Forum Casualties, Deserters/AWOL & MIA

Thanks, Pepe, for thinking of me. It's an honour.

To explain my absence: I simply ran out of steam, most of which, shamefully, had been based on alcohol and caffeine.
I think it helps to avoid feeling shame for such things. I mean, society puts these things in front of us, and a few people react badly to them.

As regards diet, I think most people recognise that a vegetarian or vegan diet would be best on moral grounds - though I don't know what we would feed our cat in such a regime! Nevertheless, most of us find that diet difficult, and it doesn't really look as if a vegan diet is particularly desirable any more - at least if you follow the re-think about saturated fats!

Anyway, it is good to see you back!

David
 
Hi Neil,

Good to hear from you. I am also interested in getting spiritual and scientific explanations to meet; I do believe that they can/"should". Sorry to hear that you felt your participation wasn't getting enough response to warrant continuing. I wish I could promise to provide the missing responses but I'm loath to make commitments which I might break. Glad to hear of your interest in questions of morality and consciousness. There was a bunch I wanted to put to you re IIT way back when, but I'm not sure I can put it all back together these several months later, nor am I sure you're interested in going over that ground. I do think IIT has some significant relevance, but as a dualist (even if tempted by monist idealism a la Kastrup), I do see its relevance as somewhat limited.

Anyhow, I've just put in a post on the Veganism thread, thought I'd finally respond to a bunch of outstanding replies, yours included.

Take care mate, have a merry Xmas.
 
Thanks, David, also good to hear from you. I'm of two minds on shame, but ultimately you might well be right in that it doesn't adequately serve a functional purpose (my - hopefully representative - paraphrasing of your sentiments!).

Re veganism, I'm glad you agree that most would see it as morally best. Re what you'd feed your cat: here's one option in Australia; check out the options where you are! Re saturated fats (and cholesterol), I've tried to address that in my recent post in the Veganism thread - would welcome your critique, if any.

Thanks for the welcome back! Happy Christmas to you and your family - including your cat!
 
I was relatively active on this forum about two years ago, give or take. Have been checking in now and then since. Not much changes in terms of the arguments. I dropped off because of this. I've come to unterstand that what would have made this forum more meaningful for me is more sharing of experience and stories than arguing one side or the other. Quite frankly no one is going to convince anyone to change their basic stance, their metaphyscial point of view, on what constitutes the nature of reality. Yet we each have our point of view and, at minimum, we can all agree that there is a reality on which our existence is dependent. How we chose "to be" in the face of that reality is an individual decision, and not something we can delegate to a consensus opinion. At the end of the day, how we chose to relate to that ultimate reality, through which the universe and everthing in the universe comes into existence, is and has to be a personal decision. We cannot abrogate that responsiblity to any "gods", be they gods of science or religion. So wheather the so called skeptics convince the so called proponents, is not important. What is important is what we as individuals decide what these things, like NDEs, mean to us. Are they sign posts to a deeper reality or are they evolution's defense mechanism against a traumatic event? The answer to the question we give to ourselves depends on how we define our mode of being. Are we accidential objects, that emerge from the evolution of an unconscious, unaware process, or are we connected in a more intimate relationship to that which gave rise to the Universe? The answer is an individual choice. It is less dependent on the so called evidence and more dependent on what we think we are: objects or subjects, things inside the world or persons of the world.
 
I should note that Skeptiko is an awful place to discuss parapsych as it gets drowned out in all the new age bullshit and the inane denialism. I can assure you that all the regs ( maaneli, johann, Michael Duggan, me) discuss the science behind parapsych regularly.
 
Let's start checking off the above here in this thread. This will probably end up being the official record of the death of the Skeptiko forum.

I'll start...

Not too long ago we suffered a major casualty, the loss of our beloved tim. Certain members of the forum were (apparently) holding to the position that males and females are physical equals, basically interchangeable in military combat roles. Yes, it seems this-- or what he thought-- was a blatant denial of objective reality and lack of common sense killed our friend. So sad. If only tim could have envisioned the platoons of heroic young women who had hacked through the jungles of Vietnam.

