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moridinamael comments on Personal Evidence - Superstitions as Rational Beliefs - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: OrphanWilde 22 March 2013 05:24PM

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Comment author: moridinamael 22 March 2013 11:29:53PM 23 points [-]

It sounds like an old house, based on the structural abnormalities. Is it possible that there is a gas leak? One prime candidate for the "haunted house" phenomenon is hallucinations brought on by exposure to carbon monoxide.

I think it worth pointing out that it's very difficult to remove selective perception and confirmation bias here. For example, if I experienced the "dropped key" scenario you described, I would simply assume that the key had slid or been kicked out of the room, and then someone else had later found it and set it down somewhere off the ground. However, if I believed that I lived in a Haunted House, the first hypothesis that would spring to mind would be that the key's teleportation was part of the haunting. So when you say such incidents have not occurred since you lived in that house, I believe that you think that, but it's likely that you just don't view incidents outside the house as existing in the same magisterium, in some sense.

Additionally, I happened to be pondering today why people seem to take Aumann's Agreement Theorem so literally around here. It is a mathematical idealization. We're not talking about the mathematics of particle physics, we're talking about the cognition and interactions of humans, who only barely do reasoning in the first place and barely succeed in communicating even the simplest concepts without signal loss.

Comment author: CronoDAS 24 March 2013 03:07:10AM 2 points [-]

It sounds like an old house, based on the structural abnormalities. Is it possible that there is a gas leak? One prime candidate for the "haunted house" phenomenon is hallucinations brought on by exposure to carbon monoxide.

I'd also be wondering about toxic mold.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 24 March 2013 02:30:06AM 0 points [-]

It's plausible that the house should be checked for carbon monoxide, regardless of issues about ghosts.

A fast google turns up CO as a possible cause of hauntedness, but I didn't see anything specific about what sort of hallucinations CO is known to cause.