[FRIAM] A longer response to Dave's question

[glen]

You used the word 'credence'. So maybe what I'm gonna say is irrelevant. But edge cases *do* present high value, low N, experimental opportunites. One set that comes to mind are the twins, where one went to space and the other didn't. The same could be said of rare *people* like the autistic, or those with other conditions that aren't squarely within 1 sigma of the mean.

To suggest, which you didn't quite do, that the rare is no *more* insightful than the common, would be a conflation of different *types* of insight.

In fact, I'd argue that a complete study of the edge cases is MORE important than yet another study of the normal cases. Taking massive doses of LSD is no different from flying your new plane at 6 G's. What you learn will probably be more significant than hanging with the old men at the Denny's or flying your 737 on typical flight plans (if you don't die, of course).

On February 22, 2020 1:41:55 PM PST, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> wrote:
>   5. There is no *a priori *reason to discount the insights one
>   experiences under "altered states of consciousness", but also no *a
>   priori* reason to give them special credence.
>   6. The degree to which a someone has a sense of certainty about
>something is not generally a reliable measure of how likely that thing
>is
>to hold up in the long run, unless many, many, many other assumptions
>are
>   met.
>   7. There is likely good reason to think that altered states of
>   consciousness are less reliable in general than "regular" states.
>   8. There are many examples that suggest certain
>insights-that-turn-out-to-hold-up-pretty-well, which were first
>experienced
>when under an altered state, were unlikely to have been experienced
>without
>   that altered state.
-- 
glen