From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Jul 12 2000 - 19:55:43 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote (quoting Joe):
>
> >My lifetime [23 year
> >record] for good guesses in free-response RV type tasking is about 55% --
> >which I figure is pretty good guessing.
With numbers like that, he might have set up a properly controlled
experiment, and be telling the truth, and *still* have nothing unusual
going on. If 100,000 would-be psychics try to test their psychic
powers, sooner or later one of them will produce results at the .001%
significance level!
Psi is an unusual theory, and unusual theories demand unusual proof. If
psi were true, it might force some minor adjustments in the Quest for
Singularity, so I am interested. But I haven't seen enough evidence to
make me believe that expending the cognitive resources required for
further consideration has a sufficiently high probability of payoff to
be worth it. In other words, it ain't worth the neurons.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://singinst.org/beyond.html
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