Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
To the bold. On the flip side it is so so much sadder when people see airplanes and call them UFOs, tree stumps and call them bigfoot, natural formations say they are built by aliens. The list of extremely obvious everyday objects called something "special" is beyond baffling.
Yup. It's true of both sides of the argument. Whether you are a Die-Hard Skeptic or a Passionate Want-To-Believer, everyone selects the evidence they want to see and discards whatever contradicts their worldview. Atheists are just as guilty of this as fundamentalists.
It's called confirmation bias. We all do it to a degree.
confirmation bias, the tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with one’s existing beliefs. This biased approach to decision making is largely unintentional and often results in ignoring inconsistent information. Existing beliefs can include one’s expectations in a given situation and predictions about a particular outcome. People are especially likely to process information to support their own beliefs when the issue is highly important or self-relevant.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
44,551 posts, read 81,085,957 times
Reputation: 57739
Quote:
Originally Posted by PhinneyWalker
What were your experiences?
Long stories, but to summarize, my wife and I both having the same strange experiences at a really old hotel that used to be a brothel, and several times seeing a full-body apparition in an old home where my parents lived, which looked like the former owner who died there. That was a text-book example of a residual haunting.
Yup. It's true of both sides of the argument. Whether you are a Die-Hard Skeptic or a Passionate Want-To-Believer, everyone selects the evidence they want to see and discards whatever contradicts their worldview. Atheists are just as guilty of this as fundamentalists.
It's called confirmation bias. We all do it to a degree.
“What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” — Warren Buffett
Yes confirmation bias is a very real thing. Like the review I posted about Lily Dale. It is exactly how that place works in my biased opinion. Plus it was the second review so it was very easy to find.
Having been a believer and now a skeptic I see both sides of the topics in this section very well.
And I suppose scientists are immune from this kind of thing, and science is the only true God. Praise be to God.
Scientists are just as susceptible to this as anyone else.
Example: When Georges Lemaître first proposed the Big Bang Theory, most mainstream scientists --- including the great Albert Einstein --- scoffed at it, thinking it seemed too religious and reminiscent of, "Let there be light! And behold, there was light." Confirmation bias in play.
But to their credit, the scientists (including Einstein) started looking at the evidence and realized that Georges Lemaître was right. The Big Bang is good physics.
So yes, scientists are just as susceptible to confirmation bias as anyone else. But the great thing about science is that scientists' egos drive them to try to constantly prove their fellow scientists wrong, so they are eager to check the evidence to confirm or deny the conclusions.
Yup. It's true of both sides of the argument. Whether you are a Die-Hard Skeptic or a Passionate Want-To-Believer, everyone selects the evidence they want to see and discards whatever contradicts their worldview. Atheists are just as guilty of this as fundamentalists.
It's called confirmation bias. We all do it to a degree.
“What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” — Warren Buffett
I have a great analogy —well it’s not an analogy — it actually happened to me. A friend of mine painted her living room, and she was choosing some new accessories —pillows, some vases, you know — let’s try to like make this look like a hotel room kind of crap. And because I quilt and have to deal with color all the time she asked me for my opinion. Which I was happy to give.
So I walked into her living room and the two sets of accessories that she purchased one was green and one was blue. She had them on her sofa and coffee table in front. I picked up a pillow from the blue side and held it up to the wall and then I picked up a green pillow and I held it up to the wall, and I said either one of these would go. The blue would be matching but the green is a very appropriate contrast.
She looked at me like I was growing horns out of my head.
“The walls are green.”
I replied — no the walls are blue.
I can attest to you because teal is my favorite color and that is sort of a slightly green tinted blue, that these walls were not teal. They were a pastel blue. She insisted they were a pastel green. The paint color title was silver birch. So she called another friend over, and the other friend said it was green but very gray.
But I am not kidding you I was seeing blue. In either case any accessory she picked would’ve gone perfectly with it, because given the pastel shade, everything matched. Perfectly.
Since I moved back to where I grew up recently, I have discovered that the things that I was so positive about, my memories of what things were where, is completely wrong. It’s fascinating.
And given that sometimes what we see, what we witness can be easily misconstrued, that’s why eyewitness accounts to events are falling out of favor. Our brains fill things in. Pareidolia. The brain completes the picture and tell the story for us, but often that story isn’t the truth.
I see this with my sister constantly. She has dementia, and she will ask me a question about our family history. I’m the family historian. And I will tell her things that she asks about, and then she will tell me I am wrong and proceeded to tell me something that she absolutely fervently believes is true because it fits her narrative. She does this with everything.
And frankly, we all do. It’s perfectly human to do.
I have a great analogy —well it’s not an analogy — it actually happened to me. A friend of mine painted her living room, and she was choosing some new accessories —pillows, some vases, you know — let’s try to like make this look like a hotel room kind of crap. And because I quilt and have to deal with color all the time she asked me for my opinion. Which I was happy to give.
So I walked into her living room and the two sets of accessories that she purchased one was green and one was blue. She had them on her sofa and coffee table in front. I picked up a pillow from the blue side and held it up to the wall and then I picked up a green pillow and I held it up to the wall, and I said either one of these would go. The blue would be matching but the green is a very appropriate contrast.
