I tentatively disagree that religion count as a falsified belief. This sounds nit-picky but I think indicates a substantial meta-level difference in our prior, i.e. the extent to which we think the average person is or isn’t crazy.
The religions are contradictory. The behavior of the founders (moreso the more recent the religion) maps onto random guys creating cults today in great detail. People express belief in their particular religion being true, the particular founder or books being right, in young earth creationism, in Islamic medicine, in miraculous healing, etc. They do so at least as fervently as they do belief in psychic powers. You can try to make up a naturalistic version of religion that, while improbable on its face, doesn’t get much of a further penalty from the evidence (simulator deism, whatever) but that doesn’t rescue the accuracy of the masses.
On direct causes, consider sleep paralysis and alien abductions. Drug use can create experiences interpreted as religious or psychic or whatever, and various biological conditions can do likewise. False memories can be cultivated by therapists or group efforts (there was an interesting book by a Harvard researcher studying people who claimed to have been abducted). The formation of urban legends by the telephone effect and optimization for good stories is well-documented. Exposed frauds are pretty common, and frauds have to be more common than exposed ones, probably far more given the scarcity of debunking resources. These things vary from culture to culture, e.g. fan death giving an indication of how much people can shape their experiences and beliefs to fit memes floating around.
I looked through much of the heuristics and biases literature and was profoundly disappointed with what I found. Since then I’ve been skeptical of claims that the average person is highly susceptible to false beliefs.
Psychology research tends to be bad. Most of the effects claimed don’t exist (far more for repeatedly replicated experiments done by independent groups), and the effects that do exist are mostly greatly exaggerated in their effect sizes and generalizability. That is also true of heuristics and biases. And yet surveys (the basis of these “lots of people believe in ESP” claims) reveal that people have lots of demonstrably false beliefs, often strong beliefs, especially on topics where they get little feedback. Bryan Caplan has many such: basic facts about the economy, demographics, toxicology, risks of death. People believe having sex with virgins cures HIV, despite the absence of any actual documented examples. They form superstitions about homeopathic placebos and acupuncture.
People do not get feedback about their capricious/subtle psi beliefs (healing that heals amputees does get enough negative feedback that it’s a rare belief), and can get utility out of believing they have psi or that the world is magical, indeed will often go out of their way to protect the belief.
Recently, quantum stuff in biological systems generally. Only important to note because various proposed psi mechanisms involve quantum computation going on in the brain, which until recently seemed rather implausible but is now a serious possibility.
I contest. Biological systems are hot and noisy, and quantum effects are at the wrong scales in nervous systems. Second, quantum computation!= telepathy, ESP, telekinesis, etc. Usually these arguments are of the form “QM and ESP are mysterious, and could be related” or “this interpretation of QM assumes nonlocal effects, or even nonlocal effects driven by magic consciousness, so there’s a proof of concept for nonlocal ESP”. These are nonsense. I would want to see an example of a good argument for quantum computation-psi connections.
Given that the methods used are practically designed so as to minimize any psi phenomena, e.g. taking away any real incentives for humans to use psi (with a few exceptions like a few of Bem’s experiments), why should we have a wide prior for psi effect sizes? E.g. Ben Goertzel’s analogy to experimentation on the alleged existence of “falling in love” comes to mind. I can’t find it but it was on his “Multiverse According to Ben” blog. Might you explain more why you think a wide prior seems good?
Claims of psi powers tend to expand to fill the gaps of observation and alternative explanation. E.g. flying witches in Africa, jinn turning people into animals, etc. Claims that psi is small seem to be a “God of the Gaps” side-effect of modern recording technologies and other developments, rewriting the prior ex post. Repelling bullets, visible healing, visible telekinesis, and similar dramatic powers have often been claimed as effects “in the wild” but they always retreat from sight. We have casinos, the stock market, and similar opportunities for precognition, telekinesis could show up in sporting events, etc, etc.
E.g. Ben Goertzel’s analogy to experimentation on the alleged existence of “falling in love” comes to mind.
Actually, all sorts of nifty research on falling in love has been performed with useful predictions about oxytocin levels, fidelity, various sorts of future self-report, divorce, frequency of sex, etc, etc. Experiments in the lab can do quite a lot to distinguish couples in love or not, and to increase or decrease it. That’s more of a rhetorical trick, insofar as we use “falling in love” in a lot of signalling games and to some extent we’re unwilling to identify it with any natural kinds that actually exist.
The evolutionary and anatomical picture for psi powers adds additional burden
I don’t follow, might you flesh this out more?
Where is the animal psi? What organs do it? How do the inputs affect human responses and behavior? How did the capacity evolve in the first place, and if it did evolve, why didn’t it keep doing so?
