Disarming the slash-happy Occamites... Rant 1 in a series...

[Trollax]

Every sample of the population will in some fashion exhibit trends and patterns that will fit the Normal curve (The bell curve). This is an inevitable part of probability. There are common traits, abilities, charachteristics, interests, and details that we all share. Magic is never one of them.
From 1950 to the very end of the cold war, the Russians spent billions on psionics research, many times more than what Langley poured into remote viewing. They developed the Kirilian camera, several paranormal investigation techniques ,as well as several sketchily described psychogenic devices, machines designed to collect and emit psychic energy in precise ways. If there was something to uncover, something to investigate, they did it. Thousands of people were tested, interviewed, and studied. Hundreds of locations, poked, prodded, and probed. In the entire body of evidence now accesible to the western world there are more cases of genuine paranormal phenomena than we have ever seen. Why?

Sampling methods

Take 100 people from any western nation. most of them will probably be loosely religious (i.e. they sometimes hang around a church or have been to a wedding in one) a few of them may have firm beliefs about something. Maybe 2 or 3 of them will be pagan, but it is unlikely that those 2 or 3 will have anything approaching what could be called a clue. Maybe (just maybe) one of these 100 people would say that they believe they have had some paranormal experiences. now... if we were to expand our sample 50 times, so that we now have 20,000 people of which roughly 2-300 would be pagan and 50-75 would be interested in the paranormal of those 250-odd pagans maybe 1-20 would be competent initiates, most of which would also be likely to be magical practicioners. of the 65-odd people interested in the paranormal maybe 2 of them would have had an experience that is at least verifiable as unexplainable.

Now let us expand our population again. we have 14 competent initiates, who are highly likely to also be magical practicioners and 2 people with some kind of esoteric experience... multiply the population again by 50 and we now have a sample of 1 million people, of which 100 have had genuine paranormal experiences and 700 are competent initiates and also likely to be magical practicioners.

Now... we have a population roughly the size of the hunter valley in Australia. of which we have 800 people with a genuine, serious and precedented interest in the paranormal. Precisely 0.8% of our population. now of this 0.8% maybe 10 percent actually have the ability to quickly and obviously cause at least one thing that would have most people scratiching their heads... so we have 0.08% of the people in our million (80 people) who actually fall in the genuine magic or psychic category.

Statistically, this is an anomaly, as it is far less than 5% of the population. On the bell curve 99.992 Percent of the population fall below whatever number you give them. This is akin to having an IQ of 150+ The difference being that we accept the idea of someone having an IQ of 150 or higher.

The problem is the fact that our sample is not representative. While it is a sample of the population as a whole it does not represent what we are looking for as what we are looking for is uncommon enough as it is. As a prime example Let's take 3 neurological disorders: Narcolepsy, Epilepsy, and Tourette's syndrome.
Let's assume for the moment that we have no knowledge whatsoever of their existence, that there is no body of evidence surrounding them, no medical studies about them, and no current research or papers that support the hypothesis that they exist. Well let's take a sample of the population again... 100 people, how many of these people. exhibit one of these disorders? Knowing what we know it seems ludachrist to assume that they don't exist. Being in the same class as an epileptic I can assure that it is very real. Despite the fact that possibly less than 1 in a 100 people have the condition.

So we have less than 1 in 100 people with this neurological condition, how do we test for it? What are we looking for, and how do we find it?

These are the sorts of questions that should be applied to the paranormal. Do we know what we are looking for? Are results necessarily indicators? Can we be certain there are no confounds? No experimental noise? This is the problem we face: We believe in something we cannot prove, we practice something without knowing how it works and whatever body of evidence we have is not readily applicable to real-world theory. Does that discount what we do? Hell no. When an experiment is conducted in science there are two possible outcomes from it. Either the hypothesis is confirmed or disconfirmed. Not, (as many less-careful scientists) would have you believe confirmed or disproven, or proven and disproven. You may need to redesign your experiment, account for additional data and new information or scrap the method entirely, the hypothesis is still alive. Just because less than 1 in ten million people on this earth have never seen a dragon in the physical world, it does not mean they do not exist. It just gets less and less likely.


...To be Continued...

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Bumped by the This Is The Sort Of Shit We Have To Put Up With Department.

[Luna]

Wow.

[Adios]

wtf?

[Luna]

wtf?

Smells like somebody trying to prove "psychics exist, because you can't prove otherwise."

[Icey]

The problem is the fact that our sample is not representative. While it is a sample of the population as a whole it does not represent what we are looking for as what we are looking for is uncommon enough as it is. As a prime example Let's take 3 neurological disorders: Narcolepsy, Epilepsy, and Tourette's syndrome.
Let's assume for the moment that we have no knowledge whatsoever of their existence, that there is no body of evidence surrounding them, no medical studies about them, and no current research or papers that support the hypothesis that they exist. Well let's take a sample of the population again... 100 people, how many of these people. exhibit one of these disorders? Knowing what we know it seems ludachrist to assume that they don't exist. Being in the same class as an epileptic I can assure that it is very real. Despite the fact that possibly less than 1 in a 100 people have the condition.

That's the best stuff I got from it.
Regardless of belief, all this really does is reiterate incompleteness of knowledge, that I believe is well understood here.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

The problem is the fact that our sample is not representative. While it is a sample of the population as a whole it does not represent what we are looking for as what we are looking for is uncommon enough as it is. As a prime example Let's take 3 neurological disorders: Narcolepsy, Epilepsy, and Tourette's syndrome.
Let's assume for the moment that we have no knowledge whatsoever of their existence, that there is no body of evidence surrounding them, no medical studies about them, and no current research or papers that support the hypothesis that they exist. Well let's take a sample of the population again... 100 people, how many of these people. exhibit one of these disorders? Knowing what we know it seems ludachrist to assume that they don't exist. Being in the same class as an epileptic I can assure that it is very real. Despite the fact that possibly less than 1 in a 100 people have the condition.

That's the best stuff I got from it.
Regardless of belief, all this really does is reiterate incompleteness of knowledge, that I believe is well understood here.

Actually, it was trollax whining that logic wasn't compatible with his magickal beliefs.  He's just using "the bell curve" where current hippies use "quantum".

Personally, I think anyone who isn't slashing away like a mad bastard with Occam's Razor has forfeited their claim to being a biped.  Trollax is a prime example.

[LMNO]

1. Incorrect use of Occams Razor.
2. Epilepsy, Tourettes, etc. can be demonstrated as visible and present. Just because it's rare doesn't mean you can't identify a sample set. Magick, because it's correlation, doesn't fit.