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maia comments on Personal Evidence - Superstitions as Rational Beliefs - Less Wrong Discussion
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Interestingly, my father, a moderately respected scientist, has cited similar reasoning to me when discussing why he believes in supernatural phenomena. He believes he has encountered overwhelmingly convincing evidence, but says he understands that I shouldn't necessarily believe him. This is... a pleasant way to deal with disagreement, if not faultless reasoning.
After reading your thread with gwern, I think you and he are probably wrong about this reasoning in general, and you are probably wrong in your case specifically.
I think it should be possible to encounter supernatural phenomena in such a way that it is extremely convincing to you and not to anyone else. If you were a highly rational agent who encountered real supernatural phenomena, and told (even perfectly rational) people about it, their first reaction would be not to believe you. And this likely makes sense on their part unless you're able to produce extremely good evidence that (you are highly rational AND you are very unlikely to be lying), OR you have reproducible evidence of a particular phenomenon that you can show them.
But you should be able to produce such evidence... if it's not convincing to them, why is it convincing to you?
Because they don't have enough evidence of your rationality.
Then why can't you produce that instead? If you don't have any outside-view evidence of your rationality, why do you believe you are rational?
Most people in the world believe in the supernatural. What's your outside view argument that it is they and not you who are irrational?
If you see something vanish before your eyes, that's evidence in favor of weird stuff happening, but it's a lot less convincing to anyone else. Without recording, it's impossible to convey all the attached data in a reliable way eg, you KNOW you bought it, you know where and when and why and you know that at one moment it was there and the next it isn't. But to them, it may never have "existed" at all, if they never saw it before it "Vanished". It's easier for them to assume you misplaced it or are lying about ever having whatever it was. The same is true for things appearing or moving around. There's also the problem of sample size. If you live in a "haunted" house, you spend orders of magnitude more time than anyone who doesn't who you try to explain the problem to. if on average something happens once a week, this can be convincing and frightening to someone who lives there for a year but might never be seen by anyone else.
Disclaimer: I'm going to set aside the issue of lying here, and assume you can convince people you are telling the truth, because this seems like a less-interesting gamut. If you want to talk about that, feel free to say so.
If they believe you are telling the truth, but think it is more likely that you are crazy than that this actually happened, why should you prefer the latter hypothesis? Do you trust your senses more just because they are your own? That doesn't make sense.
Why shouldn't you assume this if it makes more sense? People forget moving things all the time.
If it's really a repeating phenomenon, you should be able to get someone else to come over to your house and witness it at least once. And after a few times of the two of you seeing the same thing at the same time (ideally with some safeguards like writing down what you saw and when before exchanging information to avoid bias), that person can safely demote the "you are crazy" hypothesis.
Why doesn't it make more sense to trust your own senses than other peoples? You have a LOT more evidence of them being accurate, than you do of anyone else's. Different brainstates correlate with different actual events with various degrees of reliability, but you'll always have a better sample size to gather correlational data about your own brainstates as compared to that of someone else.
before you hornswoggle someone into hanging out at your spooky mansion for a few weeks to make sure of seeing something weird, you are in "possession" of evidence(Eg a temporary occurrence that created a certain brainstate such as having thought to have seen something move or appear) that is convincing to you but not to anyone else. Once you actually start witnessing stuff with someone else, that's further, different evidence.
I think there's a state of mind associated with stuff like this where you just feel bad and you don't even want to know why anymore, you just want the bad feeling to stop? So it's not really based on evidence. I think there are some brain states that might be built out of confirmation bias and bad reasoning, but sometimes the only way to flush them and make your brain work again is to just move out of the surroundings that caused the badness in the first place.