Once I understood the theory, my first question was has this been explained to any delusional patient with a good grasp of probability theory? I know this sort of thing generally doesn’t work, but the n=1 experiment you mention is intriguing. I suppose what is more often interesting to me is what sorts of things people come up with to dismiss conflicting evidence, since it is in a strange place between completely random and clever lie. If you have a dragon in your garage about something you tend to give the most plausible excuses because you know, deep down, the truth about the phenomenon so you can construct your explanation around that recognition of the way the world actually is. Delusional patients, by contrast, say things like “this is my daughters arm” that just don’t make any sense, and indicate to us in an eerie way just how deeply they believe their delusions. I’m surprised that, given the contributions from the study of injured brains to neurobiology, there’s not a bigger focus on the study of abnormal mental systems in cognitive science and decision theory, not that I’m the first person to wonder this or anything
Once I understood the theory, my first question was has this been explained to any delusional patient with a good grasp of probability theory? I know this sort of thing generally doesn’t work, but the n=1 experiment you mention is intriguing. I suppose what is more often interesting to me is what sorts of things people come up with to dismiss conflicting evidence, since it is in a strange place between completely random and clever lie. If you have a dragon in your garage about something you tend to give the most plausible excuses because you know, deep down, the truth about the phenomenon so you can construct your explanation around that recognition of the way the world actually is. Delusional patients, by contrast, say things like “this is my daughters arm” that just don’t make any sense, and indicate to us in an eerie way just how deeply they believe their delusions. I’m surprised that, given the contributions from the study of injured brains to neurobiology, there’s not a bigger focus on the study of abnormal mental systems in cognitive science and decision theory, not that I’m the first person to wonder this or anything