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gjm 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.
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.