But I’m curious now, is there a fairly sizable contingent of academic/evidential dualists in the rationalist community?
It’s more empirical than ideological for me. There are these pockets of “something’s not clear here”, where similar things keep being observed, don’t line up with any current scientific explanation, and even people who don’t seem obviously biased start going “hey, something’s off here”. There’s the recent US Navy UFO sightings thing that nobody seems to know what to make of, there’s Darryl Bem’s 2011 ESP study that follows stuff by people like Dean Radin who seem to keep claiming the existence of a very specific sort of PSI effect. Damien Broderick’s Outside the Gates of Science was an interesting overview of this stuff.
I don’t think I’ve heard much of reincarnation research recently, but it was one of the three things Carl Sagan listed as having enough plausible-looking evidence for them that people should look a lot more carefully into them in The Demon-Haunted World in 1996, when the book was otherwise all about claims of the paranormal and religious miracles being bunk. I guess the annoying thing with reincarnation is that it’s very hard to study rigorously if brains are basically black boxes. The research is postulating whole new physics, so things should be established with the same sort of mechanical rigor and elimination of degrees of freedom as existing physics is, and “you ask people to tell you stories and try to figure out if the story checks out but it’s completely implausible for the person telling it to you to know it” is beyond terrible degrees-of-freedom-wise if you think of it like a physicist.
When you keep hearing about the same sort of weird stuff happening and don’t seem to have a satisfying explanation for what’s causing it, that makes it sound like there’s maybe some things that ought to be poked with a stick there.
On the other hand, there’s some outside view concerns. Whatever weird thing is going on seems to be either not really there after all, or significantly weirder than any resolved scientific phenomenon so far. Scientists took reports of PSI seriously in the early 20th century and got started trying to study them (Alan Turing was still going “yeah, human telepathy is totally a thing” in his Turing Test paper). What followed was a lot of smart people looking into the shiny new thing and accomplishing very little. Susan Blackmore spent decades studying parapsychology and ended up vocally disillusioned. Dean Radin seems to think that the PSI effect is verified, but it’s so slight that “so go win the Randi Prize” doesn’t make sense because the budget for a statistically conclusive experiment would be bigger than the prize money. And now we’re in the middle of the replication crisis (which Radin mentions zero times in a book he published in 2018), and psychology experiments that report some very improbable phenomenon look a lot less plausible than they did 15 years ago.
The UFO stuff also seems to lead people into strange directions of thinking that something seems to be going on, but it doesn’t seem to be possible for it to be physical spacecraft. Jacques Vallée ended up going hard on this path and pissed off the science-minded UFOlogists. More recently, Greg Cochran and Lesswrong’s own James Miller talked about the Navy UFO reports and how the reported behavior doesn’t seem to make sense for any physically real object on Miller’s podcast (part 1, part 2).
So there’s a problem with the poke things with a stick idea. A lot of smart people have tried, and have had very little progress in the 70 years since the consensus as reported by Alan Turing was that yeah this looks like it’s totally a thing.
One of the best, approachable overviews of all this I’ve ever read. I’ve dabbled in some, but not all of the topics you’ve raised here, and I certainly know about the difficulties they’ve all faced with increasing to a scientific level of rigor. What I’ve always said is that parapsychology needs Doctor Strange to become real, and he’s not here yet and probably never will be. Otherwise, every attempt at “proof” is going to be dealing with some combination of unfalsifiability, minuscule effect sizes, or severe replication issues. The only related phenomenon that has anything close to a Doctor Strange is, well, reincarnation—it’s had a good few power players who’d convince anyone mildly sympathetic. And it lacks the above unholy trinity of bad science; lack of verification would mean falsification, and it’s passed that with flying colors, the effect sizes and significance get massive quick even within individual cases, and they sure do keep on coming with exactly the same thing. But it certainly needs to do a lot better, and that’s why it has to move beyond Stevenson’s methodology to start creating its own evidence. So my progressive approach holds that, if it is to stand on its own merit, then it is time to unleash its full capacity and conduct a wholesale destruction of normalcy with it; if such an operation fails, then it has proven too epistemically weak to be worthy of major attention if it is genuine at all.
