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Honestly this XKCD arguing that psychic phenomena don't exist because they're not exploited for profit is a comforting difficult to refute argument for me: http

Honestly this XKCD arguing that psychic phenomena don't exist because they're not exploited for profit is a comforting difficult to refute argument for me: https://xkcd.com/808/ https://xkcd.com/808/

mathattack 5y ago
Yes. The existence of casinos disproves psychic powers.
- throwaway7033 5y ago
  How so? Casinos routinely ban card counters; if psychic powers existed then psychics would also be banned from casinos.
  - mathattack 5y ago
    Identifying card counters is easier than identifying psychics.
NateEag 5y ago
It may be that psychic powers exist but that they are not powerful, general, or controllable enough to be reliably profitable. Also, if every profitable phenomenon in the world is already developed, then no business should ever invest in fundamental research - i.e., the pharmaceutical companies are wasting their research dollars. Why is it comforting to you to believe psychic powers don't exist?
- gs17 5y ago
  Yeah, e.g. someone who can, for example, consistently predict single bits of output from true random number generators 51% of the time would be evidence of something very strange going on, but not necessarily usable for anything practical. (Maybe if you could gather enough of these people to overcome the "weak" ability?)
  - prionassembly 5y ago
    AdaBoost, etc. were invented precisely to make good use of weak predictors.
  - mathattack 5y ago
    If you could consistently predict stock moves 51% of the time eventually you’d have all the money in the universe.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      It depends on what you mean by 51% of the time. If you’re just making a directional prediction, “will the next market day be up or down?”, that’s nowhere near enough. A little over 53% of days are up (green) days and yet you can’t use that 3x edge over a 51% predictor to make all the money.
      - ajuc 5y ago
        Try "will the X go up or down next second". > A little over 53% of days are up (green) days and yet you can’t use that 3x edge over a 51% predictor to make all the money. You can make money, just not ALL the money. And that's because other people know that too.
        sokoloff 5y ago
        I don’t have access to tick-by-tick feeds any more to test this, but I’d predict that “X will go up or down next second, [ignoring UNCHs]?” is predicted more than 51% of the time by predicting the same trend as the current/previous second and that you’re going to win on percentage of guesses and lose on money (because the changes in direction seconds [where your guess is wrong] are higher vol than the trend continuation seconds).
        ajuc 5y ago
        Again the difference is that everybody (who cares enough) know about the trends, but only you know about the 51% predictions. Assuming these information sources are independent - even if the trends predicted the market in 99% and your prediction was only 51% - you can still combine them to get a better estimate than the generally known one.
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
How do you know the things the chart says aren't happening really aren't happening?
- wtallis 5y ago
  There would be evidence. The chart helpfully points out a specific kind of evidence that is more or less impossible to conceal with any kind of conspiracy.
  - Izkata 5y ago
    One kind of possible evidence. A flipside example: Financial world could instead be used by individuals on casinos, betting, stock markets, etc. and they'd have incentive to keep it secret so they keep winning.
    - wtallis 5y ago
      It might be plausible to assume that someone exploiting ESP or whatever to beat the house could keep the secret of how they're winning. But it's a lot less plausible to postulate that they could keep secret the fact that they are beating the house or beating the market, unless the effect size is too small to be of much interest in the first place (ie. you have to largely abandon part of the original hypothesis: that the crazy phenomenon actually works).
    - yosamino 5y ago
      This argument has the structure of a conspiracy theory: "A small group of people being able to keep an enormous secret, in order to manipulate the rest of us." The more enormous the secret and the larger the group of people who supposedly are in on it, the more the probability of the secret not being a secret very long approaches one. I find it very unlikely that a shortcut to making a lot of money would be secret for very long.
      - wtallis 5y ago
        In particular, as the scope of the conspiracy grows, the cost of keeping that secret very quickly outstrips any potential profit from exploiting the secret. Eg. if oil companies could use ESP to know where to drill, then they would still need to be spending large sums of money on computers and software to analyze seismic data, or else the collapse of demand for those products would expose the conspiracy.
aradox66 5y ago
theptip 5y ago
It’s a sound point. Even a very small edge in precognition or mind reading (no matter how unreliable) would allow hedge funds to beat the market and make a killing. Ergo these effects do not exist because nobody is doing this.
- tsol 5y ago
  Warren Buffet has done quite well. So maybe it exists but only one person in the world is capable of it.
- mistermann 5y ago
  Actually this only shows that this specific form does not exist, or has not been discovered, or possibly something else both of us have overlooked.
- rkk3 5y ago
  Hedge funds do beat the market, individually. Steve Cohen probably has psychic powers.
  - wtallis 5y ago
