Proof of Immortality, the IV league

[JoeMorgue]

Exactly. The whole "all posts are anecdotes" claim is equivalent to the argument "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?"

Exactly. It's semantics at absolute best, forced obtuseness at worst.

Words mean things people. "Anecdotes" as in unverified second hand stories are not evidence period.

Broadening the definition trying to claim a win is just desperate.

And again it all ties back into a tactic Woo Slingers have to fall back on to make their nonsense work, overly narrowly defining "science" as this rigid, stodgy concrete set of rules that only work in the lab creating a false dichotomy in which if you can force someone to admit they ever came to a decision or arrived at a stance without running it through a pier review you are trapped in admitting that functionally arguments that are no different from "believe me because I say so" have to be counted as "evidence."

 

[JayUtah]

I will not attempt to speak for JayUtah in that regard.

That's okay, annnnoid will attempt it. He has his own version of my arguments which he seems to prefer to the real ones.

 

[jond]

8) "Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there..." is a sample of Yes lyrics.

But, if it's chased amid fusions of wonder it might be an anecdote? Silly human race...

 

[Sideroxylon]

Why do you consider the "annecdote" "compelling"?

Wishful thinking and credulity.

 

[JoeMorgue]

And the fact is since they are so many "anecdotes" and they are so vague and meaningless you can find a anecdote to support anything.

But I'd wager the big anecdote fanboys aren't going to listen to a lot of anecdotes that counter their Woo.

 

[Mojo]

It's not often that an author's name is such a big clue to the nature of his book.

I call Sean Hannigans.

 

[Mojo]

And the fact is since they are so many "anecdotes" and they are so vague and meaningless you can find a anecdote to support anything.

That's the point: the only anecdotes that are reported are the ones that appear to support a remarkable result. The way they are selected requires that they are a biased sample.

 

[Loss Leader]

LL,

- I'll try to be more clear.

- So as to really understand what you mean by "falsifiable evidence," I was providing an example of what I thought it to be.
- In my example, the subject claimed that something occurred while he was being resuscitated -- i.e., his wife was in the waiting room wearing red. That would certainly be a falsifiable anecdote.
- I guess that it isn't what you mean by falsifiable evidence?

Good gosh, Jabba, this isn't a difficult concept. The experiment that you are running to test a hypothesis much be such that a positive (or negative) result makes the hypothesis necessarily true.

You are testing whether NDE's provide evidence of non-physical perception. Your experiment is a guy said his wife was wearing a red dress. Does the guy saying that necessarily mean that he gained the knowledge through non-physical perception?

I think not.

First, the experiment wasn't controlled to make sure that he gained the knowledge while his brain was dead. He could have heard or even seen things in a low brain activity state.

Second, we didn't define a positive result before we started. There are billions of details around us all the time. If we don't define what we're looking for, we'll just listen until we hear something close to correct. This guy may have said fifty different wrong things before saying his wife was in a red dress.

Third, we didn't control for chance by using a large enough sample size. I flip a quarter once, you call heads and it comes up heads. Is that enough information for me to call you a psychic coin-flip reader? What if you just called heads every time? What if you got five right in a row and then ten wrong? The sample size needs to be large - the smaller the effect, the larger the sample.

If the doctor places a game of Operation on a high shelf out of sight except from the ceiling and he asks each patient which children's game she hid up there, eventually someone is going to guess Operation.

Fourth, ideally the people administering the test shouldn't know what the positive or negative answer is. That way, they can't accidentally tip the scales based on their own expectations. I can ask my son what president was 15th in such a way that he'll get the answer right (James Buchanan). But if I don't know who the 15th president was, I can't skew the results.

And those are just the problems to start. Designing a proper experiment that actually tests what you want it to is a very specific skill. Many a PhD have published a study only to be excoriated for failing to properly control for all the possible confounding factors.

I apologize for saying "falsifiable evidence." I meant evidence gathered in a properly controlled experiment of a falsifiable hypothesis.

 

[Jabba]

Good gosh, Jabba, this isn't a difficult concept. The experiment that you are running to test a hypothesis much be such that a positive (or negative) result makes the hypothesis necessarily true...

LL,

- That to which I'm referring is not an experiment.

- But anyway, there are numerous anecdotes that include claims made by the subject, and agreed to by witnesses, that could not be known to the subject except by non-physical means. The witnesses could be lying -- but otherwise,
we have evidence of immateriality.
- Here's an example:
So she [the patient] described this whole scene. And I says, “Well, where were you?” And she says, “I was, like, flying above everybody.” And so, she described, typical of what you would see if you’re doing, like, we’d do CPR on her. Now, I’m not there. I’m just describing what she’s saying. And then she said something that was kinda funny. She said, “There was a penny on top of one of the cabinets but you’d have to climb up to see.” And I happened to mention this to another nurse who talks about things like I do. And she actually looked up there and found it.

Rivas, Titus; Dirven,Anny; Smit,Rudolf. The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences (pp. 31-32). International Association for Near-Death Studies. Kindle Edition.

