ageedizzle

@ageedizzle@piefed.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  surrounded by people who are willing to believe in nonsense

  Not really lol. Read this post. This post was literally made because my friend and I were disagreeing on this topic. So if my friend was willing to believe in ’nonesense’ why would he post?

  You are a fool.

  I won’t call you a fool but you’re definitely a grumpy little fella. Try taking a nap and having a nice warm bowl of soup. Maybe put the phone down for a bit and go outside. Don’t worry we all have our ups and downs, you’ll feel better eventually.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay. Thanks for your comment. This discussion we’re having here is one of the few threads that hasn’t devolved into name-calling so I appreciate that.

  I have two responses to this.

  The first is that I’m still not so sure I agree with the framing here regarding cherry-picking or bias. Your concern seems to be (and correct me if I’m wrong) something like this: in most cases nothing out of the ordinary happens, so if we only focus on the few cases where something paranormal seems to have happened then we disregard the vast majority of the data and are only focusing on anecdotes. It’s more scientific to focus on the bulk of the data, where nothing interesting happens. (Again, please correct me if this is a misrepresentation.)

  I don’t agree with this characterization because important data is often few and far between. But we shouldn’t discount it simply because it is rare. For example, consider Hawking radiation. From what I hear it’s an important concept in theoretical physics. But Hawking radiation is very hard to observe. In fact, it’s only been observed once, and the observation wasn’t even in the wild; it was in a lab. This was an important observation; it provided experimental support for an important concept. Say I was a physicist and I was sceptical of Hawking radiation. What should I do with this information? Should I say “well, this data doesn’t matter, most of the time we can’t observe Hawking radiation anyway so this data is just anecdotal”? No, that would be an improper response. Sure, this data is rare, but that doesn’t mean I can just label it as anecdotal and reject it on that basis. Because the data, though rare, still is very hard to explain without the concept of Hawking radiation. Similarly: it is possible that interesting data regarding near-death experiences are rare. Does that mean that this data is anecdotal and should be ignored? No. So long as we have cases that are genuinely hard to explain without supernatural explanations (and, I believe, we do) then that data will be very important. Because we still have to explain what was going on in those cases.

  Another example of this is in the Earth sciences, where the large portion of the field is literally trying to create theories to explain one-time events. For example, the extinction of the dinosaurs. Should we reject the theory that they were killed by an asteroid or meteor or whatever simply because that event only happened once, and the event is therefore merely anecdotal? No. Even events that only occur once may require us to construct novel theories. So long as we cannot explain the event with current theoretical frameworks then it is our duty to invoke a new framework. As it is with dinosaurs so too with NDEs: even if there was just one, spectacular event that was difficult to explain with current frameworks, then it is our duty to invoke novel theoretical frameworks (so long as we actually want to know what’s going on). If the data leads us to theories that are paranormal in their character then, oh well, that’s just where we’ll have to go. If we want to follow the data to where it leads, then we cannot rule out certain destinations ahead of time.

  It’s also worth pointing out that focusing on single cases is common practice in psychology and medicine. Sure, it’s not a replacement for theoretical understanding or large-scale studies, but it is still informative (for the reasons mentioned above). When researchers document and discuss a single interesting case it is known as a case study.

  The second thing I wanted to say was regarding your estimates of total NDEs versus potentially paranormal NDEs. You seemed to be trying to aggregate over all the NDEs that have every happened and tried to find the ratio between the NDEs that are interesting versus the one that are amenable to mundane explanations. But I don’t know if this is super helpful. Because, for one thing, we’re largely left guessing at the numbers (how do we how many were interesting? how do we know how many were mundane? there’s literally no way to know). Even if we only look at all the data that we do have then we have to do that in a controlled manner, otherwise we’ll run into issues. If we only run thing haphazardly, back of the envelope style then we don’t know our scope (how many cases are we dealing with?) and we cannot control for any confounding variables (is this data interoperable?) or trace the data chain-of-custody (how did we even get this data to begin with, and how did that colour its presentation?). In short, it’s too messy.

