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ChristianKl comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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It's http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/06/this-is-my-last-post-for-the-patheos-atheist-portal.html
I provided a link. Scott writes that Bem's meta-analysis in favor of paranormal phenomena makes the conclusion that paranormal phenomena exist with standards of evidence that are higher than those standards for a lot of phenomena we expect as real.
That doesn't mean that you have to convinced by Bem's evidence but claiming that it isn't a shred of evidence is wrong.
Interestingly you speak of deity's while I haven't said anything about deities. The question of whether deities exist is a different question then whether they are real spiritual experiences exist.
Again that's a problem with the muddled notion of spiritual under which you wrote the opening post. You link ideas together that can exist independent from each other.
It isn't. The amount of people investigating paranormal effects is quite small.
In a world where there are no cultural forces that make people not want to accept such evidence that might be true.
It took till 2008 till a Cochrane study concluded that chiropratics techniques have an effect on reducing back pain. Decades for recognizing a fairly ease to produce effect. Nobody got the Nobel Prize.
Paradgim change is really hard. It's nothing that you get by someone making a new discovery that can easily conceptualized in the old ways of seeing the world and then newspapers convincing everybody that it's true. Reading Kuhn might be useful to understand how scientific change works.
OK, I concede the point. There may be a shred of evidence (but not much more than a shred, at least AFAICT).
Only because "deity" is easier to type than "supernatural phenomenon."
Well, yeah, that was actually my whole thesis: spiritual experiences are real even though the deities (or whatever) that some people ascribe them to are (almost certainly) not.
In general scientific writing doesn't use five letter words that are easy to type but longer more precise words.
In Bem's meta analysis case we are talking about extrasensory perception. Information transfer for which our existing theories don't account. Not just experience.
Sure, but this is a comment thread, not a journal submission.
I don't see why that is relevant. What difference does it make if it's God or ESP or leprechauns? Strong evidence for any of those would be enough to be of considerable interest.
Also, can you please re-post the link to "Bem's meta analysis"? I can't figure out what you're referring to here.
BTW, I read the Leah Libresco piece you referred me to. Thanks for the reference. I don't agree with you that it represents "good reasoning." Her reasoning was, essentially, "Someone has asked me a question for which I do not have a satisfactory answer. Therefore everything the Catholic church teaches must be true." That doesn't seem like good reasoning to me.
We are at a place that values reasoning. You are making a mistake in reasoning by switching different claims with each other.
Again you make a reasoning mistake by confusing claims. I didn't said I linked to Bem's meta analysis. I said I linked to Scott Alexander's discussion of it. And I linked to it in the first sentence speaking about a shard of evidence. Is that too hard too find?
But in general looking up papers isn't hard if you want to look up papers of Bem there's Google Scholar. If you are actually interested in the evidence than reading a bit Bem could be worthwhile to understand his arguments.
To the extend that you think that's why Leah changed the position I don't think that summarizes what I know over the process from reading her writting. The information about her the ideological turing project might be distributed over more articles.
Fair enough. I'll endeavor to be more precise.
I'm trying to keep up with a lot of parallel threads here simultaneously, and backtracking a thread more than 2-3 steps is actually fairly time consuming because of the way the LW UI is set up. I was hoping you might do me a favor and save me the trouble of having to go back and figure out what you were referring to.
But since you're giving me a hard time for my lack of precision and adherence to the conventions of scientific discourse, here is how Scott Alexander references Bem:
"Bem, Tressoldi, Rabeyron, and Duggan (2014), full text available for download at the top bar of the link above..."
The link that I presume he's referring to (the phrase "the link above" is ambiguous because there are many links above) has anchor text, "What now, motherfuckers?" which is not a phrase you find much in scientific discourse. I followed that link, and it leads to a page that has the abstract of the paper that I presume you're referring to, and a notation that says "Not available for download." So that's as far as I'm willing to go down that particular rabbit hole. Sorry. Life is short.
Of course it is, and I read some of them. I don't have time to go back and read everything she's written. But going from being a non-theist to being a theist is a huge leap, and it calls for a better explanation than the one she gave if she wanted anyone to accept is as "good reasoning" rather than a straightforward leap of faith.
Put "?context=5" on the end of the comment's permalink url to backtrack 5 steps.
So, for example, backtracking this comment 5 steps would be http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9y/is_spirituality_irrational/d4c9?context=5
Aha! Thanks!
I think this is the paper in question, completely online. I think this is official and not in any way illegitimately piratical. There is apparently a more recent revised version, but since even the first published version (to which that's a link) postdates Scott's article you should probably start with that.
Thanks!
If you don't actually want to evaluate the paper, the basic heuristic is to trust what a highly regarded member of this community with Scott Alexander says about it. It does provide a fair amount of evidence. It therefore makes sense to update and not continue to say that there's no evidence at all.
We live at a time where that's the information that specifies a scientific paper. It's quite alright to say that you don't care about the evidence for paranormal phenomena and spend your time on other issues. If you however do care about the state of the evidence then there a time where it makes sense to read scientific papers instead about making arguments about what the evidence is based on what's reported in mainstream media.
