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Will_Newsome

[Post redacted 'cuz I unfairly and carelessly misrepresented someone's views (Eliezer's). The messages of this post was: disbelief that aliens visit Earth in spaceships is a bad reason not to look into ufology. My apologies for this ugly post.]

I would want to see an example of a good argument for quantum computation-psi connections.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that that part is plausible as I haven't looked into it at all. But the "too hot and noisy" objection seems less certain now that there's research into quantum "computation" allowing for photosynthesis as well as something else quantum involved in birds' navigation. Links here. As you suggest, perhaps it should be presumed irrelevant until some plausible mechanism connecting it to psi is proposed.

Actually, all sorts of nifty research on falling in love has been performed with useful predictions about oxytocin levels, fidelity, various sorts of future self-report, divorce, frequency of sex, etc, etc.

Yeah, um, basic sanity fail on my part. Not a good sign.

Re common false beliefs, you obviously know significantly more about the subject than I do. Are there any books you'd recommend?

Claims that psi is small seem to be a "God of the Gaps" side-effect of modern recording technologies and other developments, rewriting the prior ex post.

Point conceded. Until I look at the literature more closely I'll agree with you that the lack of large effects seems is a decent chunk of evidence against psi.

It would seem that the only psi-friendly explanation of the weak results from parapsychology then would be something like actively evasive psi. You say similar hypotheses have shown up to explain the lack of certain expected phenomena in macroeconomics? Or, might you explain the connection?

By the way thank you for talking to me about this stuff, very few people have the prerequisite knowledge/skills/patience to do so fruitfully.

I'm starting to think that maybe all evidence I have for psi is incommunicable. Bleh!

But the "too hot and noisy" objection seems less certain now that there's research into quantum "computation" allowing for photosynthesis as well as something else quantum involved in birds' navigation.

It's a bit of a tangent, but I thought the recent stuff about some special "quantum" coherence enabling photosynthesis was mostly hype, as it could happen just the same classically.

5CarlShulman14y

I was referring to data-mining for correlations to produce predictive rules using historical datasets of country growth rates, rules which then fail badly when applied to new datasets. Beliefs in stronger causal conclusions persist, and folk with such beliefs talk about how the processes of growth are changing over time, or the great difficulty of pulling conclusions from the noisy data. The closest think to "actively evasive psi" would probably be academic claims to have found predictive rules for stock and other liquid markets: "my data-mined rule was for real, but now that I've published the markets are taking it into account, which is why it no longer works." [...] The evidential part of intuitions or personal psi experiences are communicable (save for the possibility of conscious lies, but it's pretty clear that those are not needed), a bigger dataset of intuitions is better than a single case, etc. Robin's common priors paper is relevant here.

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