michael_vassar comments on Psychic Powers - Less Wrong

13 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 September 2008 07:28PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (93)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: michael_vassar 12 September 2008 10:49:01PM 10 points [-]

I took psi seriously back when I thought that the scientific method defined rationality. Once I learned about Bayes I realized that the sort of reports of psi that science turns up would be expected if psi isn't real while much more blatant things would be expected if real psi inspired the investigation. I also noticed that priors matter and psi really should be ignored without very large effects based on low priors. Somewhat earlier pre-Bayes psi had blended somewhat into the category "Everything you know is wrong" and loose specific identity as 'psi'. Post-Bayes the "Everything you know is wrong" itself split into a few categories and psi went in the "reason is a mistake" extreme category.