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 confidence, but I think it still stands. If there were a line of people, each holding a branch of one of every exotic plant on Earth, waiting to ask me “should I try this? (without any further justification),” I would say no to all of them, even if there’s a good chance that one of them could provide a health boost.
Right, that makes sense. One reference class is “does not exist except in a fantasy” and the other “do not try it on yourself until there is reliable published research”.
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 confidence, but I think it still stands. If there were a line of people, each holding a branch of one of every exotic plant on Earth, waiting to ask me “should I try this? (without any further justification),” I would say no to all of them, even if there’s a good chance that one of them could provide a health boost.
Right, that makes sense. One reference class is “does not exist except in a fantasy” and the other “do not try it on yourself until there is reliable published research”.