I will give you the benefit of the doubt, and say you were mistaken.
How was I mistaken?
About the circumstances, your buddy, the guy and the girlfriend; any number of things may not have been what you perceived them to be. That doesn’t make you a liar.
I didn’t mean to imply that you or anybody else was saying I might be a liar. If it was perceived that way, I apologizet.
True, things may have been what we perceived them to be but also, things may have been exactly as we perceived them to be. I don’t know and I don’t particularily care one way or another. It was an oddity that happened in my life that I don’t automatically write off as coincidence and seek the most mundane or prosaic explanations for.
Some of us were guessing birthdays at a party one time and the third person I guessed I got right. Someone I’d never met before. People swore we were in cahoots on it. It was totally random.
And that is the problem with using personal anecdotes as evidence of paranormal activity (or anything else for that matter). Too many things are ambiguous and the best conclusion you can derive from them is, “maybe, maybe not”. That is why the scientific method, using peer-reviewed, double-blind studies that can be repeated is the the only way to come to any definitive conclusion about the existence of spooks.
But that is the most likely cause isn’t it? Life is mostly mundane and prosaic. If you hear hoof beats, do you automatically assume it might be zebras?
I don’t disagree with you at all. Way more often than not it is something mundane and prosaic. When I hear hoof beats I’m hoping it’s a Unicorn, just once in my life and I’ll be happy as a clam in sand.
I once threw two triple-sixes in a row while playing Risk. What are the odds?
For one throw, (1/6)^6=.0000214335 or 1/46656. For 1000 rolls over the course of a lifetime (say), about 2%. So this might happen to one in 50 players. Now think about the number of spooky things that could occur - I suspect that a few of them will happen to most people over the course of their lives.
Am I the only one who used to use them at slumber parties to ask, “Who likes me?” and questions like that?
Dude, all that has to have happened would be for your buddy to have heard her middle name before. Then when the girlfriend suggested you ask the board her middle name, innocently thinking that neither of you knew it, he realizes in a split second that he can pull off a cool trick and guides the planchette to the appropriate letters.
And Occam’s razor is a single-edged blade, in actuality - it’s actually not about always choosing the most likely option, it’s really about always choosing not to take the option that requires you to believe in extra unproven things. Which means that it is always going to guide you away from choosing the spectral option when there are other ones available that don’t require believing in anything unusual.
Deception wouldn’t even be necessary. It’s quite possible that jakesteele’s buddy heard the name before but at a subliminal level. Without consciously retrieving the information, his “brain made him move” the planchette to the correct middle name without him being aware of doing it. It’s a well-documented phenomenon.
My friend had never met the gal, the boyfriend had just told us about her a few days before, and unless your name is a ‘Bobby Joe Dupree’ name like down south, people very rarely tell you their middle name unless you ask for it or see something they have written. This could have happened but to ALWAYS seek the mundane/prosaic answer in an attempt to debunk, not to objectively asses and weigh all possibilities, is not being open to anything other than the mundane.
OR is a double-edged blade. The other blade I will refer to, with tounge-in-cheek, as Ocaam’s Beard. OB says: the simplest explanation is not always the best. OR is the obvious place to start but it isn’t always the end point. Example: man’s wife is murdered, start with the husband first and work you way on up the ladder until sometimes it just a random, tragic happenstance like Micheal Jordan’s father or Bill Cosby’ son; the least likely scenario.
Now, obviously, one side of the blade is going to be doing a lot more of the cutting than the other. But to go into any situation with a psychologically predisposed agenda to debunk rather than asses is not being logical, rational and objective.
Here is a classical case in point. This is a History Channel documentary about human levitation. They start talking about St. Joseph Cupertino, ‘The Flying Friar’, and at 1:36 into it they have Joe Nickell, CSIOP member give this explanation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwvEPeGPxeU
Watch it and see if you can tell me what’s wrong with this picture.
As I understand it, OR isn’t typically expressed as “the simplest explanation is correct” but “the simplest explanation is probably correct”, so the misconception you claim to be correcting doesn’t actually exist.
I’m not following what you are saying.
OR = when given two explanations for the same thing, the simpler one is usually the correct one.
OB = The simplest explanation is not always the best.
I’m not sure what you mean by, “the misconception you claim to be correcting doesn’t actually exist.” What I’m saying is that while the simplest explanation, more often than not, is usually the correct one, is not always the right one, as in the scenario I gave about a man’s wife being murdered.
