08:39PM

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Comment author: gwern 22 January 2013 02:08:41AM *  3 points [-]

I wouldn't pick schizophrenia as a base-rate.

As far as I know, schizophrenics are usually aware of their unusual mental/epistemological status, so your thinking yourself normal (as I assume you do) screens off schizophrenia; another issue with schizophrenia is that I've read that schizophrenic hallucination are almost always confined to one modality - you hear someone behind you but if you look you see nothing, I imagine is how it works - so here too you would become aware of glitches or inconsistencies in your senses.

What you want is the situation where you are unaware of any issues and have an issue; which is where confabulating comes in handy, because some of them are just like that and will confabulate that they're not confabulating.