Comment on Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?

• WolfLink@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

  source

  • ageedizzle@piefed.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    A “case study” is more formal than an anecdote, but still has the same issues.

    Okay. The distinction doesn’t seem very important to you, so there’s no use for me to waste time quibbling about it here

    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.

    I agree completely. But there are instances in medicine/psychology where it is genuinely difficult, for practical reasons, to carry out large scale studies (though of course we should still try, to best of your ability). I believe NDEs are in this camp (see this comment here I made about difficulties in performing a study like the one you described in your last comment).

    Now, before you completely dismiss NDEs for this, consider other issues with similar practical hurdles to their study. I think the short term results of corpus callosotomy (ie split brain surgery) is a good example here. This is a surgery where you basically severe a large number of connections between the brain’s right and left hemispheres; it used to be a treatment for epilepsy. This surgery is very interesting because it causes the two halves of the brain to basically act independently of one another, which lead to comical scenarios (such as fights breaking out between the right and left hand, for example). However these effects are most pronounced in the months immediately following the surgery. With time the two hemispheres learn compensate and forge new connections, allowing greater cooperation between them (though, granted, they will never return to the level of cooperation they had before). 

    It’s hard to construct a study on the immediate effects of these surgeries, for a few reason. For one, they are almost never performed anymore, and when they were performed they weren’t performed frequently enough: at any given time, the sample size of people who just had that surgery in the last few months is probably 0, and the highest its ever gotten is probably around 2 or 3. That’s hardly enough to base a study off of. And even if we were to base a study off of that, there are further issues. For one, how do you create an adequate control group (one that accounts for placebo or exaggeration)? Do we pretend to perform this surgery on some people when we actually didn’t? That seems tricky. Leaving fake surgical scars would not pass the ethics review. It would also never pass the ethics board to perform this surgery on people who don’t need it (ie people without epilepsy) but that would be the only way to control for that potentially confounding variable.

    Despite these challenges, the case studies we have here are pretty illuminating. They seem to provide us with a genuine understanding of what the near term effects of these surgeries actually are. This is not generally considered to be controversial.

    I’m sure you can see the comparison I’m driving at here. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on it. 

    source

    • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yes, there are difficulties in the design of experiments and studies sometimes. Things like control groups and placebos are designed to rule out certain very common confounding variables. If you cannot have a placebo, you might still be able to get useful data by other means. For example, sometimes comparison to an existing drug is used instead of comparison to a placebo.

      Ultimately it all comes down to statistics. Typically, you start with “assuming” the “null hypothesis” (basically that you are wrong). For example: that your medicine doesn’t work and/or has bad side effects. Your goal is to find evidence to reject that null hypothesis with sufficient confidence. This can be done by any means, but statistics should be your guide, and you have to be careful about bias and confounding factors, and standard study formats and advice are tried-and-true reliable methods to avoid common issues. But if those don’t work for some reason, it is ok to get creative, as long as your math checks out.

      If you can’t run a standard study, you should try coming up with a creative study. If you can’t come up with a way to correct all the issues, you might try studying related topics. If you really can’t gather meaningful information about your topic, that’s tough but I absolutely reject the idea that you should take something as true without true evidence just because it’s too difficult to get that evidence.

      In your specific example of corpus callostomy, I would bet that 100% of cases where this surgery was performed were well documented, including follow up visits. That’s fantastic for your statistics, and means you don’t have to worry about a lot of sampling issues that you would otherwise have to correct for. You might not be able to perform experiments or new studies on the topic, but you can certainly learn from the documented cases, and you can look at studies on related topics like brain injuries, or experiment with animals (the ethics of that is a whole other debate).

      An example of how this kind of reasoning works (note that I’m making up the specifics here): 100% of people who got this surgery had a post-surgery event where left-and-right hands fought. It seems like this is related to the surgery, but we have to be sure it’s caused by the surgery and not just some confounding factor like the symptoms that cause people to get this surgery in the first place. So we do a study of people who have symptoms that would have qualified them for the surgery, but instead get a different treatment or no treatment. If none or very few of those people have left/right arm fights, then we can say we have sufficient evidence that this symptom is caused by the surgery.

      This is very different from the NDE topic, in which a huge number of people suffer near-death situations, and only a tiny fraction of those end up with supernatural experiences. We want to prove these supernatural experiences are real, but the incidence rate is so low it could just be statistical noise. To show evidence of the supernatural you’d need some way to demonstrate that it’s not just statistical noise or other “mundane” / “null hypothesis” explanations.

      I want to mention a more science-y topic that fits into this pattern I read about the other day. If you are interested let me know and I’ll try to dig up the sources.