    > Steve Cohen probably has psychic powers. What about his track record cannot be adequately explained by mundane insider trading? Edit: Puzzled by the downvotes. I think it's entirely fair to ask whether Cohen is enough of an outlier that it requires a psychic explanation, even after accounting for the degree of success that can be reasonably attributed to luck and non-psychic skill (effects which other hedge fund managers are also subject to) plus the insider trading he's been involved in (which other hedge fund managers are not necessarily subject to). In a world with a finite number of hedge fund managers, there is always going to be somebody who is the most successful out of the bunch, and that somebody is almost certainly going to appear to be an outlier even without a supernatural influence on their success. So before attributing anything to psychic powers, we first have to establish whether he's too successful to be accounted for by the non-psychic explanations. I genuinely don't know enough about Steve Cohen's track record to know whether he's that much of an outlier, and I'd appreciate some real information about the degree of his success rather than just downvoting.
HWR_14 5y ago
You don't know if people are using them for profit. Are the best surgeons guided by auras or do Oil companies use divinations?
- astrange 5y ago
  Oil/mining companies have definitely used dowsing in the past, but as far as I know it didn’t work.
bshepard 5y ago
Just because a phenomenon can't be industrialized doesn't mean it doesn't exist; you can't industrialize lyric poetry, for example.
- kragen 5y ago
  RCA did.
- wtallis 5y ago
  The phenomena discussed in that comic were chosen for inclusion specifically because they actually would lend themselves quite easily and obviously to commercial exploitation if they really existed as popularly conceived. If you stipulate that all of those alleged psychic phenomena are inherently not exploitable in those ways or any other significantly profitable way, you're basically redefining those terms contrary to their popular meanings and just moving the goalposts.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    The same could be said of antibiotics. However, before Ehrlich & Pasteur, there were no large scale use or even specific awareness of the concept (i.e. some cultures had folk medicinal remedies that involved antibiotics but the mechanism and specific compounds were not understood). So until the 1880s, there was no commercial exploitation of these compounds, yet they nevertheless existed either in actuality or potential. Once there was an understanding of the principles and the development of some related chemical and biochemical processing, this exploded and had a dramatic impact on human life. If someone postulated in, say, 1785, the idea that perhaps there were specific compounds that could be used to cure infection, and these could be produced en masse, would it not be analogous to respond that since nobody is commercially exploiting (at the time), they clearly do not exist?
    - wtallis 5y ago
      > If someone postulated in, say, 1785, the idea that perhaps there were specific compounds that could be used to cure infection, and these could be produced en masse, would it not be analogous to respond that since nobody is commercially exploiting (at the time), they clearly do not exist? None of the ideas included in the xkcd comic are particularly new or obscure. Despite being pigeonholed as a certain kind of bullshit, they are still ideas that a lot of people have heard about and been hearing about for a very long time—more than enough time for someone to get around to commercially exploiting if that were in fact practical. Ghostbusters came out 37 years ago, and the stuff it made fun of was familiar enough to its audience. However, in 1785 the principles of chemical engineering were largely unknown, precluding the development of a modern-style pharmaceutical industry. It did not, however, prevent widespread use of antibiotic treatments that we now understand the mechanism for and can refine or synthesize into more effective forms.
jpttsn 5y ago
What if in the time before the discovery of e.g. quantum mechanics you did the same analysis? Would it tell you that quantum mechanics doesn’t exist?
- wtallis 5y ago
  If you don't have a theory of quantum mechanics and you don't have any observable phenomena that require a quantum explanation, then there's nothing to apply this kind of analysis to, and nothing to reject the existence of.
normac2 5y ago
The author of this blog, Scott Alexander, has an online novel called Unsong [1] based on this idea. In the book's universe, Kaballah is real and (among many other wild things) corporations automatically generate long lists of Hebrew characters to find names of God that give various powers. [1] https://unsongbook.com/ https://unsongbook.com/
- csdvrx 5y ago
  > In the book's universe, Kaballah is real and (among many other wild things) corporations automatically generate long lists of Hebrew characters to find names of God that give various powers. In this universe, we do the same with numbers generated by ASICS or GPU: it mostly gives the power of money.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  There is that sf story about the names of god too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God
nestorD 5y ago
I am seing one empty box that should get a "has been tried" mark and four that should get "are being used" marks. I don't know if they work but I know they are being used for profit.
sampo 5y ago
Also, certain supernatural abilities would have been so useful in stone age societies that they would have given an evolutionary advantage to the individuals possessing them, and hence we all should have those abilities by now, as evolution should have made those adaptations more common.
- optimalsolver 5y ago
  In Larry Niven's "Known Space" books [0], there was a planet where telepathy was common. Natural selection kept it in check so a hunter would only be able to nudge a prey into walking into an ambush. Then an alien exploratory vessel lands on the planet, aliens that have no resistance to telepathy are instantly controlled and you get an intergalactic slaver empire from a neolithic culture in one generation. So red queen effect [1]. Maybe telepathy evolves in tandem with resistance to telepathy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Ptavvs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Ptavvs [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen's_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen's_race
bsder 5y ago
Actually, you find aromatherapy and its ilk used in healthcare. It seems to help people relax going into surgery and improves outcomes. Thus strengthening your argument that if it works, capitalism will exploit it.

