I am an atheist who does not believe in the super natural. Great. Tons of evidence and well thought out reasoning on my side.
But… well… a few things have happened in my life that I find rather difficult to explain. I feel like a statistician looking at a data set with a nice normal distribution… and a few very low probability outliers. Did I just get a weird sample, or is something going on here? I figure that they are most likely to be just weird data points, but they are weird enough to bother me.
Let me give you one example. A few years ago I had a dream that I was eating and out of the blue I discovered a shard of glass in my mouth. The dream bothered me so much that I had a flash back to the dream the next day as I was walking down the road. For me that’s extremely unusual. It’s rare that I can even remember a dream, and when I do they certainly don’t bother me the next day. So, the day after that I was eating a salad and crunch. I spat out what was in my mouth and there was a seriously nasty looking slither of glass. I didn’t cut my mouth or anything, no harm done. I just hit it with my tooth.
To the best of my knowledge that was the only time I’ve ever found glass in something I was eating, and it was the only time I’ve had a vivid dream about it that bothered me the next day (or any dream about it all). I didn’t have any particular glass eating phobia before all this took place (except for a normal aversion to the idea), and I haven’t been worried about it since (ok, except for looking rather carefully at salads from that particular cafeteria for a few weeks afterwards). Was this all just a really weird coincidence? As far as I can make out the probabilities are just too low to be ignored. To make matters worse, I have a few other stories that I find just as difficult to explain away as coincidence.
Now, I wouldn’t say that I “believe” that something seriously weird is going on here. That would be much too strong. However, because I don’t feel that I can adequately account for some of my observations of the world, I think I must assign a small probability that there is something very seriously strange going on in the universe and that these events were not weird flukes.
I have other things to say but that would get into topics currently banned from this blog :-/
Of all the people who live in the world, should the lucky thousand who witness the events that are a million times too unlikely to witness for any single individual, start believing in supernatural, while the rest shouldn’t?
No, but if those thousand people don’t know if they are part of the thousand or not, after all in any normal situation I wouldn’t tell these stories to anybody, shouldn’t they assume that they probably aren’t part of the 1 in 1000 and thus adjust their posterior distribution accordingly?
I know about the birthday effect and similar. (I do math and stats for a living.) The problem is that when I try to estimate the probability of having these events happen I get probabilities that are too small.
Well, I’m getting my karma eaten so I’ll return to being quiet about these events. :-)
I am an atheist who does not believe in the super natural. Great. Tons of evidence and well thought out reasoning on my side.
But… well… a few things have happened in my life that I find rather difficult to explain. I feel like a statistician looking at a data set with a nice normal distribution… and a few very low probability outliers. Did I just get a weird sample, or is something going on here? I figure that they are most likely to be just weird data points, but they are weird enough to bother me.
Let me give you one example. A few years ago I had a dream that I was eating and out of the blue I discovered a shard of glass in my mouth. The dream bothered me so much that I had a flash back to the dream the next day as I was walking down the road. For me that’s extremely unusual. It’s rare that I can even remember a dream, and when I do they certainly don’t bother me the next day. So, the day after that I was eating a salad and crunch. I spat out what was in my mouth and there was a seriously nasty looking slither of glass. I didn’t cut my mouth or anything, no harm done. I just hit it with my tooth.
To the best of my knowledge that was the only time I’ve ever found glass in something I was eating, and it was the only time I’ve had a vivid dream about it that bothered me the next day (or any dream about it all). I didn’t have any particular glass eating phobia before all this took place (except for a normal aversion to the idea), and I haven’t been worried about it since (ok, except for looking rather carefully at salads from that particular cafeteria for a few weeks afterwards). Was this all just a really weird coincidence? As far as I can make out the probabilities are just too low to be ignored. To make matters worse, I have a few other stories that I find just as difficult to explain away as coincidence.
Now, I wouldn’t say that I “believe” that something seriously weird is going on here. That would be much too strong. However, because I don’t feel that I can adequately account for some of my observations of the world, I think I must assign a small probability that there is something very seriously strange going on in the universe and that these events were not weird flukes.
I have other things to say but that would get into topics currently banned from this blog :-/
I’ll answer with a koan.
Of all the people who live in the world, should the lucky thousand who witness the events that are a million times too unlikely to witness for any single individual, start believing in supernatural, while the rest shouldn’t?
No, but if those thousand people don’t know if they are part of the thousand or not, after all in any normal situation I wouldn’t tell these stories to anybody, shouldn’t they assume that they probably aren’t part of the 1 in 1000 and thus adjust their posterior distribution accordingly?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlewood%27s_Law_of_Miracles
Also the Birthday effect, as the coincidence was a match between two different events.
I know about the birthday effect and similar. (I do math and stats for a living.) The problem is that when I try to estimate the probability of having these events happen I get probabilities that are too small.
Well, I’m getting my karma eaten so I’ll return to being quiet about these events. :-)
http://www.unicornjelly.com/oldforums/viewtopic.php?p=135082