what sort of p-values would you need to see in that paper in order to believe with, say, 50% probability that the effect measured is real?
P-values won't do it. Psi experiments consistently have high sounding significance because the trials are so large. Mass replication is what will make me believe.
That critique doesn't really work for t-tests though does it? Sure, as n increases so does your chance that the finding is statistically significant, but it also reduces the chance of the data being a fluke. If you flip a fair coin a million times holding a banana in your left hand and it comes up heads 55% of the time... there's some explaining to do. Even if the explanation is that it wasn't a fair coin.
I read Goertzel's recent paper on "Morphic Pilot Theory", which sketches a possible framework for PSI phenomena of the inexplicable synchronicity type.
As far as I could understand, the idea is that the seemingly causally unconnected phenomena are mutually affected by nonlocality from the Bohmian interpretation of quantum physics. The anomalous cognition part comes in as some kind of conservation of algorithmic information, where the Bohmian configuration state tends towards having a low Kolmogorov complexity, this shows up as the same pattern acausally showing up in several places at once. I guess human and animal brains are then assumed to have been evolved to make what use they can of this phenomenon.
I can't really evaluate the paper. I've never looked into Bohmian QM in any detail and would have to work up my physics to get there. I do get that the paper is very speculative, but it is interesting in positing zero ontologically basic woo to work. On the other hand, PSI with quantum physics is a well-deserved crackpot indicator, and I'd really need to know more about the generally physicist-approved version to tell if this stuff is off the deep end or not.
I'm in no position to analyse it either, but if psi exists and can be selected for by evolution, doesn't this imply that an AI (or even just a brute force algorithm on the right track) can optimise for it too?
So that's something to consider if there turns out to be anything substantial behind all this.
I think one of the arguments declaring that voting is rational is a bit suspect.
But here's the good news. If your vote is decisive, it will make a difference for 300 million people!
In the rather unlikely event that your vote decisive, this is true enough (for US voters anyway). The error he makes though is the assumption that your decisive vote will always create a positive change. If you're going to take the credit for the right decisive vote, you have to take the blame for the wrong decisive vote.
Some people might go on to argue that it's the voters job to make an informed choice, but good luck with that. Even the most informed voter is going to be working with sketchy information, politicians don't always (ever?) deliver everything they promise.
Worse still, you can't even tell what positive/negative real life events were actually dependent on who is in office even in theory, let alone in practice.
I'm not going to say whether voting behaviour is rational or not because I'm not sure everyone is using the same definition as me, but I will say that I think people seriously overestimate the power of their vote.
In that case, the requirement to show up at the polling station seems like a pointless infringement on personal liberty.
It's annoying sure, but what other strategies are available to them? Voting is anonymous process after all. They've succeeded in getting you all the way to the polling booth which is a start. If the voters can't even be bothered to fill out a simple form, that suggests to me deeper problems.
Not that I'm one to talk, I vote for Optimus Prime.
for instance, not voting is illegal in Australia, and incurs a fine.
I'm being pedantic but it's more accurate to say that "Not marking your attendance off on the electoral roll incurs a fine". There is no penalty for then taking your ballot and submitting it blank.
Under what conditions do you support (or are confused about whether you should support) suicide and assisted suicide? Under these conditions, would cryonics be a better alternative, barring legal and financial barriers?
Situations where continuing medical interventions are effectively only prolonging the suffering of the individual and family members. Cryonics as an alternative is very interesting, but I haven't given the topic much thought.
Assisted suicide is not about looking for death, it's about minimising pain and humiliation.
Death is just a mean to that end - specifically, the only remaining mean. You don't have to like death to decide that it's the only way you're going to leave that hospital bed.
Ah, so it's a non-optimal solution that just so happens to be the best of the crappy options available. Thanks.
A common thread in the transhumanist community's ethics is "non-consensual effects are wrong"
Smallpox is a non-consensual cessation of existence. Suicide is consensual.
Is that, perhaps, the ethical principle that causes you to accept one and not the other?
Possibly, but consent in this context is a bit tricky.
A depressed person may actively want to die but we generally don't consider a person in this state as capable of consenting to anything.
If that same person had depression AND a fatal illness that will cause them suffer for another joyless 20 years, do we consider them capable?
Your suggestion is a really good rule of thumb but I'm just wondering if there is more to the story
I would identify myself as holding many trans-humanist values and beliefs. That death and dying are not desirable and that it should, like smallpox, be eradicated. It also occurs to me however that I hold the belief that assisted suicide can sometimes be the right course of action. I can justify this sufficiently to myself, but I have a history of being a sophisticated arguer, so my ability to convince myself isn't great evidence.
Are my beliefs incoherent? I look at both issues and they both still feel right (I'm aware this does not make it so). Are these beliefs contradictory (and if so how)? Or are they justified by some hidden assumptions that I can't seem to acknowledge explicitly?
I get the idea that this is probably borderline appropriate for the discussion forum so I will delete this topic if asked to.
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Failures to set up or follow proper experimental procedures (giving hints, not fully random presentation, etc) or otherwise introducing a slight biasing effect will show an effect which is puny. With low n, this won't be statistically significant, but with high n it will appear very statistically significant.
That's true, statistical significance isn't the most sophisticated statistic. My rule of thumb is looking at the p and d values.