      There is a significant amount of neurons throughout the body (outside the brain). One particularly large collection of those is in the heart. This is sometimes called the “brain of the heart” and is in charge of controlling the heart muscles with only high-level instructions from the brain. There was a hypothesis that some other behavior might happen in that heart-brain such as storing memories. This idea came from a couple case studies where a heart transplant recipient would seem to gain memories or personality traits from the donor. These cases sounded a lot like the typical “paranormal knowledge” story. Two particular cases were someone liking a food they didn’t like before but the donor did, and a child avoiding a toy that donor had with them when they died. Personality change is common after transplants in general, presumably because of the immense stress and changing life habits related to the situation. So a study was done, where they interviewed a selection of transplant recipients of both the heart and other organs and recorded any personality changes to see personality changes in general, or if some specific types of personality changes, were more common among heart transplant recipients than others. The results showed that the only statistical difference between the heart and other organs was personality changes related to sports or exercise, which has the much more mundane explanation of being a result of the symptoms of having an y healthy vs healthy heart.

      Disproving ideas is just as important as proving them. That’s the whole reason for the scientific process: to make sure what we accept as fact is very likely to be fact.

      source

      • ageedizzle@piefed.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        I absolutely reject the idea that you should take something as true without true evidence just because it’s too difficult to get that evidence.

        So do I.

        This idea came from a couple case studies where a heart transplant recipient would seem to gain memories or personality traits from the donor. These cases sounded a lot like the typical “paranormal knowledge” story. Two particular cases were someone liking a food they didn’t like before but the donor did, and a child avoiding a toy that donor had with them when they died.

        Being able to accurately describe the location of objects (in or outside the room) or describe specialized medical equipment, the appearance of the doctors in the room (even if the patient hadn’t met them before or after), and so on. This is all very strange stuff. To have hallucinated this stuff perfectly would be remarkable. Forget about being dead, some of these stories would be impressive even if the patient just had their eyes closed (or, in some cases, even if their eyes were wide open). In comparison, someone changing their toy or food preferences to more closely align with those of a particular stranger is, really, not that shocking. So I don’t think this is a fair comparison at all.

        Again, we are running into the same issues we had before regarding your statistical noise hypothesis. We don’t know how many NDEs occur, or what percentage of them are reported to have components that require supernatural explanations. So to assert that it’s all just statistical noise is to assume, without any data, that these numbers are going to match what you’re looking for. Despite our data being constrained here, I actually think the absence of certain kinds of data counts strongly against the statistical noise hypothesis.

        Because, if the statistical noise hypothesis were correct, it would be extremely common for patients to hallucinate what was going on in the hospital room inaccurately. But all the reports I get are of one of two categories:

        • [1] reports of visiting another realm (these are the most common types of cases) or
        • [2] reports of staying in the hospital and observing what is going on with surprising accuracy (these are the most interesting cases).

        But I am not aware of even a single report of a third category of case,

        • [3] reports of staying in the hospital and observing what is going wrong with total inaccuracy.

        And I get that cases in the third category would be less likely to be reported on because those cases are less interesting. I see that concern. But we have to appreciate how, given your hypothesis, just how thoroughly these inaccurate accounts would dwarf all these seemingly supernatural ones. Cases in the third category would outnumber cases in the first category by the thousands at least (realistically, it would be more like the millions, due to the sheer level of detail in some cases in the first category, and just how unlikely it would be to hallucinate that detail accurately). If it really were the case that cases in the first category were so common then I would expect at minimum at least one or two of these inaccurate hallucinations to be reported in the medical literature. But I am not aware of a single case like this (is there really not one doctor that would write in their notes, “patient reported this and that occurred in the operating room, but he was wrong”?). So I have a challenge for you: can you identify even a single case that matches the description in (3)? After all, if you’re right, then these types of cases would be extremely plentiful so even if only 0.01% of these cases in the third category are reported on, it should still be fairly easy for you to identify at least one.

        So, to sum it up, you’re making a number of assumptions here. The first assumption is that these NDE cases are banal enough that they could be ‘statistical noise’ (which, I think, is demonstrable false; these are not cases where someone changes their food preferences, they are cases where someone has detailed information that they should not have). Then you are assuming that there are an extraordinarily large number of NDE cases where people inaccurately report on what is going on in the hospital when they are going through an NDE (though this second assumption isn’t demonstrably false, it is at least extremely suspect since there doesn’t seem to be any cases like this reported in the medical literature, despite the extreme frequency of their occurrence). So your statistical noise hypothesis relies on these two assumptions, and both of them seem to collapse under scrutiny.

        On top of that there are other things going on, too, such as preterminal lucidity, that also point to the possibility that we ‘survive’ our death. If you recall from my earlier comments, I was using NDE as an example from a particular book (Surviving Death by Leslie Kane). I chose NDEs because they are an example that is familiar to a lot of people. But it was only one chapter from the book, and it was one of the least interesting chapters. I’m not saying this because I think this book is the ultimate source of truth on this topic, I’m just saying that there is more than just NDEs to suggest that death is not the end. Unfortunately this stuff is so thoroughly stigmatized that people can’t even bring themselves to look at this data. But any honest person that did would realize, at the very least, that this stigma is unwarranted.

        source