Practically speaking, this may cause us to disregard the evidence. This would be akin to resisting a Pascal’s mugging. Imagine I do a literature review on the evidence for telepathy, put all the pieces of evidence along with my prior into a spreadsheet, and crunch the numbers. Let’s say the result is that my priors on telepathy being real remain extremely low. You then run another study on telepathy that again finds that it’s real. I might decide that it’s not even worth my time to plug the data from your study into my spreadsheet.
Imagine you live earlier in history. Attempts to triangulate the distance away from the earth that stars are fails—in order to calculate that you need two perspectives that are far enough apart. But the method fails. And this tells you stars are unimaginably far away.
After looking at the numbers, you discount this possibility. There’s no way they’re that far away.
Imagine you live earlier in history. Attempts to triangulate the distance away from the earth that stars are fails—in order to calculate that you need two perspectives that are far enough apart. But the method fails. And this tells you stars are unimaginably far away.
After looking at the numbers, you discount this possibility. There’s no way they’re that far away.