brilliant

Excellent video which I'd love to show to a few people I know =P Problem is that they would likely not get it =( My landlord still has the crazy notion that smoking does not cause cancer. I shit you not.

really cool

Number 1 baby, this is going all the way.

My parents fascinate me in this regard. My dad is the ultimate scientific proof of anything kind of guy, has no time for ghost stories or anything of the sort (but loves movies of paranormal/sci fi etc, because not believing there's been any good proof of something does not mean you don't have a great imagination and love to hear/see STORIES about them). My mother on the other hand is very much into ghost stories, guardian angels, voices from the dead and so on and so forth.

One adheres to this video absolutely, one is a perfect example of the type of anecdotal stories becoming fact.

Fascinating.

^ I think so as well. Out of the queue in only forty minutes.

My father is also very sceptical, but he's a tad bit too postmodernistic to agree with all my debunking on an ethical level.

Good post, great to see common sense articulated so well. I'm listening to the Quintana Illusion but I don't hear the 5th voice, is it some sort of high-pitched overtone or something like that? If anyone has an example of that "voice" being isolated that would be nice to hear.

Anecdotes are inadequate? Thank God we have exceptions to that rule, like the Bible.

It took approximately 11 hours for someone to tie in the Bible/Christianity/religion to a particular sift? I'm very disappointed.

Good talk for *brains with select *animations.

Adding video to channels (Animation, Brain) - requested by Krupo.

*doublepromote

Double-Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Sunday, February 1st, 2009 9:43am PST - doublepromote requested by jwray.

Who is this guy?
Doug. QualiaSoup on YT.
Same guy as this one:
http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Skewed-Views-of-Science

>> ^Xax:
It took approximately 11 hours for someone to tie in the Bible/Christianity/religion to a particular sift? I'm very disappointed.


Personally, I'm dissappointed that none of the other videos in the top 15 have yet received comments on Bible/CHristianity/religion. Especially the one about four wheel offroad suspension, I mean that sift is the perfect forum for religious discussion. Come on! But hey, 11 hours isn't bad for this sift, considering anecdotes have very little to do with the Bible and stories about Jesus.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Great post. I love his dispassionate presentation style.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Didn't hear the Quntina illusion, but I really liked that vocal style.

Common sense is so uncommon.

I think these human quirks of reasoning exist for a reason, from an evolutionary standpoint. I think the more prudent thing to do is stand back and let these tendencies continue or die out naturally, rather than campaign against their existence.

In the mysterious cough story, if they hadn't identified the source of the cough, the person who assumed it was a ghost--and all those in the room ready to believe it--might've grieved a little more easily by feeling that their deceased relative was still with them in some form.

Psychology is a fairly new science. Discarding cultural traits because their use isn't immediately obvious is like an 1800s doctor removing organs from a patient because he didn't know what good they were doing. There's nothing inherently wrong with people holding supernatural or superstitious beliefs, and removing those beliefs without cause can do more harm than good.

That said, I did like the latter 2/3rds of the video.

"There's nothing inherently wrong with people holding supernatural or superstitious beliefs, and removing those beliefs without cause can do more harm than good."

Oooo I so disagree. I've seen nothing but detachment from reality arise from superstition and supernatural beliefs. I can only see that detachment as a good thing when you , at some level, realize that you are detached and just enjoying a temporary mind trip. Too many people stay detached and it eventually bites them. That is unless they stay permanently detached and delusional to the grave, which makes them just sad.

I'm also sick of people living with guilt as a result of these delusions.

There is a strong cause to remove them - we're not just waking them up because we're nit-picking.

Fuckin quintana...... that creep can roll, man... Hey maybe that's who the 5th voice is, jesus quintana?

I never heard it though in the clip, and the singing was absolutely terrible.

Paranormal stuff, UFOs, Bigfoot, and of course Religion.

People believe what they want to believe and even when cornered with opposing evidence they often just fall back on their "conspiracy" theories to explain away the difference.

So, yeah *promote

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Sunday, February 1st, 2009 11:55pm PST - promote requested by gwiz665.

Poor guy, he's surrounded by morons and it passively pisses him off.

This reminds me of a date I went on; the girl insisted that ghosts were absolutely real, and detailed stories of ghosts and poltergeist-ish activity in her old house. I started very briefly to break down how circumstantial all her claims were (my Grandma SWORE she heard a baby cry, but the baby had been dead for 15yrs ZOMG).

