Confirmation Bias Debunked!

[Twain Shakespeare]

[The Necromancer]

Sorry for bumping this up, but I wanted to talk about this without creating another thread.

'Confirmation Bias' is another underhanded tactic pseudoskeptics like to use to try to explain the reason why psychics 'feel' what they do.

You have a feeling/theory which is either borne out or influenced by experience...so? Should we say the theory never happened or the experience never happened? they just seemed to co-relate and reinforce each other, that's all.

The alternative is the 'argumentum ad populum' world that pseudoskeptics live in, where they cannot even have a single idea, notion or theory unless it's a child of their religion called 'science' or has already been thought about by a much proficient and more highly skilled pseudoskeptic.

So, when is something just 'confirmation' which leads us to explore on from that, discovering new methods and possibilities...or 'confirmation bias' which only leads us to dismiss that confirmation as a kind of 'I knew it would happen anyway, ergo it didn't happen'?

This 'confirmation bias' is a whole load of codswallop...and it's more of a 'you are either with US or with THEM' argument that stupid pseudoskeptics use to further annoy people.

[TheLight954]

I'm pretty sure my cases of precognitive dreams is NOT confirmation bias. Firstly, my family has zero history of dreaming about new things, much less vividly. When you dream of flying in a transparent airplane and you find out very soon after that it gets invented, this is truly something to investigate and not to just dismiss as sheer coincidence.

Also, in my case of sleep paralysis predicting an earthquake, this is the first dream that I recall thinking that it was real even shortly after I woke up for the first time(no earthquake of magnitude greater than 2 happened anywhere near me. Magnitudes of 2 or less happen several times daily by the way in my area). It took me until I woke up for real way later to become back to sanity. Also, I apparently woke up for no reason(and not to mention it was probably the earliest I've ever woke up), as normally I when I wake up in the middle of the night I'm urging to go to the bathroom.

What strikes me bizarre is when some case might be confirmation bias, pseudoskeptics say it MUST be confirmation bias. And even after it has been ruled out, sometimes pseudoskeptics keep on insisting on it.