  So what we need, instead, is something more controlled. Ideally for something like this we’d want to look at a meta-analysis. But unfortunately I don’t know if anything with the required scope exists (if you can find one though, let me know). So the second-best thing to look at is an individual study. You mentioned earlier that you were looking at some studies. If you found any that you thought were interesting then it would probably be more productive to poke holes in that study specifically. I would be happy to discuss the merits of any study of your choosing and then take things from there.

  But if we do that then I think the ratios you were discussing in your message would dissolve. This is because its practically impossible to conduct an NDE study with a large sample size (it’s hard to predict if/when/how/where someone will die, and the vast majority of those that do die don’t come back to talk about it). And with small studies even a single hard-to-explain NDE would be a relatively large percentage of the total sample (which should, I think, mitigate the concerns you expressed in your earlier message; but correct me if I’m wrong on that).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  You remind me of Peter Dinklage’s character in this clip here

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank you for this haha. Its very interesting and a nice break from arguing with everyone here

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  This is literally the same justification the church gave to Galileo when they refused to look through his telescope. His discoveries violated what they thought to be the laws of physics at the time, so they knew he was wrong and therefore was no need to even look fo themselves. 

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I am familiar with the sources, yes.

  I’m not sure what you’re looking for here. Do you want me to send you links to some of the research from the bibliography? If so then I can do that when I get home from work

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Why so you care? If you want to discuss, sure, but why go out of your why to just name call people on the internet simply because they disagree with you? Get a life

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  In the topic of near death experiences, if there are 1,000,000 near death experiences and 100 involve someone “knowing something they shouldn’t be able to”, those 100 cases are more likely to be remembered or recorded as significant than the other 900,000 cases

  These are nowhere near the real numbers. No one could realistically conduct a study on near death experiences that included 1,000,000 participants 

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  you seem like an extremely close-minded person 

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The thing is: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A book simply isn’t that. It’s way too easily faked, isn’t subject to the scientific method, peer review, any form of control or critical oversight

  Okay, I revise my request. Please just read the books bibliography and read the peer-reviewed research that it cites.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for your response. If you and I agree on anything it’s that we should do more science to understand this stuff better.

  The scientific method involves looking at both the cases where it seems like something happened and the cases where nothing happened (e.g. someone said they had an experience but it clearly didn’t match reality). If you cherry pick just the events that “showed” what you want, that’s confirmation bias.

  Confirmation bias is real, but this isn’t it. If I believe that all swans are white , and then I come across a black swan, should I just dismiss that data point because it would confirmation bias (perhaps people would accuse me of wanting this outcome)? No. Ignoring the black swan isn’t the way to go here. It wouldn’t be ridding ourselves of confirmation bias, it would be ridding ourselves of critical data that contradicts our starting hypothesis.

  Similarly: even if supernatural stuff that is hard to explain happens in only a percentage of cases, discarding that data isn’t ridding ourselves of confirmation bias; it’s simply choosing to ignore critical data. That’s not good science.

  I instead urge you to go read scientific papers on the topic, and specifically not just the ones that seem to suggest the outcome you want to hear.

  This is what I started with, so for the longest time I was very skeptical, just like most people in this thread. It is my belief that anyone with an open mind who takes in all the information on this topic (including the studies that suggest supernatural outcomes and those that don’t; the first-hand accounts and the skeptical rebuttals) will inevitably come to the same conclusion that I have. That was my experience, anyway. This is not a conclusion I was looking for; I was really stubbornly against this stuff for the longest time, but I was forced to change my mind.

  It’s also worth noting that the book talks about more than just near-death experiences; I just used them as an example.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I would still believe in gravity.

  I believe in helium balloons too. Does that mean I don’t believe in gravity?

