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TheOtherDave comments on A Rationalist's Account of Objectification? - Less Wrong Discussion
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For my own part, I have low confidence in my ability to identify individuals as sane, reasonable, intelligent, well-intentioned, honest, without obvious incentives to lie, etc. I'd be interested in how you go about reliably distinguishing such people from humans in general; I would find that a useful skill to learn.
Why do you have low confidence in your abilities? It seems to me that there are many cases in which it should be obvious to you whether or not a person has one of those qualities. E.g., I can be reasonably certain that my step-mother is sane, reasonable, intelligent, well-intentioned, and without obvious incentives to lie—so if she reported psi phenomena, I would have to accuse her of lying for some completely non-transparent reason. (My step-mother doesn't seem like the trolling type.)
I don't recall any false positives in my experience, though I seem to vaguely recall false negatives. FWIW all the girls I've ever been close friends with have been Slytherin, so I might have abnormally much experience with natural liars (though well-intentioned ones). Er also I scored perfect or near-perfect on some emotion facial expression reading quiz thingy at SingInst, and I've been weirdly sensitive to peoples' microexpressions since childhood. I don't know if I learned any of the relevant skills, nor am I certain I possess them, but for the cases I have in mind I suspect I do, and that most other intelligent non-autistic-spectrum humans do also, especially the schizotypal ones.
For convenience, call T a threshold such that if someone clears T I can reliably trust that their reports of a phenomenon I otherwise consider unlikely ought to be either believed or classed as a lie. That is, when you describe someone as "sane, reasonable, intelligent, well-intentioned, honest, without obvious incentives to lie, etc. " we understand that to mean that the person clears T.
I have low confidence in my ability to recognize people who clear T because of the numerous incidences in my life where, for example, two people who appear to me to clear T give me mutually exclusive accounts of the same experience, or more generally, where people who appear to me to clear T give me accounts that turn out to be false, but where I discern no reason to believe they're lying.
The conclusion I reach is that ordinary people say, and often genuinely believe, all kinds of shit, and the fact that someone reports an occurrance isn't especially strong evidence of it having occurred.
If that's not actually true of ordinary people, and I've simply been unable to distinguish ordinary people from the people of whom that's true, it would be awfully useful to learn to tell the difference.
Edit: I should add that I also have plenty of evidence that I don't clear T, and I might also be generalizing from one example.
http://www.psy-journal.com/article/S0165-1781%2800%2900227-4/abstract
Reminds me of an experience I had as a kid where I woke up in the middle of the night, and was unable to move, with a ghost asking me for help. I ran to my parents' room, and I knew what I was about to say would make me look stupid or confused, but I also knew I was right -- I saw and heard that ghost. So, I made the story as convincing as possible; I left out any little details that might have drawn suspicion to my experience.