Comment on Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?

• WolfLink@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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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  • ageedizzle@piefed.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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. 

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