johnlawrenceaspden comments on Rationality Quotes April 2014 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: elharo 07 April 2014 05:25PM

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Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 05 April 2014 12:49:12AM 10 points [-]

I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.

Alan Turing (from "Computing Machinery and Intelligence")

Comment author: gwern 02 May 2014 11:09:30PM 4 points [-]

Particularly relevant a quote given Yvain's recent http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 03 May 2014 03:55:55PM 0 points [-]

That is an exceedingly interesting article. Thanks for the link.

Comment author: DanArmak 06 April 2014 04:47:42PM 2 points [-]

Can you provide some context? I don't understand: the claim that the evidence for telepathy is very strong is surely wrong, so is this sarcasm? A wordplay?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 07 April 2014 07:19:24AM 4 points [-]

Turing's 1950 paper asks, "Can machines think?"

After introducing the Turing Test as a possible way to answer the question (in, he expects, the positive), he presents nine possible objections, and explains why he thinks each either doesn't apply or can be worked around. These objections deal with such topics as souls, Gödel's theorem, consciousness, and so on. Psychic powers are the last of these possible objections: if an interrogator can read the mind of a human, they can identify a human; if they can psychokinetically control the output of a computer, they can manipulate it.

From the context, it does seem that Turing gives some credence to the existence of psychic powers. This doesn't seem all that surprising for a British government mathematician in 1950. This was the era after the Rhines' apparently positive telepathy research — and well before major organized debunking of parapsychology as a pseudoscience (which started in the '70s with Randi and CSICOP). Governments including the US, UK, and USSR were putting actual money into ESP research.

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 07 April 2014 03:02:43PM 3 points [-]

Yes, but also remember that Turing's English, shy, and from King's College, home of a certain archness and dry wit. I think he's taking the piss, but the very ambiguity of it was why it appealed as a rationality quote. He's facing the evidence squarely, declaring his biases, taking the objection seriously, and yet there's still a profound feeling that he's defying the data. Or maybe not. Maybe I just read it that way because I don't buy telepathy.

Comment author: wuncidunci 08 April 2014 01:50:24PM *  8 points [-]

Hodges claims that Turing at least had some interest in telepathy and prophesies:

These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be the first to go.

Readers might well have wondered whether he[Turing] really believed the evidence to be ‘overwhelming’, or whether this was a rather arch joke. In fact he was certainly impressed at the time by J .B. Rhine’s claims to have experimental proof of extra-sensory perception. It might have reflected his interest in dreams and prophecies and coincidences, but certainly was a case where for him, open-mindedness had to come before anything else; what was so had to come before what it was convenient to think. On the other hand, he could not make light, as less well-informed people could, of the inconsistency of these ideas with the principles of causality embodied in the existing ‘laws of physics’, and so well attested by experiment.

Alan Turing: The Enigma (Chapter 7)

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 19 April 2014 10:43:41AM 4 points [-]

I think Turing's willingness to take all comers seriously is something to emulate.

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