(August 4, 2017 at 9:14 am)pocaracas Wrote: Bayesian probabilities... hmmm.... How about we apply it to psychology?
What are the odds that an extraordinary claim has extraordinary origins, with the prior knowledge that humans have:
- a fertile imagination
- the ability to Willingly Suspend Disbelief
- the ability to lie
- the tendency to follow charismatic people
- a prior belief system already composed of a few similar extraordinary claims
- a natural evolutionary based tendency to accept a claim if it comes from a trustworthy source (parents at a young age, for example)
- a relatively short lifespan
- a brain that tends to be affected by the Dunning Kruger effect ("a cognitive bias wherein persons of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is.")
- an inability to accurately assess non-intuitive probabilities
- senses that make it challenging to measure the very small quantum world and the very large extra-galactic Universe.
- etc, etc, etc...
Yet that would be all wiped away in a second if the paralyzed guy got up and walked. Instead of applying the probability to the event, you are applying it to the reliability of the witness. So you really are not talking about the event anymore, you are describing an a priori assumption that witnesses cannot be reliable in the case of extraordinary events without any actual facts that would mitigate these issues on a case by case basis.