She looked at me like I was growing horns out of my head.
“The walls are green.”
I replied — no the walls are blue.
I can attest to you because teal is my favorite color and that is sort of a slightly green tinted blue, that these walls were not teal. They were a pastel blue. She insisted they were a pastel green. The paint color title was silver birch. So she called another friend over, and the other friend said it was green but very gray.
But I am not kidding you I was seeing blue. In either case any accessory she picked would’ve gone perfectly with it, because given the pastel shade, everything matched. Perfectly.
Since I moved back to where I grew up recently, I have discovered that the things that I was so positive about, my memories of what things were where, is completely wrong. It’s fascinating.
And given that sometimes what we see, what we witness can be easily misconstrued, that’s why eyewitness accounts to events are falling out of favor. Our brains fill things in. Pareidolia. The brain completes the picture and tell the story for us, but often that story isn’t the truth.
I see this with my sister constantly. She has dementia, and she will ask me a question about our family history. I’m the family historian. And I will tell her things that she asks about, and then she will tell me I am wrong and proceeded to tell me something that she absolutely fervently believes is true because it fits her narrative. She does this with everything.
And frankly, we all do. It’s perfectly human to do.
To the bold part. WOW do I get that. I have done my fair share of traveling and lived in a few different parts of the US. Now with google earth I like to go back to those places and am amazed at how different things are than I remembered them.
I have a great analogy —well it’s not an analogy — it actually happened to me. A friend of mine painted her living room, and she was choosing some new accessories —pillows, some vases, you know — let’s try to like make this look like a hotel room kind of crap. And because I quilt and have to deal with color all the time she asked me for my opinion. Which I was happy to give.
So I walked into her living room and the two sets of accessories that she purchased one was green and one was blue. She had them on her sofa and coffee table in front. I picked up a pillow from the blue side and held it up to the wall and then I picked up a green pillow and I held it up to the wall, and I said either one of these would go. The blue would be matching but the green is a very appropriate contrast.
She looked at me like I was growing horns out of my head.
“The walls are green.”
I replied — no the walls are blue.
I can attest to you because teal is my favorite color and that is sort of a slightly green tinted blue, that these walls were not teal. They were a pastel blue. She insisted they were a pastel green. The paint color title was silver birch. So she called another friend over, and the other friend said it was green but very gray.
But I am not kidding you I was seeing blue. In either case any accessory she picked would’ve gone perfectly with it, because given the pastel shade, everything matched. Perfectly.
Since I moved back to where I grew up recently, I have discovered that the things that I was so positive about, my memories of what things were where, is completely wrong. It’s fascinating.
And given that sometimes what we see, what we witness can be easily misconstrued, that’s why eyewitness accounts to events are falling out of favor. Our brains fill things in. Pareidolia. The brain completes the picture and tell the story for us, but often that story isn’t the truth.
I see this with my sister constantly. She has dementia, and she will ask me a question about our family history. I’m the family historian. And I will tell her things that she asks about, and then she will tell me I am wrong and proceeded to tell me something that she absolutely fervently believes is true because it fits her narrative. She does this with everything.
And frankly, we all do. It’s perfectly human to do.
There are different types of color blindness. I've run into people, who, when something is light grey (comes up in the context of car colors, for example), they see light blue. They say red/green colorblindness is one of the more common types. Some cultures don't differentiate green from blue, so people from those cultures will see only blue.
Have you ever been tested for color blindness? It sounds like it might be an interesting experiment in your case.
Long stories, but to summarize, my wife and I both having the same strange experiences at a really old hotel that used to be a brothel, and several times seeing a full-body apparition in an old home where my parents lived, which looked like the former owner who died there. That was a text-book example of a residual haunting.
There are different types of color blindness. I've run into people, who, when something is light grey (comes up in the context of car colors, for example), they see light blue. They say red/green colorblindness is one of the more common types. Some cultures don't differentiate green from blue, so people from those cultures will see only blue.
Yup. A lot of this is semantic. My wife and I sometimes argue about the differences between various hues of blue and green. We grew up in different parts of the country, so it's more a matter of definition than the color we are actually seeing. She insists that certain shades are blue when I can see that they are obviously green and she is crazy.
Fun fact: Ancient Greek (and others) didn't have a word for "blue." They could see it. The language just didn't have a conceptual word for it.
Can we see something for which we have no word? Yes. The Greeks were able to distinguish shades of blue just as vividly as we can now, despite lacking a specific vocabulary for them. Yet, writes Deutscher, even though Gladstone was wrong about the Greeks' sense of perception, his hunch about the emergence of colour words was "so sharp and far-sighted that much of what he wrote . . . can hardly be bettered today".
It turned out that it wasn't just the Ancient Greeks who never said the sky was blue. None of the ancient languages had a proper word for blue. What we now call blue was once subsumed by older words for black or for green. (In fact, this is why in Japan green lights are actually a bluer shade of green than in the rest of the world. The word used for the green of traffic lights is ao, which used to mean "green and blue" but now means blue. Rather than change the word, they changed the colour.)
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Solly says — Be nice!
