For clarity it was listed as an ACX meetup, not a LW meetup. Still, I’m not that surprised; the rationalist community seems to select for eccentricity, and sometimes the way someone’s eccentric is they believe in ESP. Do meetups you attend not have this?
Despite making sure Bayes was fresh in everyone’s minds, the believer couldn’t be prompted into using numbers. If I recall correctly, they were “pretty sure that it might” show up after enough trials. After three sets of ten cards each set, I believe they were 2, 2, and 3 for correct guesses. (Quote marks and correctness are to the best of my memory.) A different attendee worked out the base rates for different levels of correct guesses, most attendees made a rough guess at the base rates and were pretty confident the results would be one to three correct guesses. I wish we’d done more trials with them!
There’s a huge gap between believing that ESP is possible in principle and believing that this particular setup will show effects. This setup is about people doing the guesses without strongly developed skills and without much intentionality. on the part of the person who’s thoughts are guessed.
Even if a person would generally believe that ESP is possible in principle, I would expect a rationalist to be more into Leverage style intention phenomena experiments than having believes about these kinds of card-guessing in experimental setups that look like what you described.
For clarity it was listed as an ACX meetup, not a LW meetup. Still, I’m not that surprised; the rationalist community seems to select for eccentricity, and sometimes the way someone’s eccentric is they believe in ESP. Do meetups you attend not have this?
Despite making sure Bayes was fresh in everyone’s minds, the believer couldn’t be prompted into using numbers. If I recall correctly, they were “pretty sure that it might” show up after enough trials. After three sets of ten cards each set, I believe they were 2, 2, and 3 for correct guesses. (Quote marks and correctness are to the best of my memory.) A different attendee worked out the base rates for different levels of correct guesses, most attendees made a rough guess at the base rates and were pretty confident the results would be one to three correct guesses. I wish we’d done more trials with them!
There’s a huge gap between believing that ESP is possible in principle and believing that this particular setup will show effects. This setup is about people doing the guesses without strongly developed skills and without much intentionality. on the part of the person who’s thoughts are guessed.
Even if a person would generally believe that ESP is possible in principle, I would expect a rationalist to be more into Leverage style intention phenomena experiments than having believes about these kinds of card-guessing in experimental setups that look like what you described.