Honestly this XKCD arguing that psychic phenomena don't exist because they're not exploited for profit is a comforting difficult to refute argument for me: https://xkcd.com/808/ https://xkcd.com/808/

mathattack 5y ago

Yes. The existence of casinos disproves psychic powers.

throwaway7033 5y ago
How so? Casinos routinely ban card counters; if psychic powers existed then psychics would also be banned from casinos.
- mathattack 5y ago
  Identifying card counters is easier than identifying psychics.

NateEag 5y ago

It may be that psychic powers exist but that they are not powerful, general, or controllable enough to be reliably profitable. Also, if every profitable phenomenon in the world is already developed, then no business should ever invest in fundamental research - i.e., the pharmaceutical companies are wasting their research dollars. Why is it comforting to you to believe psychic powers don't exist?

gs17 5y ago
Yeah, e.g. someone who can, for example, consistently predict single bits of output from true random number generators 51% of the time would be evidence of something very strange going on, but not necessarily usable for anything practical. (Maybe if you could gather enough of these people to overcome the "weak" ability?)
- prionassembly 5y ago
  AdaBoost, etc. were invented precisely to make good use of weak predictors.
- mathattack 5y ago
  If you could consistently predict stock moves 51% of the time eventually you’d have all the money in the universe.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    It depends on what you mean by 51% of the time. If you’re just making a directional prediction, “will the next market day be up or down?”, that’s nowhere near enough. A little over 53% of days are up (green) days and yet you can’t use that 3x edge over a 51% predictor to make all the money.
    - ajuc 5y ago
      Try "will the X go up or down next second". > A little over 53% of days are up (green) days and yet you can’t use that 3x edge over a 51% predictor to make all the money. You can make money, just not ALL the money. And that's because other people know that too.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        I don’t have access to tick-by-tick feeds any more to test this, but I’d predict that “X will go up or down next second, [ignoring UNCHs]?” is predicted more than 51% of the time by predicting the same trend as the current/previous second and that you’re going to win on percentage of guesses and lose on money (because the changes in direction seconds [where your guess is wrong] are higher vol than the trend continuation seconds).
        ajuc 5y ago
        Again the difference is that everybody (who cares enough) know about the trends, but only you know about the 51% predictions. Assuming these information sources are independent - even if the trends predicted the market in 99% and your prediction was only 51% - you can still combine them to get a better estimate than the generally known one.