 

[Jabba]

He could be right or wrong about his wife being in the waiting room wearing red, but this is meaningless without context. If he's right it could just be a lucky guess.* Because of the way these anecdotes are collected there is no way of knowing.


*If I was undergoing surgery it would be a pretty good bet that Mrs Mojo would be in the waiting room, and I would probably have a pretty good idea of what she was wearing because I would have seen her beforehand.

Mojo,
- In the study I referred to, they explained why it wouldn't be a lucky guess.
- How much is reasonable to quote? Again, my book has 100 anecdotes that seem to rule out lucky guesses.

 

[Jabba]

That's the point: the only anecdotes that are reported are the ones that appear to support a remarkable result. The way they are selected requires that they are a biased sample.

Mojo,
- I wonder how often it happens that claims made during an NDE turn out to be false. I'll see if I can find anything about that...

 

[Sideroxylon]

Mojo,
- I wonder how often it happens that claims made during an NDE turn out to be false. I'll see if I can find anything about that...

Here is a starting point:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/21/boy-who-came-back-from-heaven-alex-malarkey

Note also how publishers don't care about veracity while the dollars are rolling in.

 

[godless dave]

Mojo,
- In the study I referred to, they explained why it wouldn't be a lucky guess.
- How much is reasonable to quote? Again, my book has 100 anecdotes that seem to rule out lucky guesses.

Why should we believe any anecdote in that book?

 

[John Jones]

Mojo,
- I wonder how often it happens that claims made during an NDE turn out to be false. I'll see if I can find anything about that...

Finish this sentence: "The plural of anecdote is..."

 

[JoeMorgue]

I wonder how often it happens that claims made during an NDE turn out to be false. I'll see if I can find anything about that...

*Sighs*

Ted: Bob anecdotes are biased because by definition we only use those that supports our viewpoints.
Bob: I'll see if I can find any anecdotes that don't support the idea that they are biased. I'll be back.

 

[Jabba]

Good gosh, Jabba, this isn't a difficult concept. The experiment that you are running to test a hypothesis much be such that a positive (or negative) result makes the hypothesis necessarily true.

You are testing whether NDE's provide evidence of non-physical perception. Your experiment is a guy said his wife was wearing a red dress. Does the guy saying that necessarily mean that he gained the knowledge through non-physical perception?

I think not.

First, the experiment wasn't controlled to make sure that he gained the knowledge while his brain was dead. He could have heard or even seen things in a low brain activity state.

Second, we didn't define a positive result before we started. There are billions of details around us all the time. If we don't define what we're looking for, we'll just listen until we hear something close to correct. This guy may have said fifty different wrong things before saying his wife was in a red dress.

Third, we didn't control for chance by using a large enough sample size. I flip a quarter once, you call heads and it comes up heads. Is that enough information for me to call you a psychic coin-flip reader? What if you just called heads every time? What if you got five right in a row and then ten wrong? The sample size needs to be large - the smaller the effect, the larger the sample.

If the doctor places a game of Operation on a high shelf out of sight except from the ceiling and he asks each patient which children's game she hid up there, eventually someone is going to guess Operation.

Fourth, ideally the people administering the test shouldn't know what the positive or negative answer is. That way, they can't accidentally tip the scales based on their own expectations. I can ask my son what president was 15th in such a way that he'll get the answer right (James Buchanan). But if I don't know who the 15th president was, I can't skew the results.

And those are just the problems to start. Designing a proper experiment that actually tests what you want it to is a very specific skill. Many a PhD have published a study only to be excoriated for failing to properly control for all the possible confounding factors.

I apologize for saying "falsifiable evidence." I meant evidence gathered in a properly controlled experiment of a falsifiable hypothesis.

LL.
- Thanks. You're forgiven.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Of course that would be the one line you'd grace us to respond to.

 

[Jabba]

Mojo,
- I wonder how often it happens that claims made during an NDE turn out to be false. I'll see if I can find anything about that...

Mojo, I only looked through 3 Google pages of "NDE false claims," but most of the examples were from religious points of view, and none of them contained the kind of false claims I was looking for...

 

[JayUtah]

Here's an example:

Your previous example from that book turned out to be nothing like what your book described. This happened to you in the Shroud thread, remember? Remember how you trusted the editors of these sorts of summaries to accurately and completely report the primary sources, and you found out far too late that they didn't?

So the question is what have you done to vet this and all the other anecdotes, given that your editors are not faithful?

 

[JayUtah]

Mojo,
- In the study I referred to, they explained why it wouldn't be a lucky guess.
- How much is reasonable to quote? Again, my book has 100 anecdotes that seem to rule out lucky guesses.

I've asked you several times to describe the empirical controls applied in your book to rule out prosaic causes. It appears there aren't any; it appears that all it can do is rely on attestations by witnesses, none of whom the editors themselves seem to have contacted. Hearsay in this context is not probative. Loss Leader may have corrected himself on what he meant by "falsifiable evidence," but I'm sticking to that gun: this sort of n-th level hearsay is not falsifiable evidence. You don't know what empirical controls may apply, your editors don't, and hence we can't test this evidence. Untestable evidence is unfalsifiable evidence, and it is not probative.