Of course, I didn't mean to group fairies and vitamin X in the same category and convey that their odds were comparable (the odds of the existence of fairies are surely many times lower than the odds of vitamin X being effective). I rather meant to showcase the heuristic by which I tend to group fairies and trolls into "artifacts of the human tendency to anthropomorphize everything" to dismiss them as imaginary, which I think is the same heuristic by which I tend to group vitamin X and Y into "sounds like bogus" to dismiss them as ineffective. Grouping these into "sounds like bogus" might be done with a lower level of... (read more)
I believe in fairies! I do! I do!
...Except I don't, and neither do you.
"Why don't you believe in fairies?" I ask.
"What an absurd question," you retort, "it's because fairies don't exist." However, the many times when you thought something so-obviously-didn't-exist and were proven absolutely wrong suddenly pop into your mind. "Okay, let's do this exercise then. Why do I believe fairies do not exist?" For the sake of argument, let's equate fairies to diminutive humanoids with insect-like wings that can fly, and leave magic and wonder and weird golden powder out of the equation.
There are certain beliefs you hold about the real world that you deem incompatible with the existence of fairies.... (read 735 more words →)
Thanks!
Hi! I first learned about LW and its corresponding memespace from reading SSC and gwern. I've semi-lurked on the site for various years now and was attracted to it because of how often it activated my insight antennae, but I only started seriously reading the sequences (which I have yet to finish) since last year. I have always wanted to join the site in some capacity or another, but I didn't really believe I could come up with anything meaningful to add and didn't feel godly enough to post. Now I do have some things I want to write about, so I finally came up with an excuse to create an account... (read more)
I guess it depends on how much that "room for doubt" translates into being adopted as standard practice (i.e. if doubting the efficacy of vitamin X leads to it not being widely adopted, I might not recommend it either), which leads to
Basically this - thanks for pointing this out because I agree that's where my heuristics would have landed me and what actually happened at first, and it's a... (read more)