TigeriusKirk 5y ago

How do you know the things the chart says aren't happening really aren't happening?

wtallis 5y ago
There would be evidence. The chart helpfully points out a specific kind of evidence that is more or less impossible to conceal with any kind of conspiracy.
- Izkata 5y ago
  One kind of possible evidence. A flipside example: Financial world could instead be used by individuals on casinos, betting, stock markets, etc. and they'd have incentive to keep it secret so they keep winning.
  - wtallis 5y ago
    It might be plausible to assume that someone exploiting ESP or whatever to beat the house could keep the secret of how they're winning. But it's a lot less plausible to postulate that they could keep secret the fact that they are beating the house or beating the market, unless the effect size is too small to be of much interest in the first place (ie. you have to largely abandon part of the original hypothesis: that the crazy phenomenon actually works).
  - yosamino 5y ago
    This argument has the structure of a conspiracy theory: "A small group of people being able to keep an enormous secret, in order to manipulate the rest of us." The more enormous the secret and the larger the group of people who supposedly are in on it, the more the probability of the secret not being a secret very long approaches one. I find it very unlikely that a shortcut to making a lot of money would be secret for very long.
    - wtallis 5y ago
      In particular, as the scope of the conspiracy grows, the cost of keeping that secret very quickly outstrips any potential profit from exploiting the secret. Eg. if oil companies could use ESP to know where to drill, then they would still need to be spending large sums of money on computers and software to analyze seismic data, or else the collapse of demand for those products would expose the conspiracy.

aradox66 5y ago

theptip 5y ago

It’s a sound point. Even a very small edge in precognition or mind reading (no matter how unreliable) would allow hedge funds to beat the market and make a killing. Ergo these effects do not exist because nobody is doing this.

tsol 5y ago
Warren Buffet has done quite well. So maybe it exists but only one person in the world is capable of it.
mistermann 5y ago
Actually this only shows that this specific form does not exist, or has not been discovered, or possibly something else both of us have overlooked.
rkk3 5y ago
Hedge funds do beat the market, individually. Steve Cohen probably has psychic powers.
- wtallis 5y ago
  > Steve Cohen probably has psychic powers. What about his track record cannot be adequately explained by mundane insider trading? Edit: Puzzled by the downvotes. I think it's entirely fair to ask whether Cohen is enough of an outlier that it requires a psychic explanation, even after accounting for the degree of success that can be reasonably attributed to luck and non-psychic skill (effects which other hedge fund managers are also subject to) plus the insider trading he's been involved in (which other hedge fund managers are not necessarily subject to). In a world with a finite number of hedge fund managers, there is always going to be somebody who is the most successful out of the bunch, and that somebody is almost certainly going to appear to be an outlier even without a supernatural influence on their success. So before attributing anything to psychic powers, we first have to establish whether he's too successful to be accounted for by the non-psychic explanations. I genuinely don't know enough about Steve Cohen's track record to know whether he's that much of an outlier, and I'd appreciate some real information about the degree of his success rather than just downvoting.

