Which beliefs are considered acceptable and which are not?

Surveys consistently find that approximately 30% of Americans believe in ghosts. Belief in ghosts is an interesting example to me because it exists on its own, unlike other supernatural beliefs which are supported by organized religion (as with the belief that the events in the Bible actually happened) or which have some appeal in the technology community (as with belief in extra-sensory perception or the belief that UFOs are space aliens).

It doesn’t seem that belief in ghosts will be going away any time soon, which on the face of it might seem strange, given that the existence of ghosts violates our current understanding of science, also there’s no good evidence for ghosts–just the usual story with supernatural phenomena of a lot of bad evidence that disintegrates as you look at it too closely. On the other hand, it makes sense to believe in ghosts because the idea is so intuitive: when friends or relatives or pets die, they can remain vivid in our minds–in some way they still feel very alive–so it’s natural to think that this feeling can have some physical manifestation. This seems similar to the way that extra-sensory perception seems like it should be true: at some intuitive level, if seems like if you focus your mind really hard, you should be able to move objects at a distance, perceive things that are far away, etc. And, of course, once you hold a belief or want to hold a belief, it’s not hard to find evidence that is consistent with what you want to be true. So, yeah, ghosts. Again, an interesting example because there’s no organized religion pushing it.

Although belief in ghosts is prevalent, it’s not exactly respectable. There will be the occasional news media feature on ghosts, but it’s more for fun or sociological curiosity than anything else. For example, a quick search led to this Halloween-themed NPR story, “Listen If You Dare: Exploring Our Belief In Ghosts.”

Then there’s extra-sensory perception, which used to be respectable but not anymore. My theory on ESP is that, in the wake of the developments in quantum mechanics in the 1920s and 1930s, it seemed reasonable to believe that “spooky action at a distance” could be occurring in all sorts of ways. Indeed, ESP is not much of a stretch given the discovery of radio waves in the late 1800s. And regular readers of this blog will recall Alan Turing’s statement: “I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.”

Turing was wrong on that one. Not just erroneously believing in phenomena that, as far as we know, don’t exist, but, more importantly to me, wrong in his assessment of the evidence. Even if it were to somehow turn out that ESP is real, it was an unambiguous error to believe that there was overwhelming evidence for ESP in 1950. In any case, ESP was popular with credentialed scientists from the 1940s through the 1970s (see the second-to-last-paragraph of this post), but decades of debunking had their effect, and now it’s not taken seriously. Even NPR seems to have given up on the topic, after getting burned by running a credulous report in 2011.

Somewhere near ESP, but still vague enough to maintain some academic and news-media credibility, are the more extreme claims regarding mind-body healing.

And then there’s the belief that UFOs are space aliens. We’ve talked before about the role of the elite media in promoting this idea.

I’ve discussed before why I characterize UFO’s-as-space-aliens as a supernatural belief. A good analogy here might be unicorns. We can easily imagine a world in which unicorns are real, just as we can imagine a world in which space aliens are exploring our planet. The problem is that there’s no good evidence for space alien UFOs or unicorns, or is there any good indirect evidence or theories (for example, residues of previous alien spacecraft, or unicorn fossils, or whatever).

Lots of people already believe that UFOs are, or might be, space aliens. No assist from the news media is required here. It’s a belief that’s out there. The role of the elite news media here has not been so much to disseminate the belief but rather to legitimize it. The idea that UFOs are space aliens is as ridiculous now as it’s ever been, if not more so. That doesn’t stop a large percentage of people from believing it.

I thought about all of this after receiving this email from Eric Potash (great name for an environmental scientist, by the way!):

Here’s an essay about UFOs by economist Robin Hanson (linked by Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution) that starts:

IMHO, the strongest evidence so far that (some) UFOs are aliens just dropped… This evidence is of many brief bright glints of sunlight reflecting off of big surfaces in high orbit around Earth, before humans had put anything up there, and correlated in time with both UFO reports and nuclear tests.

There are a lot of technical details about telescopes and then the correlation claim is elaborated:

These glints also seem to have a significant date correlations with nuclear tests and UFO reports. Glints were 45% more likely (p = 0.008) on dates within one day of nuclear tests, and there was a significant (p<.001) correlation between the number of UFOs reported and number of glints on each date.

That reference is currently under review at Nature scientific reports. Thought this nexus of economists, UFOs, p-values and Nature might be of interest to you.

My interest here is not in Hanson’s arguments, which I find absolutely ridiculous–you can follow the link to that post and read the comment thread to see lots of clear arguments explaining the problems with the purported evidence–; rather, I’m interested in the question posed in the title of this post: Which beliefs are considered acceptable and which are not?

A bunch of elite news media people such as Ezra Klein, Nate Silver, and Tyler Cowen, along with elite-media-adjacent people such as Robin Hanson, are into this whole space aliens thing. (Just to be clear on the labeling here, I consider myself to be elite-media-adjacent as well, so I’m certainly not saying that all or even most elite-media-adjacent people are space-aliens-curious.) We’ve reached a point where a pundit can openly talk about believing in space aliens, in the same way they can talk about believing in Jesus or Moses or whatever, but not in the way that they would talk about ghosts.

I’m not saying Hanson wouldn’t talk about ghosts. In his writings, Hanson doesn’t seem to be constrained by what might be socially acceptable, as evidenced by his notorious post about rape. But if he were to start writing about ghosts, I don’t know that Cowen and the others would pick up on it. The space aliens thing, like belief in the Bible, or belief in the Book of Mormon, or whatever, has been successfully carried to respectability in a way that ghosts haven’t, even though lots of people believe in all these things.