  Because if that was true, if this so called credible science in your book wasn’t misinterpreted or simply faked, the scientists responsible would have gotten a nobel price and world wide recognition

  Why do you assume that these scientists would get nobel prizes? Science is still a cultural phenomenon and people have their prejudices. Stigmas exist (as this thread amply reveals). Einstein didn’t even get a nobel prize for special relativity because it was considered too radical at the time.

  There’s simply no good reason for such “credible science” to go unnoticed.

  And why do you assume this science has gone ‘unnoticed’? We’re talking about it, aren’t we? People have spent their lives studying it, and an entire university department at Princeton is devoted to studying these sorts of things. This sort of stuff is frequently brought up and debated in reputable journals such as the Journal of Consciousness Studies (which recently devoted an entire issue to debating the topic of near death experiences iirc). That doesn’t sound very unnoticed to me. Controversial? Sure. But not unnoticed.

  To be honest I’m still not sure why that convinced you.

  Well then you should read the book. Like I said I’m not doing it justice. If you’re actually interested in this topic, and not just interested in taking cheap shots on Lemmy, then read the book.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come in American classrooms they make another language an elective. Why not teach our kids as many languages possible that way if we go somewhere we will kind of have uper hand?⁩ ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Wow thats honestly pretty crazy to me. To me this is like learning Americans don’t learn geometry in school or something. Language learning should be an essential part of any public education system 

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The book addresses these standard debunking claims that you find in this article. Most of these dubunking strategies only work if the person doesn’t know what they are talking about or are leaving out important details and lying by omission. I used to be very skeptical of this sort of stuff (and still consider myself to be a skeptical person, for example I’m still an atheist), and I was a fan of skeptics magazine and all the standard debunkers and the like. This only changed when I decided to actually read the source material and see for myself if there was anything there. It was a very eye-opening experience, because I realized I wasn’t getting the full story. I encourage you to do the same; read the book, but also read all the skeptical rebuttals, and then try to reason through it yourself. I think you will be surprised at what you find. I know I was.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  How can you dismiss a book you’ve never read? You have to admit thats a bit shoddy. Even you’re sure that the book is a crock of shit you won’t know why its a crock of shit (and which rebuttals to apply) until after you’ve finished reading at least part of it.

  Regarding the other stuff: I don’t have the time to get into the weeds on the matter with everyone here so I’m considering this comment here to be my official statement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, hi. Heres another comment I made that explains my position better.

  As per the graph. Is not meant to be “inherently useful”. Its literally just a meme. Its meant to be funny. 

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t want to get bogged down on the stuff about the scientific method because, like I said in my earlier message, I think you actually can make a reasonable scientific case for the existence of the supernatural (and I hope there is more science done on this; unfortunately the social stigma around this makes that kind of a bad career move for most scientists but I’m optimistic that this will improve with time).

  Nevertheless, if you have some decent examples of actual evidence of ghosts, I’m genuinely curious.

  I gave a brief defense of my position in another comment in this thread. I know linking is not great on lemmy but here’s the link to that comment, if you’re interested.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Basically, there are reliable, repeatable and measurable effects that are best explained by people ‘surviving’ their own death. A good example of this is near death experiences. People come back from having been clinically dead and can tell you things that they shouldn’t know. For example like where items are placed on the roof of the hospital or events that transpired when they had no brain activity. These people would have no way of having knowing this stuff unless they’ve seen it for themselves, which would have been physically impossible. So this makes their own fist-person accounts of what happened (“I was out of my body and literally floating around”) start to seem more credible.

  The power of the book is the sheer volume of cases it presents for these sorts of events and other related phenomena. It shows you that events like these do occur reliably and repeatably and are quite literally scientific in that people can and do study them scientifically (and more of this study should occur, but that can only happen if we get past the current social stigma).

  The power of the book is that it just inundates you with credible stories (and credible science!) from credible people, all of which is suggestive of the supernatural. It might be possible to talk yourself into dismissing one or two of these cases, but when you have several hundred of them compiled back-to-back-to-back it becomes harder and harder to find the willpower required to muster up a skeptical response. After a while you have to admit “okay, theres something more going on here, and I don’t understand it”. At least, thats what happened to me.