It is well-known that psi seems to be react in agentic ways to attempts to experiment on it. This is really weird and seems to indicate flaws in the research rather than that psi is actually an agentic process that is trying to stay on the verge of detectability.
Well, it seems that way to pro-psi researchers, but it’s not so different from research into unrelated bogus phenomena where researchers are motivated to keep trying different angles of attack, e.g. cross-country international development models in economics.
I would want to see an example of a good argument for quantum computation-psi connections.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that that part is plausible as I haven’t looked into it at all. But the “too hot and noisy” objection seems less certain now that there’s research into quantum “computation” allowing for photosynthesis as well as something else quantum involved in birds’ navigation. Links here. As you suggest, perhaps it should be presumed irrelevant until some plausible mechanism connecting it to psi is proposed.
Actually, all sorts of nifty research on falling in love has been performed with useful predictions about oxytocin levels, fidelity, various sorts of future self-report, divorce, frequency of sex, etc, etc.
Yeah, um, basic sanity fail on my part. Not a good sign.
Re common false beliefs, you obviously know significantly more about the subject than I do. Are there any books you’d recommend?
Claims that psi is small seem to be a “God of the Gaps” side-effect of modern recording technologies and other developments, rewriting the prior ex post.
Point conceded. Until I look at the literature more closely I’ll agree with you that the lack of large effects seems is a decent chunk of evidence against psi.
It would seem that the only psi-friendly explanation of the weak results from parapsychology then would be something like actively evasive psi. You say similar hypotheses have shown up to explain the lack of certain expected phenomena in macroeconomics? Or, might you explain the connection?
By the way thank you for talking to me about this stuff, very few people have the prerequisite knowledge/skills/patience to do so fruitfully.
I’m starting to think that maybe all evidence I have for psi is incommunicable. Bleh!
Are there any books you’d recommend?
Bryan Caplan’s references section in his Myth of the Rational Voter book has cites for many good sources.
It would seem that the only psi-friendly explanation of the weak results from parapsychology then would be something like actively evasive psi. You say similar hypotheses have shown up to explain the lack of certain expected phenomena in macroeconomics? Or, might you explain the connection?
I was referring to data-mining for correlations to produce predictive rules using historical datasets of country growth rates, rules which then fail badly when applied to new datasets. Beliefs in stronger causal conclusions persist, and folk with such beliefs talk about how the processes of growth are changing over time, or the great difficulty of pulling conclusions from the noisy data. The closest think to “actively evasive psi” would probably be academic claims to have found predictive rules for stock and other liquid markets: “my data-mined rule was for real, but now that I’ve published the markets are taking it into account, which is why it no longer works.”
I’m starting to think that maybe all evidence I have for psi is incommunicable. Bleh!
The evidential part of intuitions or personal psi experiences are communicable (save for the possibility of conscious lies, but it’s pretty clear that those are not needed), a bigger dataset of intuitions is better than a single case, etc. Robin’s common priors paper is relevant here.
But the “too hot and noisy” objection seems less certain now that there’s research into quantum “computation” allowing for photosynthesis as well as something else quantum involved in birds’ navigation.
It’s a bit of a tangent, but I thought the recent stuff about some special “quantum” coherence enabling photosynthesis was mostly hype, as it could happen just the same classically.
Most of the effects claimed don’t exist (far more for repeatedly replicated experiments done by independent groups), and the effects that do exist are mostly greatly exaggerated in their effect sizes and generalizability. That is also true of heuristics and biases.
Do you mean this in the trivial sense, or are you making a stronger claim against the heuristics and biases literature?
This sense. I don’t think the heuristics and biases literature is among the worst psychological subfields in terms of quality. I don’t think it is the best.
The religions are contradictory. The behavior of the founders (moreso the more recent the religion) maps onto random guys creating cults today in great detail. People express belief in their particular religion being true, the particular founder or books being right, in young earth creationism, in Islamic medicine, in miraculous healing, etc. They do so at least as fervently as they do belief in psychic powers. You can try to make up a naturalistic version of religion that, while improbable on its face, doesn’t get much of a further penalty from the evidence (simulator deism, whatever) but that doesn’t rescue the accuracy of the masses.
On direct causes, consider sleep paralysis and alien abductions. Drug use can create experiences interpreted as religious or psychic or whatever, and various biological conditions can do likewise. False memories can be cultivated by therapists or group efforts (there was an interesting book by a Harvard researcher studying people who claimed to have been abducted). The formation of urban legends by the telephone effect and optimization for good stories is well-documented. Exposed frauds are pretty common, and frauds have to be more common than exposed ones, probably far more given the scarcity of debunking resources. These things vary from culture to culture, e.g. fan death giving an indication of how much people can shape their experiences and beliefs to fit memes floating around.