HWR_14 5y ago

You don't know if people are using them for profit. Are the best surgeons guided by auras or do Oil companies use divinations?

astrange 5y ago
Oil/mining companies have definitely used dowsing in the past, but as far as I know it didn’t work.

bshepard 5y ago

Just because a phenomenon can't be industrialized doesn't mean it doesn't exist; you can't industrialize lyric poetry, for example.

kragen 5y ago
RCA did.
wtallis 5y ago
The phenomena discussed in that comic were chosen for inclusion specifically because they actually would lend themselves quite easily and obviously to commercial exploitation if they really existed as popularly conceived. If you stipulate that all of those alleged psychic phenomena are inherently not exploitable in those ways or any other significantly profitable way, you're basically redefining those terms contrary to their popular meanings and just moving the goalposts.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  The same could be said of antibiotics. However, before Ehrlich & Pasteur, there were no large scale use or even specific awareness of the concept (i.e. some cultures had folk medicinal remedies that involved antibiotics but the mechanism and specific compounds were not understood). So until the 1880s, there was no commercial exploitation of these compounds, yet they nevertheless existed either in actuality or potential. Once there was an understanding of the principles and the development of some related chemical and biochemical processing, this exploded and had a dramatic impact on human life. If someone postulated in, say, 1785, the idea that perhaps there were specific compounds that could be used to cure infection, and these could be produced en masse, would it not be analogous to respond that since nobody is commercially exploiting (at the time), they clearly do not exist?
  - wtallis 5y ago
    > If someone postulated in, say, 1785, the idea that perhaps there were specific compounds that could be used to cure infection, and these could be produced en masse, would it not be analogous to respond that since nobody is commercially exploiting (at the time), they clearly do not exist? None of the ideas included in the xkcd comic are particularly new or obscure. Despite being pigeonholed as a certain kind of bullshit, they are still ideas that a lot of people have heard about and been hearing about for a very long time—more than enough time for someone to get around to commercially exploiting if that were in fact practical. Ghostbusters came out 37 years ago, and the stuff it made fun of was familiar enough to its audience. However, in 1785 the principles of chemical engineering were largely unknown, precluding the development of a modern-style pharmaceutical industry. It did not, however, prevent widespread use of antibiotic treatments that we now understand the mechanism for and can refine or synthesize into more effective forms.

jpttsn 5y ago

What if in the time before the discovery of e.g. quantum mechanics you did the same analysis? Would it tell you that quantum mechanics doesn’t exist?

wtallis 5y ago
If you don't have a theory of quantum mechanics and you don't have any observable phenomena that require a quantum explanation, then there's nothing to apply this kind of analysis to, and nothing to reject the existence of.

normac2 5y ago

The author of this blog, Scott Alexander, has an online novel called Unsong [1] based on this idea. In the book's universe, Kaballah is real and (among many other wild things) corporations automatically generate long lists of Hebrew characters to find names of God that give various powers. [1] https://unsongbook.com/ https://unsongbook.com/

csdvrx 5y ago
> In the book's universe, Kaballah is real and (among many other wild things) corporations automatically generate long lists of Hebrew characters to find names of God that give various powers. In this universe, we do the same with numbers generated by ASICS or GPU: it mostly gives the power of money.
jacquesm 5y ago
There is that sf story about the names of god too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God

nestorD 5y ago

I am seing one empty box that should get a "has been tried" mark and four that should get "are being used" marks. I don't know if they work but I know they are being used for profit.

sampo 5y ago

Also, certain supernatural abilities would have been so useful in stone age societies that they would have given an evolutionary advantage to the individuals possessing them, and hence we all should have those abilities by now, as evolution should have made those adaptations more common.

optimalsolver 5y ago
In Larry Niven's "Known Space" books [0], there was a planet where telepathy was common. Natural selection kept it in check so a hunter would only be able to nudge a prey into walking into an ambush. Then an alien exploratory vessel lands on the planet, aliens that have no resistance to telepathy are instantly controlled and you get an intergalactic slaver empire from a neolithic culture in one generation. So red queen effect [1]. Maybe telepathy evolves in tandem with resistance to telepathy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Ptavvs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Ptavvs [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen's_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen's_race

bsder 5y ago

Actually, you find aromatherapy and its ilk used in healthcare. It seems to help people relax going into surgery and improves outcomes. Thus strengthening your argument that if it works, capitalism will exploit it.