  It’s a great book though, and I’m not doing it justice. I highly recommend giving it a read. 

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I am familiar with the Gods of the gaps argument. Its not a God of the gaps argument (I’m literally an atheist, if that matters). I don’t know how you can assume that you already know where this book goes wrong without having even read it. Or maybe you got that from my comment? Bur literally no where in my comment did I make any argument, and I certainly didn’t make any Gods of the gaps argument

  This is exactly the problem with this topic, people have an understanding of it based on popular debunkers like Neil Degrasse Tyson or whoever and they think thats all there is left to hear on the topic. They just want to be on the side of science (understandable, I do too!) and see these guys are scientific and think thats it, cased closed. They never actually engage with the subject matter. They acquire a repertoire of buzzwords and debunking strategies that allow them to dismiss everything wholesale, then they never dig any deeper so they never realize the ways in which these skeptical responses are insufficient

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not referring to the Netflix series

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I am the friend OP is referring to and I am also an atheist

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Hi, I’m the friend. I don’t want to reveal too much about my identity here but my science education was actually very thorough (I know that sounds arrogant but I just wanted to defend my honour here). Let’s not get bogged down with personal detail though like that though because ad hominems like this can often cause a conversation to unravel into personal attacks.

  Regarding what my friend said about my views on the scientific method: This is a bit of a mischaracterization. I don’t have anything against the scientific method. I just think that the things we have reason to believe is larger than the things that we can provide evidence for scientifically. (Broadly speaking I think this is a fairly standard view of things.)

  Another way to out this is this. The question is not ‘ is xyz scientific ’ but ‘do we have reason to believe xyz’’? It turns out that if we can demonstrate something scientifically it does give us reason to believe that thing. But there are some things we have reason to believe that we cannot demonstrate scientifically. For example I have good reason to believe solipsism is false, or that chocolate tastes more like coffee than soap, even though I cannot strictly speaking demonstrate these things scientifically (examples like this often have something to do with the subjectivity of the mind, which cannot be directly measured but is nonetheless very apparent to us).

  For the ghost stuff, I think you actually could make a reasonable scientific case for the existence of ghosts (very hot take, I know), but that’s not my primary concern. What I’m worried about is do we have good reason to believe in ghosts? As it happens, I believe the answer to that is yes. The details here might be a bit out of scope for a c/nostupidquestions thread but I’m basing my thoughts here on the book Surviving Death by Leslie Kane . I used to have a similar view as most people in this thread (that ghosts were irrational and unscientific etc) until I read this book and it forced me to change my mind. It’s a great book and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in this topic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren't into LLMs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Well there you go. Hopefully they get around to overthrowing the mobile webkit overlords soon enough

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren't into LLMs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends where you. In some places (I think it was Japan?) Apples practice of not allowing alternative browser engines was deemed anticompetitive and outlawed

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Researchers have found the cause of hallucinations in LLMs, H-Neurons: On the Existence, Impact, and Origin of Hallucination-Associated Neurons in LLMs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Ia it a design flaw? Or is it just false advertising? If I sell you a vacuum by telling you it can mop your flow, is the problem with the vacuum or the way I’m selling the product?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘A feedback loop with no brake’: how an AI doomsday report shook US markets⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  It sucks and its at the point now where were hitting diminishing returns so I’m not sire if it sill get better

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists may have found the holy grail of quantum computing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting, I didn’t know that

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists may have found the holy grail of quantum computing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends how far you are from the Sun

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists may have found the holy grail of quantum computing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, if we had these aboard the International Space Station or a spaceship, we could simply choose to crank the heat down in the computer room. Might actually save energy in that case. 

  Dream big! 

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Federated End-to-End Encrypted Messaging is Coming Soon⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There you go. So I think adding DMs to ActivityPub would add an extra level of convenience