It seems to me that there’s a large body of papers on hypnosis that do suggest that it’s not in the same reference class as telepathy.
If you want to prove hypnosis, one problem is that it needs some skill to do it. As an experiment, I think suggesting color blindness and letting people do the stoop test would be one of the best setups.
On the English Wikipedia article on Parapsychology, hypnosis is listed between false awakening and ideomotor phenomenon. When I google “parapsychology” I get
“the study of mental phenomena which are excluded from or inexplicable by orthodox scientific psychology (such as hypnosis, telepathy, etc.).” -Definitions from Oxford Languages.
On the one hand, that’s obviously argument by definition and I maybe shouldn’t do that. On the other hand, the reference class I’m trying to construct isn’t “things Screwtape is very confident are false” it’s “things which Screwtape expects meetup attendees are skeptical of and which a local meetup could test, ideally requiring a bit of statistics to investigate.” For that use case, the remote detection of staring is the odd one out since the equipment to measure electrodermal activity is kind of niche. It got included on the list essentially as a hat tip to the Scott Alexander article that gave me the idea for this meetup. The worst thing about that list to me is that halfway I switch from specific experiments on telepathy to one word parapsychology or pseudoscience effects. That’s just messy categorization.
I realized after I hit post that I forgot to say thank you for suggesting an experiment for hypnosis, so, thank you! I’ll try and get ahold of a copy to read myself, but from reading the abstract I suspect once I do I’ll edit that in as a link with Hypnosis.
I’m not sure how easy is it for someone without hypnosis experience to run a hypnosis induction to create the effect but in general the stroop experiment is a good way to move hypnosis effects out of subjective effects to objective effects.
A lot of skepticism toward hypnosis is about whether someone who’s hypnotized is just role-playing and the good thing about the stroop test is that you can’t just role play to not feel any interference in the stroop test.
It seems to me that there’s a large body of papers on hypnosis that do suggest that it’s not in the same reference class as telepathy.
If you want to prove hypnosis, one problem is that it needs some skill to do it. As an experiment, I think suggesting color blindness and letting people do the stoop test would be one of the best setups.
On the English Wikipedia article on Parapsychology, hypnosis is listed between false awakening and ideomotor phenomenon. When I google “parapsychology” I get
On the one hand, that’s obviously argument by definition and I maybe shouldn’t do that. On the other hand, the reference class I’m trying to construct isn’t “things Screwtape is very confident are false” it’s “things which Screwtape expects meetup attendees are skeptical of and which a local meetup could test, ideally requiring a bit of statistics to investigate.” For that use case, the remote detection of staring is the odd one out since the equipment to measure electrodermal activity is kind of niche. It got included on the list essentially as a hat tip to the Scott Alexander article that gave me the idea for this meetup. The worst thing about that list to me is that halfway I switch from specific experiments on telepathy to one word parapsychology or pseudoscience effects. That’s just messy categorization.
I realized after I hit post that I forgot to say thank you for suggesting an experiment for hypnosis, so, thank you! I’ll try and get ahold of a copy to read myself, but from reading the abstract I suspect once I do I’ll edit that in as a link with Hypnosis.
I’m not sure how easy is it for someone without hypnosis experience to run a hypnosis induction to create the effect but in general the stroop experiment is a good way to move hypnosis effects out of subjective effects to objective effects.
A lot of skepticism toward hypnosis is about whether someone who’s hypnotized is just role-playing and the good thing about the stroop test is that you can’t just role play to not feel any interference in the stroop test.
Once can be a misprint but three in a row is
enemy actiona mistaken belief. Stroop!You are right, it should be stroop I edited the typo.