externalmonologue

In the beginning there was Yudkowsky: The Less Wrong Sequences, 2006-2009.

scam artist for sure, that one is easy.

The irony here is that rational wiki has an article on yudkowsky and it isn't very flattering. Perhaps you have read it David?

I love somewhat fringe articles on lesswrong. It helps raise the quality of discussion by offering contrasts to what is and is not acceptable and points out onerous details skeptics are wary to explain in detail, like the subtleties of believing a phenomena exists versus having a theory to explain it. (see my comments above).

But this whole idea of the rate of error in repeatability of a field ignores all the experiments that are never done again because the same phenomena is found over and over again.

In general I agree. But I don't believe you should claim a phenomena does not exist because it doesn't fit with mainstream science.

If you think science says what can or cannot exist, you would only be rationally correct (that is correct by whatever criteria you have specified), not actually correct because the best answer is unknowable, so far. Thus, I maintain my agnosticism about net power, but not cold fusion. Cold fusion isn't a real phenomena, but maybe some have obtained net power, or maybe not.

I know, I edited my remark after thinking a bit more to read, "no one in the mainstream..."

I am only trying to draw out the difference between claims of net power through some unknown physical process and the obvious flaws of cold fusion as a means of explaining the statistical phenomena. Non existence is obvious and trivial, but sometimes it merely points to our own ignorance. I am not a physicist so I use heuristics to decide who to believe, but they are mere heuristics and really shouldn't be taken very seriously.

One in a bajillion? You are saying you actually know how complex psi is without even saying what aspect of psi you are talking about.

We know biology is very complex. So when testing a supplement like creatine, the pseudoskeptic could say "biology is extremely complex. We do not know the mechanism that makes creatine work so I assign a very low bayesian probability. Today I feel like a hundred trillion to one".

Keep in mind this is after several studies have shown an effect in the predicted direction whose odds are not easily explained by chance. Indeed, there is nothing wrong with you assertion about complexity just the subjective part where you assign a number to a phenomena you are not very familiar with.