3 ms·

Hey, I can make random accurate guesses too! I just don't tell you about my failures...

NateEag 4y ago
I don't know what the author is referring to, but in NDE research, you can find plenty of claimed witnesses to incidents where someone awoke and promptly made a claim about reality that proved to be correct and which they had no clear way to have observed naturally. The most common one is probably knowing someone else has recently died, due to encountering the newly-dead in the apparent afterlife part of their NDE. Could that still suffer from the same selection bias problem? Sure. Do we have rigorous proof that this really happens as such? No, just various eyewitness testimonies saying that it did, and eyewitness testimony is famously unreliable. Still - if people really do come back from near-death and spontaneously report other deaths accurately without first checking for whether their perception was correct... that's kind of weird. Bruce Greyson apparently published a paper about the phenomenon, IIRC saying that they didn't find any instances of someone reporting a death incorrectly out of hundreds of reports of NDE-inspired death-knowledge claims. I've been meaning to dig that one up and look more closely at it, because that's at the very least pretty remarkable selection bias. Not sure I'm remembering the details right, though.
- thechao 4y ago
  > you can find plenty of claimed witnesses to incidents where someone awoke and promptly made a claim about reality that proved to be correct and which they had no clear way to have observed naturally This is literally unbelievable. If what you're saying is true, it would be published in something like "Nature" or "Science". Please point to that paper. If it's not published in a journal of that prestige level, then it's certainly factually wrong.
  - yathaid 4y ago
    Argument from Authority 101. "If the Earth revolved around the Sun surely the Church would have published Copernicus' work." I don't disagree with your conclusion, just your method of reaching it.

I don't know what the author is referring to, but in NDE research, you can find plenty of claimed witnesses to incidents where someone awoke and promptly made a claim about reality that proved to be correct and which they had no clear way to have observed naturally. The most common one is probably knowing someone else has recently died, due to encountering the newly-dead in the apparent afterlife part of their NDE. Could that still suffer from the same selection bias problem? Sure. Do we have rigorous proof that this really happens as such? No, just various eyewitness testimonies saying that it did, and eyewitness testimony is famously unreliable. Still - if people really do come back from near-death and spontaneously report other deaths accurately without first checking for whether their perception was correct... that's kind of weird. Bruce Greyson apparently published a paper about the phenomenon, IIRC saying that they didn't find any instances of someone reporting a death incorrectly out of hundreds of reports of NDE-inspired death-knowledge claims. I've been meaning to dig that one up and look more closely at it, because that's at the very least pretty remarkable selection bias. Not sure I'm remembering the details right, though.

thechao 4y ago
> you can find plenty of claimed witnesses to incidents where someone awoke and promptly made a claim about reality that proved to be correct and which they had no clear way to have observed naturally This is literally unbelievable. If what you're saying is true, it would be published in something like "Nature" or "Science". Please point to that paper. If it's not published in a journal of that prestige level, then it's certainly factually wrong.
- yathaid 4y ago
  Argument from Authority 101. "If the Earth revolved around the Sun surely the Church would have published Copernicus' work." I don't disagree with your conclusion, just your method of reaching it.