Psychology research tends to be bad. Most of the effects claimed don’t exist (far more for repeatedly replicated experiments done by independent groups), and the effects that do exist are mostly greatly exaggerated in their effect sizes and generalizability. That is also true of heuristics and biases. And yet surveys (the basis of these “lots of people believe in ESP” claims) reveal that people have lots of demonstrably false beliefs, often strong beliefs, especially on topics where they get little feedback. Bryan Caplan has many such: basic facts about the economy, demographics, toxicology, risks of death. People believe having sex with virgins cures HIV, despite the absence of any actual documented examples. They form superstitions about homeopathic placebos and acupuncture.
People do not get feedback about their capricious/subtle psi beliefs (healing that heals amputees does get enough negative feedback that it’s a rare belief), and can get utility out of believing they have psi or that the world is magical, indeed will often go out of their way to protect the belief.
I contest. Biological systems are hot and noisy, and quantum effects are at the wrong scales in nervous systems. Second, quantum computation!= telepathy, ESP, telekinesis, etc. Usually these arguments are of the form “QM and ESP are mysterious, and could be related” or “this interpretation of QM assumes nonlocal effects, or even nonlocal effects driven by magic consciousness, so there’s a proof of concept for nonlocal ESP”. These are nonsense. I would want to see an example of a good argument for quantum computation-psi connections.
Claims of psi powers tend to expand to fill the gaps of observation and alternative explanation. E.g. flying witches in Africa, jinn turning people into animals, etc. Claims that psi is small seem to be a “God of the Gaps” side-effect of modern recording technologies and other developments, rewriting the prior ex post. Repelling bullets, visible healing, visible telekinesis, and similar dramatic powers have often been claimed as effects “in the wild” but they always retreat from sight. We have casinos, the stock market, and similar opportunities for precognition, telekinesis could show up in sporting events, etc, etc.
Actually, all sorts of nifty research on falling in love has been performed with useful predictions about oxytocin levels, fidelity, various sorts of future self-report, divorce, frequency of sex, etc, etc. Experiments in the lab can do quite a lot to distinguish couples in love or not, and to increase or decrease it. That’s more of a rhetorical trick, insofar as we use “falling in love” in a lot of signalling games and to some extent we’re unwilling to identify it with any natural kinds that actually exist.
Where is the animal psi? What organs do it? How do the inputs affect human responses and behavior? How did the capacity evolve in the first place, and if it did evolve, why didn’t it keep doing so?
Well, it seems that way to pro-psi researchers, but it’s not so different from research into unrelated bogus phenomena where researchers are motivated to keep trying different angles of attack, e.g. cross-country international development models in economics.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that that part is plausible as I haven’t looked into it at all. But the “too hot and noisy” objection seems less certain now that there’s research into quantum “computation” allowing for photosynthesis as well as something else quantum involved in birds’ navigation. Links here. As you suggest, perhaps it should be presumed irrelevant until some plausible mechanism connecting it to psi is proposed.
Yeah, um, basic sanity fail on my part. Not a good sign.
Re common false beliefs, you obviously know significantly more about the subject than I do. Are there any books you’d recommend?
Point conceded. Until I look at the literature more closely I’ll agree with you that the lack of large effects seems is a decent chunk of evidence against psi.
It would seem that the only psi-friendly explanation of the weak results from parapsychology then would be something like actively evasive psi. You say similar hypotheses have shown up to explain the lack of certain expected phenomena in macroeconomics? Or, might you explain the connection?
By the way thank you for talking to me about this stuff, very few people have the prerequisite knowledge/skills/patience to do so fruitfully.
I’m starting to think that maybe all evidence I have for psi is incommunicable. Bleh!
I was referring to data-mining for correlations to produce predictive rules using historical datasets of country growth rates, rules which then fail badly when applied to new datasets. Beliefs in stronger causal conclusions persist, and folk with such beliefs talk about how the processes of growth are changing over time, or the great difficulty of pulling conclusions from the noisy data. The closest think to “actively evasive psi” would probably be academic claims to have found predictive rules for stock and other liquid markets: “my data-mined rule was for real, but now that I’ve published the markets are taking it into account, which is why it no longer works.”
The evidential part of intuitions or personal psi experiences are communicable (save for the possibility of conscious lies, but it’s pretty clear that those are not needed), a bigger dataset of intuitions is better than a single case, etc. Robin’s common priors paper is relevant here.
It’s a bit of a tangent, but I thought the recent stuff about some special “quantum” coherence enabling photosynthesis was mostly hype, as it could happen just the same classically.
Do you mean this in the trivial sense, or are you making a stronger claim against the heuristics and biases literature?
This sense. I don’t think the heuristics and biases literature is among the worst psychological subfields in terms of quality. I don’t think it is the best.