Come on, people. Occam’s razor isn’t “when given two explanations for the same thing, the simpler one is usually the correct one.” It simply isn’t. To quote the wiki, Occam’s razor is entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, roughly translated as “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.”
It has nothing at all to do with probability. It specifically refers to minimizing the number of things you have to invent for your theory to work. Regarding Ouija boards, the scientific explanation invents nothing - it falls back on phenomena that have been independently observed and documented. The non-scientific explanations have to invent spirits that have the ability to possess or influence people’s movements. (About the only thing going for that theory is that such entities (or at least somewhat similar ones) were thought up a long time ago - but despite the theory’s longevity, there has still been amazingly little accumulated evidence for these supposed entities that are supposed to have been omnipresent forever.)
Again, OR has nothing to do with probability. It’s about assuming the existence of extra things. So, if there was an Occam’s Beard, it would be “Sometimes new things actually do exist”. Which is, of course, true. Radio waves and gamma waves are fine examples of this; we didn’t know about them, and theories were eventually proposed that included them. But the thing is, the theories devised survived because there weren’t theories without them that worked. Which is, of course, exactly the point of Occam’s Razor: you don’t invent spirits or gods or new types of waves unless you have to. If the entities are real, the evidence will eventually force you to admit it. Which is, in fact, the point of the razor; not to prevent the discovery of new things, but to prevent you inventing and believing in stuff half-cocked.
So there really is no beard. And Occam’s Razor will never support the spectral explanations - until there is no other explanation at all.
Main page
2nd page
Occam’s Razor above
“The simplest explanation is usually the right one. Detectives use it to deduce who’s the likeliest suspect in a murder case – you know, the butler did it.
The video link below is a History Channel show about human levitation. Check out about 1:30 into it and you will see a CSIOPtic named Joe Nickell stretch the credibility of OR to the breaking point. He gives one of the weakest OR explanations I have ever seen and doesn’t include OB because he already has his mind made up that it can’t exist. Hence, somebody grabbing at strawmen to maintain his cognitive closure.
I used to have hemorrhoids. I got them “repaired”. I never saw any billion gazillion dollars.
WHERE’S MY MONEY BIOTCH!
Meh. All this talk about devils and demons and ouija boards being a gateway to hell.
People don’t need a devil. They can (and do) come up with all sorts of nasty things, all on their own.
That’s a really, really bad article, going so far as to claim that – regarding the lone gunman explanation for Kennedy’s assassination – Occam’s razor tells us to ignore additional evidence if it isn’t in line with the ‘simplest explanation’, which is basically antithetical to its actual use, and, on top of that, it doesn’t support your assertion, explaining both plurality and parsimony right there on the first page, and explicitly mentioning that what you quoted above is not what William originally wrote.
I think the most instructive way to think about this is that if, when you are presented with multiple hypotheses explaining the same phenomena equally well, those hypotheses only differ in their complexity (as measured by, for instance, the amount of additional entities posited, or the amount of assumptions not mandated by evidence), it is the simplest one that it is most reasonable to believe. That doesn’t make it necessarily the right one, since additional evidence can always surface later, but it is the only viable way to single one out among an infinity of possible explanations – eschewing the razor, all explanations stand on equal footing, and you could just as well believe in Newton’s universal gravitation as in invisible fairies that push things down to the ground.
Well, even this (admittedly somewhat strained) explanation is more likely than a human being actually flying, since the latter requires revision of very strongly supported physical principles; however, I would probably just assume some magic trick – I’ve seen a lot of people fly, and in no case, there were any paranormal abilities on display (for instance, here’s Chris Angel explaining a simple street magic levitation trick – not saying that’s how the flying friar did it, though it certainly looks like you could pull something like that off with a wide-flowing frock). Always remember, just because you (or I) can’t explain it, doesn’t mean there’s no explanation! Sometimes, the most parsimonious assumption is that one just doesn’t have a clue.
I don’t disagree with that.
Has anyone here ever heard of “Collective Unconsious”?
Doesn’t sound like too many scientific minds in here if everyone discounts something without attempting to prove or disprove it.
Pity.
While I’m on the subject:
Hi there, I’m a student at a local college and I’m studying Psychology with a minor in Philosophy. I’m currently conducting research for a paper that seeks to understand the societal function of psychics and soothsayers and why people are so eager to pay for their “services”.
What I would like to know is if anyone knows any good free sites or way to advertise myself as a psychic? I need to research how often people agree with whatever they are told and whether gullibility and desperation is the issue at work.
Any advice would be appreciated.