[Rhinoceros] I was just wondering whether this was the right place to post this.
[Rhinoceros] E-SKEPTIC FOR JULY 25, 2002 <snip>[/quote]
[Hermit] Absolutely. Although, due to its significance, I would have granted it its own thread.
[Hermit] One of those amazingly timely articles providing confirmation for a theory long held by many skeptics attempting to comprehend why believers appear to see confirmation of astrology, prophecy, etc. in things that clearly have no significant correlation.
[thompsonj] This suggests nothing about whether the patterns are actually there, just how well the brain recognizes them. Looks like truth resides somewhere between skepticism and belief.
[Hermit] I suspect that the assumption articulated here is caused by flawed comprehension. The article specifically noted, "Believers were much more likely than skeptics to see a word or face when there was not one... skeptics were more likely to miss real faces and words..." and "skeptics became more likely to interpret scrambled words or faces as the real thing."
[Hermit] My reading is that an appropriate methodology was used, namely mixing valid patterns (real words and faces) with invalid fragments (random letter groupings and image fragments). The hypothesis, as I read it was a two part one. The first hypothesis was that skeptics, when they erred, did not detect valid patterns, while believers erred by claiming that invalid fragments were valid patterns.
[Hermit] Analysis of the first phase of the experiment appeared to support the hypothesis about believers and skeptics.
[Hermit] The second phase of the experiment addressed the hypothesis that this was caused by the variation in Dopamine levels observed between self-identified believers and skeptics. The results appeared to confirm Dopamine take-up involvement, in that increasing dopamine levels caused the skeptics to join the believers in confusing invalid fragments for patterns - and I conclude from this report, slightly increased the believer's error rate.
[Hermit] An additional experiment, which suggests itself to me, would be to repeat the experiment, only using dopamine antagonizers rather than supplements to determine whether this has the opposite effect to the reported second phase. I would hypothesize that this would indeed be the case.
[Hermit] I am not sure that "truth" is an appropriate concept to apply to this mechanism. On the one hand, logically, skeptics should be skeptical about their own findings too, and thus should tend to correct their errors over time (negative feedback - stable). Experience, and the fact that this is exactly the mechanism used in the scientific method, under which most progress we have made has occurred, tends to bear this out. On the other hand, believers tend to accept their own findings and have no motivation to question them (positive feedback - unstable). This causes a person who has internalized any unsubstantiated belief to tend to accept ever wilder and less-substantiated propositions.
[Hermit] I would suggest that the long, dark history of the world when belief has ruled, along with the clearly visible progressions into the insanity of requiring the acceptance of ever more fantastic propositions in order to avoid barbaric punishments contrasted to the progress made when skeptics have replaced believers, indicates which of these systems may benefit people more. I'd also suggest that the skeptical view provides the only method which will, over time, lead through self-correction to an accurate (true) world-view.
Thanks-again Rhinoceros.
Kind Regards
Hermit.
---- This message was posted by Hermit to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25786>
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