.3. Close examination of the ghost may reveal useful knowledge that does not have to do with ghosts. 4. However small the chance, ghosts may be real, and you’ve just uncovered an entirely new thing worth time and money.
You have to weigh these considerations against other potentially more useful activities. Like you have to calculate the expected payoff when choosing whether to buy a lottery ticket or to do something else with your money. Ghost-chasing is probably among the worst uses of your time, effort and money, and unless you are doing it for fun (due to the childhood obsession with Scooby Doo, for example) your arguments 1,2,3 and 4 are just rationalizations.
The problem with lottery tickets is that in buying one, you accept that the chances of winning are slim to none. The expected payoff of any activity which tests if knowledge is true, is true knowledge. I always win that gamble, so long as I play the game (as stated previously in numbers 1 through 4). And it is about fun—what’s more fun than educating people, helping people, finding new stuff, or validating someone’s claims? Seems like the essence of science to me… Skepticism is useful only when you know something the one making the claim doesn’t know, after all. For example, the probability of Deepok Chopra’s ideas about the mind being correct are so small because of what we already know about psychology, and because his stuff contradicts itself. Deepok Chopra’s claims are, therefore, not worth testing, not because all weird claims are not worth testing, but because even the payoff of “proven wrong” may be impossible in such a case (no learning will take place).
PS: I suspect I’m getting something wrong here. Still, I will go forward, to see what I can learn. As I said, I look forward to seeing how people estimate the whole cold fusion business. So, what kind of game do you think is being played? Is this the same as playing the lottery (dumping money into something that won’t even produce learning, and hence fun)? Is it worth it to test cold fusion, based on previous knowledge? Why?
My own position is, of course, cautious optimism (not investing in cold fusion for a while yet), because I expect to see SOME kind of reward no matter the outcome—it SEEMS to me like scientists are doing science, here (not that I know enough to say with 90 percent certainty)...
The expected payoff of any activity which tests if knowledge is true, is true knowledge. I always win that gamble, so long as I play the game
You get true knowledge either way, but you might only get useful knowledge one way. If you’re running the experiment because you want useful knowledge, then it’s a gamble.
Also, you’re not necessarily getting the same amount of knowledge either way. For example, if you’re 99% sure before the experiment, you only get 0.014 bits of knowledge if you were right, but you get 6.6 bits if you were wrong. There’s a factor of 458 difference.
Ah! I think I see what you mean. This is a matter of how much one wins, not whether one wins.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. You have to pay to run the experiment. If you make your decision based on the expected winnings, and pay more than the minimum winnings, then if you get the worst outcome, it’s a net loss.
As for usefulness. What do you mean?
Knowledge tends to be instrumentally valuable. Regardless of your goals, knowledge will be helpful to accomplish them. However, not all knowledge is equally helpful. For example, knowing how to make a cold fusion generator will be useful for making paperclips or running experiments or whatever it is you find intrinsically valuable. Knowing that you can’t make a cold fusion generator will only be useful for preventing you from wasting time and money trying to make a cold fusion generator.
You have to weigh these considerations against other potentially more useful activities. Like you have to calculate the expected payoff when choosing whether to buy a lottery ticket or to do something else with your money. Ghost-chasing is probably among the worst uses of your time, effort and money, and unless you are doing it for fun (due to the childhood obsession with Scooby Doo, for example) your arguments 1,2,3 and 4 are just rationalizations.
The problem with lottery tickets is that in buying one, you accept that the chances of winning are slim to none. The expected payoff of any activity which tests if knowledge is true, is true knowledge. I always win that gamble, so long as I play the game (as stated previously in numbers 1 through 4). And it is about fun—what’s more fun than educating people, helping people, finding new stuff, or validating someone’s claims? Seems like the essence of science to me… Skepticism is useful only when you know something the one making the claim doesn’t know, after all. For example, the probability of Deepok Chopra’s ideas about the mind being correct are so small because of what we already know about psychology, and because his stuff contradicts itself. Deepok Chopra’s claims are, therefore, not worth testing, not because all weird claims are not worth testing, but because even the payoff of “proven wrong” may be impossible in such a case (no learning will take place).
PS: I suspect I’m getting something wrong here. Still, I will go forward, to see what I can learn. As I said, I look forward to seeing how people estimate the whole cold fusion business. So, what kind of game do you think is being played? Is this the same as playing the lottery (dumping money into something that won’t even produce learning, and hence fun)? Is it worth it to test cold fusion, based on previous knowledge? Why? My own position is, of course, cautious optimism (not investing in cold fusion for a while yet), because I expect to see SOME kind of reward no matter the outcome—it SEEMS to me like scientists are doing science, here (not that I know enough to say with 90 percent certainty)...
You get true knowledge either way, but you might only get useful knowledge one way. If you’re running the experiment because you want useful knowledge, then it’s a gamble.
Also, you’re not necessarily getting the same amount of knowledge either way. For example, if you’re 99% sure before the experiment, you only get 0.014 bits of knowledge if you were right, but you get 6.6 bits if you were wrong. There’s a factor of 458 difference.
Ah! I think I see what you mean. This is a matter of how much one wins, not whether one wins.
As for usefulness. What do you mean?
It’s a bit more complicated than that. You have to pay to run the experiment. If you make your decision based on the expected winnings, and pay more than the minimum winnings, then if you get the worst outcome, it’s a net loss.
Knowledge tends to be instrumentally valuable. Regardless of your goals, knowledge will be helpful to accomplish them. However, not all knowledge is equally helpful. For example, knowing how to make a cold fusion generator will be useful for making paperclips or running experiments or whatever it is you find intrinsically valuable. Knowing that you can’t make a cold fusion generator will only be useful for preventing you from wasting time and money trying to make a cold fusion generator.