The evidence I have personally seen suggests haunted houses are, in fact, real, without given any particular credence to any particular explanation of what the haunting is.
So, it seems like there’s a strong and weak interpretation of this sentence.
The weak interpretation (that I endorse) is “reported physical evidence is often physical”- crop circles aren’t photoshopped, they’re actually there in the fields. Throwing out the evidence with the interpretation is rarely wise. Talking with someone who believes in alien abduction reports, I get the sense that there are a number of them where it’s reasonable to believe that weird things were really noticed (like someone’s lawn having an abnormal amount of radiation, or so on). Under this interpretation, you probably ought to move out of the house / set up hidden cameras / etc.; if any of these are the result of hallucinations or the actions of others or the unremembered actions of yourself, then setting up systems to counteract that is a good idea.
In this interpretation, a “superstition” is more of a “unarticulated causal model.” It isn’t that “ghosts live in the house, and move objects around,” it’s “something unknown about this house is bad, and I should avoid it.” (That particular model doesn’t even articulate why it’s bad- it accepts both teleporting keys and your memory being faulty.)
The strong interpretation (that I don’t endorse) is “physical evidence is anywhere near close enough to overcome a sensible prior against the supernatural.” If there really are crop circles in your fields, it’s still many, many times more likely that you’re doing it while sleepwalking, or other humans are doing it to you, or some other mundane explanation, than that aliens are doing it to you. I will note that it is often useful to take the outside view on your own evidence, especially if you have or are developing a mental disorder. “If someone told me that there were invisible ants crawling all over them, how likely is it that they’re hallucinating? Very likely, and from that I should expect that the invisible ants crawling all over me aren’t real.” I wrote a post about this a while back that may be interesting.
The evidence I have personally seen suggests haunted houses are, in fact, real, without given any particular credence to any particular explanation of what the haunting is.
So, it seems like there’s a strong and weak interpretation of this sentence.
The part after the last comma, and other things he says in the post, make it overwhelmingly clear to me that the weak interpretation is what is meant.
In general, it seems valuable to me to attempt to rewrite things more precisely, both as an aid to my understanding and for the purposes of communication.
The last clause was ambiguous to me, because it could suggest giving a comparable amount of credence to supernatural explanations. It seems reasonable to me to give particular anti-credence to supernatural explanations, because they seem strictly dominated by explanations that involve mental illness. Further, the parts about incommunicable evidence strike me as pushing towards the strong interpretation.
So, it seems like there’s a strong and weak interpretation of this sentence.
The weak interpretation (that I endorse) is “reported physical evidence is often physical”- crop circles aren’t photoshopped, they’re actually there in the fields. Throwing out the evidence with the interpretation is rarely wise. Talking with someone who believes in alien abduction reports, I get the sense that there are a number of them where it’s reasonable to believe that weird things were really noticed (like someone’s lawn having an abnormal amount of radiation, or so on). Under this interpretation, you probably ought to move out of the house / set up hidden cameras / etc.; if any of these are the result of hallucinations or the actions of others or the unremembered actions of yourself, then setting up systems to counteract that is a good idea.
In this interpretation, a “superstition” is more of a “unarticulated causal model.” It isn’t that “ghosts live in the house, and move objects around,” it’s “something unknown about this house is bad, and I should avoid it.” (That particular model doesn’t even articulate why it’s bad- it accepts both teleporting keys and your memory being faulty.)
The strong interpretation (that I don’t endorse) is “physical evidence is anywhere near close enough to overcome a sensible prior against the supernatural.” If there really are crop circles in your fields, it’s still many, many times more likely that you’re doing it while sleepwalking, or other humans are doing it to you, or some other mundane explanation, than that aliens are doing it to you. I will note that it is often useful to take the outside view on your own evidence, especially if you have or are developing a mental disorder. “If someone told me that there were invisible ants crawling all over them, how likely is it that they’re hallucinating? Very likely, and from that I should expect that the invisible ants crawling all over me aren’t real.” I wrote a post about this a while back that may be interesting.
The part after the last comma, and other things he says in the post, make it overwhelmingly clear to me that the weak interpretation is what is meant.
In general, it seems valuable to me to attempt to rewrite things more precisely, both as an aid to my understanding and for the purposes of communication.
The last clause was ambiguous to me, because it could suggest giving a comparable amount of credence to supernatural explanations. It seems reasonable to me to give particular anti-credence to supernatural explanations, because they seem strictly dominated by explanations that involve mental illness. Further, the parts about incommunicable evidence strike me as pushing towards the strong interpretation.