I have no problem with someone saying that he doesn't know or cares to know about the state of the evidence, but if that's your position don't claim that there's no evidence.
The even more basic heuristic is to look at the history of psi claims and observe that the overwhelming majority of them have failed to stand up to scrutiny. It might even be true that not a single psi claim has ever stood up to scrutiny (though this depends a bit on what you mean by "scrutiny".) It is certainly true that no psi phenomenon has ever been reliably reproduced, and that the Randi prize went unclaimed despite there having been over 1000 applicants. One person's opinion, no matter how well respected, doesn't make much of a Bayesian dent in that mountain of negative evidence. People can be fooled, and people make mistakes. Even smart people.
I already conceded this point, so you are now attacking a straw man. If you're not going to cut me any slack over terminology the you should expect me to cut you any when you don't pay attention. (Though I submit that this conversation will be more fruitful if we both cut each other a little more slack.)
The linked paper is about a meta-study that described how a specifc psi phenomena was reliably reproduced.
There's an older meta-review of Ganzfeld experiments that came to a similar result. Ganzfeld experiments have been multiple time reproduced.
The standard of the Randi prize (betting chances of 1:1,000,000) is substantially more tough than the standards of evidence-based medicine (two trials that beat 1:20).
You don't go around and say that there's no significant evidence that FDA approved drugs work because they aren't proven to work for Randi's standards.
That's not what reliable reproduction means. What it means is that you would be willing to place a real-money bet on the outcome of a future experiment.
Actually, there's good reason to believe that the drug testing process has some serious flaws. But even under ideal circumstances, the odds of getting a false positive are 1 in 400. There have been about 1500 drugs approved by the FDA so almost certainly at least 3 or 4 of them actually don't work. Those are good enough odds for me, particularly when compared to the alternatives.
Yes, of course. If Randi had used the FDA standard, then with over 1000 applicants, you would expect two or three of them to win at 1:400 purely by chance. I'll take the bet at 1:400 confidence if you're willing to pay 1/40th of the prize as an entrance fee, and are willing to do the experiment more than once. In fact, I'll go you one better: You name any statistical test you think you can beat and I'll take a bet at 10:1 odds. Heck, make it 2:1. (If it's good enough for a Vegas casino, it's good enough for me.) Truthfully, that's a bet I would be absolutely thrilled to lose.
But my prediction is that you will not accept this offer.
I don't think that's fair. More like: "Someone has asked me a question for which the least unsatisfactory answer I can find is that there is a god who somewhat resembles that of Christianity; I have already decided that Roman Catholicism is the most plausible variety of theism; therefore I shall convert to Roman Catholicism". She doesn't say explicitly the bit about having already decided that RCism is the most plausible sort of theism, but it seems clear from context.
The step from theism-in-general to RCism-in-particular is, though, something Leah seems particularly unwilling to justify in any way that would make sense to a skeptic, and I agree it looks like a very weak point. Just not quite as weak as you represent it as being :-).
Sure, I'd agree with that. Sometimes when trying to be brief one fails to capture all of the subtle nuances of someone else's argument. But one way or another, I think she skipped a step or two.
I can see how you can get to something resembling "morality loves me". What I don't see is how you get from there to "Jesus, an actual flesh-and-blood human being (who was also the physical embodiment of the omniscient omnipresent omnipotent deity who created the universe) died for my sins, and this is an actual point of physical fact, not merely an allegorical myth."
The quality of the reasoning involved is debatable, and Leah's apparent reluctance to say more about just how the reasoning went doesn't seem like a good sign. (For the avoidance of doubt, I firmly agree that Leah is very intelligent and I'm sure she was trying to reason well. But even very intelligent people trying to reason well perpetrate bad reasoning sometimes.)
When I say good reasoning then I mean using the ideological turing test to decide which experts know most about the subject and then copying the judgement of those experts.
That's not the only thing that Leah did, but bootstraping priors in that way is a pretty sophisticated way to reason. It's an impressive example on focusing more on using a reasoning technique than focusing on achiving the generally accepted results that your social circle wants you to achieve.
As far as relucatance goes, I think most people aren't fully transparent about all reasoning that goes into major belief changes in written articles.
Although Leah hasn't been terribly forthcoming about how her conversion happened, I think she's said enough to be pretty sure that it wasn't that. What makes you think it was?
Read the blog post you linked to. She doesn't say anything about ideological Turing tests; she doesn't say anything about deferring to the judgement of experts-on-religion; she says she had a lot of trouble figuring out how to make sense of ethics and decided that "Morality just loves me or something" provided the best explanation.
My understanding is that a lot of Leah's social circle was RC even before she converted.
She did elsewhere. She run the first ideological Turing test for religion. Theists scored better. A catholic scored best overall.
I didn't reread the article. I just took the link from Wikipedia's page on ideological turing tests that points to her moving to Catholics.
I think you are mixing up the true proposition
with the false proposition
... also neither claims nor implies that Leah's conversion was a result of her finding that Christians did better than atheists in her ideological Turing test.