It’s more empirical than ideological for me. There are these pockets of “something’s not clear here”, where similar things keep being observed, don’t line up with any current scientific explanation, and even people who don’t seem obviously biased start going “hey, something’s off here”. There’s the recent US Navy UFO sightings thing that nobody seems to know what to make of, there’s Darryl Bem’s 2011 ESP study that follows stuff by people like Dean Radin who seem to keep claiming the existence of a very specific sort of PSI effect. Damien Broderick’s Outside the Gates of Science was an interesting overview of this stuff.
I don’t think I’ve heard much of reincarnation research recently, but it was one of the three things Carl Sagan listed as having enough plausible-looking evidence for them that people should look a lot more carefully into them in The Demon-Haunted World in 1996, when the book was otherwise all about claims of the paranormal and religious miracles being bunk. I guess the annoying thing with reincarnation is that it’s very hard to study rigorously if brains are basically black boxes. The research is postulating whole new physics, so things should be established with the same sort of mechanical rigor and elimination of degrees of freedom as existing physics is, and “you ask people to tell you stories and try to figure out if the story checks out but it’s completely implausible for the person telling it to you to know it” is beyond terrible degrees-of-freedom-wise if you think of it like a physicist.
When you keep hearing about the same sort of weird stuff happening and don’t seem to have a satisfying explanation for what’s causing it, that makes it sound like there’s maybe some things that ought to be poked with a stick there.
On the other hand, there’s some outside view concerns. Whatever weird thing is going on seems to be either not really there after all, or significantly weirder than any resolved scientific phenomenon so far. Scientists took reports of PSI seriously in the early 20th century and got started trying to study them (Alan Turing was still going “yeah, human telepathy is totally a thing” in his Turing Test paper). What followed was a lot of smart people looking into the shiny new thing and accomplishing very little. Susan Blackmore spent decades studying parapsychology and ended up vocally disillusioned. Dean Radin seems to think that the PSI effect is verified, but it’s so slight that “so go win the Randi Prize” doesn’t make sense because the budget for a statistically conclusive experiment would be bigger than the prize money. And now we’re in the middle of the replication crisis (which Radin mentions zero times in a book he published in 2018), and psychology experiments that report some very improbable phenomenon look a lot less plausible than they did 15 years ago.
The UFO stuff also seems to lead people into strange directions of thinking that something seems to be going on, but it doesn’t seem to be possible for it to be physical spacecraft. Jacques Vallée ended up going hard on this path and pissed off the science-minded UFOlogists. More recently, Greg Cochran and Lesswrong’s own James Miller talked about the Navy UFO reports and how the reported behavior doesn’t seem to make sense for any physically real object on Miller’s podcast (part 1, part 2).
So there’s a problem with the poke things with a stick idea. A lot of smart people have tried, and have had very little progress in the 70 years since the consensus as reported by Alan Turing was that yeah this looks like it’s totally a thing.
One of the best, approachable overviews of all this I’ve ever read. I’ve dabbled in some, but not all of the topics you’ve raised here, and I certainly know about the difficulties they’ve all faced with increasing to a scientific level of rigor. What I’ve always said is that parapsychology needs Doctor Strange to become real, and he’s not here yet and probably never will be. Otherwise, every attempt at “proof” is going to be dealing with some combination of unfalsifiability, minuscule effect sizes, or severe replication issues. The only related phenomenon that has anything close to a Doctor Strange is, well, reincarnation—it’s had a good few power players who’d convince anyone mildly sympathetic. And it lacks the above unholy trinity of bad science; lack of verification would mean falsification, and it’s passed that with flying colors, the effect sizes and significance get massive quick even within individual cases, and they sure do keep on coming with exactly the same thing. But it certainly needs to do a lot better, and that’s why it has to move beyond Stevenson’s methodology to start creating its own evidence. So my progressive approach holds that, if it is to stand on its own merit, then it is time to unleash its full capacity and conduct a wholesale destruction of normalcy with it; if such an operation fails, then it has proven too epistemically weak to be worthy of major attention if it is genuine at all.