Parapsychology: the control group for science

62 AllanCrossman 05 December 2009 10:50PM

Parapsychologists are constantly protesting that they are playing by all the standard scientific rules, and yet their results are being ignored - that they are unfairly being held to higher standards than everyone else. I'm willing to believe that. It just means that the standard statistical methods of science are so weak and flawed as to permit a field of study to sustain itself in the complete absence of any subject matter.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Frequentist Statistics are Frequently Subjective

Imagine if, way back at the start of the scientific enterprise, someone had said, "What we really need is a control group for science - people who will behave exactly like scientists, doing experiments, publishing journals, and so on, but whose field of study is completely empty: one in which the null hypothesis is always true.

"That way, we'll be able to gauge the effect of publication bias, experimental error, misuse of statistics, data fraud, and so on, which will help us understand how serious such problems are in the real scientific literature."

Isn't that a great idea?

By an accident of historical chance, we actually have exactly such a control group, namely parapsychologists: people who study extra-sensory perception, telepathy, precognition, and so on.

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We're in danger. I must tell the others...

3 AllanCrossman 13 October 2009 11:06PM

... Oh, no! I've been shot!

— C3PO

A strange sort of paralysis can occur when risk-averse people (like me) decide that we're going to play it safe. We imagine the worst thing that could happen if we go ahead with our slightly risky plan, and this stops us from carrying it out.

One possible way of overcoming such paralysis is to remind yourself just how much danger you're actually in.

Humanity could be mutilated by nuclear war, biotechnology disasters, societal meltdown, environmental collapse, oppressive governments, disagreeable AI, or other horrors. On an individual level, anybody's life could turn sour for more mundane reasons, from disease to bereavement to divorce to unemployment to depression. The terrifying scenarios depend on your values, and differ from person to person. Those here who hope to live forever may die of old age, and then cryonics turns out not to work.

There must be some number X which is the probability of Really Bad Things happening to you. X is probably not a tiny figure, but instead significantly above zero, which encourages you to go ahead with whatever slightly risky plan you were contemplating, as long as it only nudges X upwards a little.

Admittedly, this tactic seems like a cheap hack that relies on an error in human reasoning - is nudging your danger level from .2 to .201 actually more acceptable than nudging it from 0 to .001? Perhaps not. Needless to say, a real rationalist ought to ignore all this and take the action with the highest expected value.

Open Thread: September 2009

2 AllanCrossman 01 September 2009 10:54AM

I declare this Open Thread open for discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts.