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Comment on Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?

I’m not saying “rare data in general is not valuable”.

Not observing hawking radiation in a situation where no theory predicts hawking radiation is neither evidence for nor against the existence of hawking radiation. That would be like taking the lack of NDE in completely healthy people as evidence against NDEs.

I’ll try to state my problem with cherry picking anecdotes about NDE more succinctly.

My hypothesis: These NDE stories are the experience of wacky brain activity arising from near death situations.

Supposed evidence against that hypothesis: Some of these stories involve people knowing stuff they shouldn’t have been able to know.

My hypothesis to explain that “supernatural” knowledge:

Sometimes people notice things subconsciously, and sometimes other people could have been tipped off about information in ways other people don’t realize.
Sometimes people guess things correctly

The problem with relying on anecdotes is:

Memory is fallible and people’s accounts of events are often affected by discussion after the fact as well as what they “want” to think about the event
This is the confirmation bias part. If you only record correct guesses, it doesn’t seem like they are guessing.

Let’s there’s a tik tok trend and 1000 people ask someone to guess the result of 10 coin flips. One of them gets them all correct! Wow that’s amazing that person must have supernatural powers! (Nope it’s just statistics).

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ageedizzle@piefed.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Okay thanks for clarifying. I see what you’re saying. I think your stance is basically this: a broken clock is right at least twice a day, so sometimes people might make correct guesses about what happened when they were flatlining, but that’s to be expected. (Please correct me if this is a mischaracterization.)

I’d say, yes, a broken clock is right sometimes, but not very often. You seem to agree with this so you’re trying to show that the total numbers of potentially paranormal NDEs is a small fraction of the total number of NDEs. But I’m very weary of this. Because the way we’re going about it here is very unstructured. Because we don’t know how many NDEs there are total, how many seem potentially supernatural, how many seem mundane, the ratio between them, etc. If we want to crunch the numbers then we would need to look at a particular study, otherwise I don’t think there’s any use. It would all just be guesswork.

My hypothesis to explain that “supernatural” knowledge:

Sometimes people notice things subconsciously, and sometimes other people could have been tipped off about information in ways other people don’t realize.

You seem to be concerned, here, that people who come back from an NDE may misattribute the source of their information. They may get information from a mundane source then effectively launder it, misattributing it to a supernatural source. (For example a person that is mistakenly labeled as brain-dead might actually only be comatose. This would allow them to hear conversations in the room and recount what happened afterwards. This seems spooky but nothing out of the ordinary is going on here.) This is a perfectly legitimate concern. And it’s a valid hypothesis. We can call it the information laundering hypothesis.

But let me ask you: what would it take for this hypothesis to be disproved? Could you conceive of some scenario where you’d be satisfied that there truly was no physical means for the NDE patient to have accessed that information? For example, what if the patient knew what was going on in another room that was out of earshot? And what if the patient was the only person in Room A who knew what was going on in Room B (so no one could have tipped them off)? Or what if the patient knew about what object(s) were placed in some inaccessible area, even though practically speaking no one could have known this unless they had a unique vantage point? Can you conceive of any scenarios like this that would more-or-less disqualify the information laundering hypothesis?
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- WolfLink@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I don’t think any one anecdote or even a collection of anecdotes would convince me because of the explanations I layed out.
  
  I can think of an experiment, which would be something like to hide a box with a computer that displays one of 3 colors, selected randomly and recorded by the computer so nobody can know what color was displayed until inspecting the computer later. Ask people if they had an out-of-body experience, and if they noticed the box and looked inside. Ask people who answered affirmatively to that what color was in the box, and do a statistical analysis of the results.
  
  Even if you aren’t going to do a controlled experiment, you have to make sure your interviews of patients include every patient who had a near death experience over the course of your study.
  
  Reviews of anecdotes that were only recorded because they are interesting is not a productive way to answer this question.
  
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  - ageedizzle@piefed.ca ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    How do you distinguish between an anecdote snd a case study?
    
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    WolfLink@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    A “case study” is more formal than an anecdote, but still has the same issues.
    
    Here’s a quote from the end of the “Limitations” section of the Wikipedia article on “Case Study”:
    
    As small-N research should not rely on random sampling, scholars must be careful in avoiding selection bias when picking suitable cases. A common criticism of qualitative scholarship is that cases are chosen because they are consistent with the scholar’s preconceived notions, resulting in biased research.
    
    Another quote from earlier in that section:
    
    The authors’ recommendation is to increase the number of observations … because few observations make it harder to estimate multiple causal effects, as well as increase the risk that there is measurement error, and that an event in a single case was caused by random error or unobservable factors.
    
    The “Uses” section of that article starts with:
    
    Case studies have commonly been seen as a fruitful way to come up with hypotheses and generate theories. Case studies are useful for understanding outliers or deviant cases.
    
    Lower down that section has:
    
    Case studies of cases that defy existing theoretical expectations may contribute knowledge by delineating why the cases violate theoretical predictions and specifying the scope conditions of the theory.
    
    Case studies are used to guide experimental and quantitative research, but are not a replacement for that part of the research process.
    
    Applying that to case studies that appear to involve the supernatural, sufficient convincing case studies should lead to theories about the conditions for supernatural events, which should lead to experiments or quantitative studies to test those theories.
    
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