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Jehovah's Witnesses != Mormons, even though both are known for door-to-door solicitation. Reliable statistics are thin on the ground, but the Mormons seem to be doing a little better than average in terms of personal socioeconomic status. (BYU is not, however, an unbiased source.)
You are correct. I'm not sure where I got the idea that LDS was Jehovah's Witnesses.
For whom? For the Mormon Church or for the specific individuals? :-/
I̶t̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶e̶a̶r̶s̶ ̶m̶o̶s̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶u̶r̶c̶h̶,̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶a̶r̶e̶n̶t̶l̶y̶.̶ ̶W̶o̶w̶.̶
Edit -- missionary.lds.org is latter day saints. One of their quotes was by a Jehovah's Witness, so I thought this was a guide for Jehovah's Witnesses. If the question is "Does it work for the specific individuals in the Mormon Church?" the answer is yes.
Seems to have worked for them.
Alright, so you bring this alleged time traveler with you to visit two or three different psychologists, all of whom are appropriately surprised by the whole 'time travel' thing but agree that you seem to be perceiving and processing the facts of the situation accurately.
Furthermore you have a lot of expensive tests run on the health and functionality of your brain, and all of the results turn out within normal limits. Camera-phone videos of the initial arrival are posted to the internet and after millions of views nobody can credibly figure out how it could have been faked. To the extent that introspection provides any meaningful data, you feel fine. In short, by every available test, your sanity is either far beyond retrieval down an indistinguishably perfect fantasy hole, or completely unmarred apart from perhaps a circumstantially-normal level of existential anxiety.
Now what?
Then I accept that there's a time traveler. The evidence in this second situation is quite a bit stronger than a personal observation, and would probably be enough to convince me.
Well, the insanity defense is always a possibility, but then again, you have no proof that you're not insane right now, either, so it seems to be a fully general counterargument that can apply at any time to any situation. Ignoring the possibility of insanity, would you see any point in refusing to update, i.e. claiming that what you just saw didn't happen?
It's always a possibility that I'm insane, but normally a fairly unlikely one.
The baseline hypothesis is (say) p = 0.999 that I'm sane, p = 0.0001 that I'm hallucinating. Let's further assume that if I'm hallucinating, there's a 2% chance that hallucination is about time travel. My prior is something like p = 0.000001 that time travel exists. If I assume those are the only two explanations of seeing a time traveler, (i.e. we're ignoring pranks and similar), my estimate of the probability that time travel exists would shift up to about 2% instead of 0.0001% -- a huge increase. The smart money (98%) is still on me hallucinating though.
If you screen out the insanity possibility, and any other possibility that gives better than 1 in a million chances of me seeing what appears to be a time traveler with what appears to be futuristic technology, yes, the time traveler hypothesis would dominate. However, the prior for that is quite low. There's a difference between "refusing to update" and "not updating far enough that one explanation is favored".
If I was abducted by aliens, my first inclination would likewise be to assume that I'm going insane -- this is despite the fact that nothing in the laws of physics precludes the existence of aliens. Are you saying that the average person who thinks they are abducted by aliens should trust their senses on that matter?
I don't think the quote is talking about "hypothesizing" anything; I read it more as "You have to update on evidence whether that evidence fits into your original model of the world or not". Instead of "hypothesizing time travel when things don't make sense", it'd be more like a stranger appears in front of you in a flash of light with futuristic-looking technology, proves that he is genetically human, and claims to be from the future. In that case it doesn't matter what your priors were for something like that happening; it already happened, and crying "Impossible!" is as illegal a move in Bayes as moving your king into check is in chess.
Not that such a thing is likely to happen, of course, but if it did happen, would you sit back and claim it didn't because it "doesn't make sense"?
Yes. And then I would go see a psychologist. Because I find it more likely that I'm losing my grip on my own sanity than that I've just witnessed time travel.
Then I'm not sure what your terminal values are beyond surviving.
I think there may be a communication failure here. While most desirable changes are themselves changes to the status quo, the phrase "changing the status quo" generally has the connotation of moving away from an undesirable state, instead of moving toward a desirable state.
For a concrete example, if I wanted to eradicate malaria, I would say "I want to eradicate malaria," not "I want to impact the status quo" or "I want to make a difference," even though both types of statements are true. The goal is to make a specific difference, not to make a difference.
What's so great about impacting the status quo?
Depends on your value system, of course. But impacting the status quo is a synonym for "making a difference" and if you don't ever make a difference, well...
well...
Please continue. If you don't ever make a difference, then what?
This isn't necessarily- if you have to think about using that link as charity while shopping, it could decrease your likelihood of doing other charitable things (which is why you should set up a redirect so you don't have to think about it, and you always use it every time!)
Amazon already does that for you -- if you go to buy something without using that link, it'll ask you if you want to.
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How'd you manage to strikethrough part of your post? I thought the markup for that had been disabled.