I stopped myself quickly; my chance for being naked at the end of the date would have been in severe jeopardy. -1 for intellectual cowardice

The quintina is simply an harmonic singing you can hear a similar effect much more clearly in this sift http://www.videosift.com/video/Overtone-singing. Note that he's not whistling while singing he's reinforcing particular harmonic with is mouth, like we do in a less accentuated way when pronouncing particular vowel.

If someone can pull in the bible and jesus I'm totally pulling 911 into this one.

We only have anecdotal evidence for 911, give me rigorous scientific evidence or give me death1#!!!"!"

The plural of anecdote is not data.

Good content but his voice is frustratingly monotonous.

>> ^Enzoblue:
Oooo I so disagree. I've seen nothing but detachment from reality arise from superstition and supernatural beliefs. I can only see that detachment as a good thing when you , at some level, realize that you are detached and just enjoying a temporary mind trip. Too many people stay detached and it eventually bites them. That is unless they stay permanently detached and delusional to the grave, which makes them just sad.
I'm also sick of people living with guilt as a result of these delusions.
There is a strong cause to remove them - we're not just waking them up because we're nit-picking.


I don't see people living with guilt because of superstitions. In fact, superstition is often used as a kind of wish fulfillment by your subconscious, just as in this video's example. My mother has a story like that where she was sure she saw a dead relative's face in a window, and it definitely helped her grieve to feel that her relative was imparting silent approval on her life from beyond the grave.

I agree there are individual cases where people need to be "woken up," like adolescents that confuse it for reality, UFO/911 conspiracy believers who change their lifestyle because of their delusions, someone that believes he had a curse put on him ... stuff like that, but there are far more people that have more minor and beneficial examples of superstitious belief. And superstitious belief certainly isn't the only path to detachment from reality.

the simplest explanation is most of the time the right one...

>> ^Fade:
If someone can pull in the bible and jesus I'm totally pulling 911 into this one.
We only have anecdotal evidence for 911, give me rigorous scientific evidence or give me death1#!!!"!"


Wait what? you're comparing stories of Jesus turning water into wine with terrorists crashing a planes into the world trade center on national television?

Do you even know what "anecdote" means?

There's some good stuff in this video. There's also some truly laughable items.

My following comments are chronologically ordered with the video. They are not all meant to be examples of "laughable items".

1) He uses the first two anecdotes he mentions in exactly the same way in which he says the characters in those anecdotes used their own. In other words, he comes to a conclusion of the characters' behavior based upon supposition derived from a single experience, not upon statistically significant data.

2) The second optical illusion (moving petals) is completely static for me. I'm red-green colorblind, and I wonder if that's why?

3) "Skeptics don't state as fact that paranormal phenomena don't exist," "No paranormal claim has ever been validated by independent means."
Tautological much? Of course no paranormal claim has ever been validated, because as soon as it has been, it is no longer considered paranormal!

4) When the sunbather that has not contracted melanoma claims that sunbathing can do you no harm, he or she is correct in a certain sense. It apparently cannot do them any harm. This is where anecdotal evidence is in fact useful. If I find that I have an uncanny ability to avoid breaking my bones when I fall, then it is logical for me to conclude that the next time I fall, I won't break any bones. Obviously I can't apply that to anyone else, because it is dependent upon my own physiology, kinesthetics, athletic ability, etc. I'm happy to finally find a video like this that at least acknowledges the flip side of the coin.



I'm not entirely sure this belongs in the 'brain' channel. It is a description, not an explanation, of human behavior. If the 'Mind and Brain' channel is to have any coherence, I feel I must demand that explanation. Otherwise, any video with a description of human behavior would valid for inclusion. The end result is that any video showing human behavior (nearly every non-lolcat video on the sift) is then qualified for inclusion. I'm going to leave it for now and revisit again in a couple of days.

This post has been removed from the Brain channel by channel owner jonny. Please review the FAQ to learn about appropriate channel assignments.

*promote

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>> ^spoco2:
Number 1 baby, this is going all the way.


Wow, Spoco2..., you guessed it - you must be phsychic!!!!
"I know someone who guessed this would go right to Number One!" - What are the Chances

Tags for this video have been changed from 'anecdotes, evidence, illusion, paranormal, explanation' to 'anecdotes, evidence, illusion, paranormal, explanation, QualiaSoup' - edited by EDD

*promote

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"This video is private." *dead

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