A friend and I are arguing over ghosts.

I think it’s akin to astrology, homeopathy and palm reading. He says there’s “convincing “ evidence for its existence. He also took up company time to make a meme to illustrate our relative positions. (See image)

(To be fair, I’m also on the clock right now)

What do you think?

    • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      2 months ago

      That’s a number I threw out there to estimate how many near death experiences might have happened, studied or not, and that’s why it’s such a problem to only focus on the anecdotal cases that get recorded because they are interesting.

      A proper study doesn’t need to include 1,000,000 cases, but it does need to ensure that it doesn’t have bias in the cases it does include.

        • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          2 months ago

          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:

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

          The problem with relying on anecdotes is:

          1. 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
          2. 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).

            • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
              1·
              2 months 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.

                • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
                  1·
                  2 months 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.

        • clean_anion@programming.dev
          1·
          2 months ago

          Claims of the supernatural are a subset of correct claims. We can’t comment on the supernatural aspect if all we know is that a claim is correct. This is affirming the consequent.

            • clean_anion@programming.dev
              1·
              2 months ago

              I also agree that there is something that superficially seems to be supernatural. However, I believe that the reason things appear to be supernatural is because all supernatural-looking events (i.e. all correct predictions about a room) are being presented as supernatural despite random guesses accounting for a lot of these. Whether or not these events are actually supernatural may be checked by the experiment I proposed in another reply. Please do tell me your thoughts on that experiment.