Well ok I do not mean some kind of visions, voice etc. (I mean it can happen but I did not experience it). For me it is rather answers to my questions in form of quite unlikely coincidence. But this is for me, I would expect that it is individual.
What would count as successful contact? Can an outside person verify that contact has happened? If someone would convince you that your contact was actually confirmation bias would you change your opinion or probablity in god existing?
That sounds like simple confirmation bias. You notice the times you (coincidentally) get answers, and forget the many more times you don’t. (And then wrongly credit God when He doesn’t deserve it.) And of course seeking helps you find things, even when God is not involved.
I thought about it immediately after reading HPMOR :) . It is just seems to me still quite unlikely (if I would one time out of hundred correctly guess the natural number from the interval from 1 to 100 it would be absolutely a bias; but I feel that for me frequency is significantly higher than the probability).
“I feel that for me” feels very wishy-washy for me.
A feeling is not a statistic. It is very easy to misjudge frequencies and probabilities due to various well-known cognitive heuristics and biases. Credence calibration is a skill, and most people are bad at it.
Are you writing these questions and answers down? Or are you relying on memory—the availability heuristic?
Are you tracking the cases when the answers don’t come to you? When the answer was wrong? If not, that sounds like confirmation bias. You need both sides to compute a likelihood ratio to evaluate evidence.
If you keep seeking until you find the right answer, then obviously questions can only be “answered”, or “not answered yet”. That’s just persistence, and I don’t understand what you think God has to do with it. Do you track the time it takes to get answers?
Have you seriously considered alternative hypotheses? I would expect that simply being mentally open to answers makes you more likely to notice them, even in unexpected places.
Did you use experimental controls, like asking for God’s guidance in some cases and not in others to see if it made any difference? How about asking pagan gods or deceased ancestors? How about asking your own subconscious mind to see if it’s just openness?
Did you ask for any kind of peer review of your methods? Are you keeping score with the kind of scientific rigor that could be peer-reviewed?
You claim in your profile to have a scientific background. The scientific methods that I am describing should not be news to you. You know this stuff already, don’t you? Science has developed these processes to avoid certain well-established epistemological failure modes. But religion tends to get mentally compartmentalized as a “separate magisterium”. I’m suggesting that you also try to avoid these failure modes when thinking about God.
Well ok I do not mean some kind of visions, voice etc. (I mean it can happen but I did not experience it). For me it is rather answers to my questions in form of quite unlikely coincidence. But this is for me, I would expect that it is individual.
What would count as successful contact? Can an outside person verify that contact has happened? If someone would convince you that your contact was actually confirmation bias would you change your opinion or probablity in god existing?
That sounds like simple confirmation bias. You notice the times you (coincidentally) get answers, and forget the many more times you don’t. (And then wrongly credit God when He doesn’t deserve it.) And of course seeking helps you find things, even when God is not involved.
I thought about it immediately after reading HPMOR :) . It is just seems to me still quite unlikely (if I would one time out of hundred correctly guess the natural number from the interval from 1 to 100 it would be absolutely a bias; but I feel that for me frequency is significantly higher than the probability).
“I feel that for me” feels very wishy-washy for me.
A feeling is not a statistic. It is very easy to misjudge frequencies and probabilities due to various well-known cognitive heuristics and biases. Credence calibration is a skill, and most people are bad at it.
Are you writing these questions and answers down? Or are you relying on memory—the availability heuristic?
Are you tracking the cases when the answers don’t come to you? When the answer was wrong? If not, that sounds like confirmation bias. You need both sides to compute a likelihood ratio to evaluate evidence.
If you keep seeking until you find the right answer, then obviously questions can only be “answered”, or “not answered yet”. That’s just persistence, and I don’t understand what you think God has to do with it. Do you track the time it takes to get answers?
Have you seriously considered alternative hypotheses? I would expect that simply being mentally open to answers makes you more likely to notice them, even in unexpected places.
Did you use experimental controls, like asking for God’s guidance in some cases and not in others to see if it made any difference? How about asking pagan gods or deceased ancestors? How about asking your own subconscious mind to see if it’s just openness?
Did you look at base rates for other people?
Did you ask for any kind of peer review of your methods? Are you keeping score with the kind of scientific rigor that could be peer-reviewed?
You claim in your profile to have a scientific background. The scientific methods that I am describing should not be news to you. You know this stuff already, don’t you? Science has developed these processes to avoid certain well-established epistemological failure modes. But religion tends to get mentally compartmentalized as a “separate magisterium”. I’m suggesting that you also try to avoid these failure modes when thinking about God.