Who else is there?
Congrats, Andrex. This thread has succeeded in shaming many ex-members into making reappearances.

Forgot to mention Matt2. It's a been while and I miss that guy.
 
Last edited:
I hate it when people overuse the exclamation mark. It's disrespectful to the dignity of the punctuation. When it is needed most, it's rendered impotent and completely useless. But I guess when you're a forum moderator you can get away with such irresponsibility and not have to suffer the consequences.
 
I'll leave it at this: did anyone else have the impression that Jay (JT512 as was) came out of the Ganzfeld (and others) discussion having exposed Maaneli?

That didn't really happen. What happened was that Jay had a rather subtle point about binomial tests that turned out to be correct, and we came to an agreement on that eventually (that is, it isn't technically valid to assume a hit rate different from the null in the ganzfeld paradigm just because your p-value is very small—but, as it is, the binomial calculation of the p-value does adequately summarize the probability of finding the test statistic as extreme or more extreme, under the hypothesis of identical, independently distributed Bernoulli trials, at p = .25—therefore if it is very small, something important is going on). Anyway, it's technically interesting, but practically not very important; Jay agrees that ganzfeld researchers have uncovered evidence for psi that far exceeds conventional thresholds, and he says as much in this wonderful post, and in subsequent ones: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=10414041&postcount=970

He defends the binomial inference, with his quibbles, and takes a jab at the Milton and Wiseman meta-analysis, here: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=10418824&postcount=1157

I actually quite like Jay. He's a fair and knowledgeable opponent, and has a sense of humor. My exchanges with him were some of the most informative. Max and Jay, do both, however, have a tendency to get a little testy; the animosity in the early ganzfeld threads was mutual, and had escalated, so neither party was willing to moderate their position. Where Max and I tend to disagree most with Jay is in his assessment of the (subjective) physically-based probability of psi; he still says things like, "it would overturn all of physics", and he appears to rely heavily for this on Sean Carol's essay on the subject. Max, being a graduate student in theoretical physics, and having published several papers in quantum foundations, made a long response to Carol that argued with his premises. I'm not nearly at Max's level yet, but I've taken courses in quantum mechanics and general relativity, and I don't find "overturn all of physics" arguments very well thought out.

Actually, I'm not so sure Jay does either, since the prior probability he actually set for psi (1 in 10 million) is pretty easily overcome by a few psi experiments—assuming they were conducted as stated in their published reports, which Jay isn't willing to do for a variety of reasons; many of which I find reasonable. Nevertheless, if he were able to witness one successful psi experiment that he could put complete trust in, it would only take a Bayes factor of a little more than 700,000 to 1 to push him to 50/50 odds on psi. By contrast, Rouder, Morey, and Province (2010) found a Bayes factor of 6 billion to 1 in their skeptical analysis of just some 67 ganzfeld experiments (before they argued for excluding a number of them on methodological grounds). So it's not hard to shift this prior. To give you some perspective, Jay was arguing with people who were trying to justify setting the prior probability of psi at zero; that means no amount of statistical evidence can shift it.

Now, these days, I hang out with a lot of really knowledgeable people (my interests have somewhat shifted, though I still do discuss a lot psi research, and have been invited to give a talk at the PA/SSE convention), and I have, with Max, had some pretty intensive discussions about psi research with them. Few of the folks in these discussions—mostly data analysts, physicists, and mathematicians—continue to think of psi like they think of horoscopes and creationism. That's something that appears to be endemic to a population of self-styled skeptics with, I'm sorry to say, a low wit, and little imagination—not the crop that still lurks around here, or Jay. Also, interestingly, a majority of them seem to have gravitated towards panpsychism, as a philosophy of mind, more or less independently.
 
Last edited:
Just to be clear, Johann (good to see you are still around, btw), I wasn't supporting the view that Jay "exposed" Max, I was asking whether people agreed with the view that fls expressed. Her view was certainly not my impression of those exchanges.

Thanks for the clarification, though. I only wish I could understand the intricacies.
 
Back
Top