Skepticism doesn't mean resisting any justification for moving the needle of your certainty away from 50%.
You are allowed to expect that psychic phenomena being real would lead to the existence of clear evidence that psychic phenomena are real, and to conclude from the lack of such evidence where it ought to be found that it is less likely that psychic phenomena are real.
> Suppose you have a target that is half red and half blue; you are aiming for red. You would have to be very very confident in your dart skills to say there is only a one in a million chance you will miss it. But if there is a target that is 999,999 millionths red, and 1 millionth blue, then you do not have to be at all good at darts to say confidently that there is only a one in a million chance you will miss the red area.
> Suppose a Christian says “Jesus might be God. And he might not be God. 50-50 chance. So you would have to be incredibly overconfident to say you’re sure he isn’t.” The atheist might respond “The target is full of all of these zillions of hypotheses – Jesus is God, Allah is God, Ahura Mazda is God, Vishnu is God, a random guy we’ve never heard of is God. You are taking a tiny tiny submillimeter-sized fraction of a huge blue target, painting it red, and saying that because there are two regions of the target, a blue region and a red region, you have equal chance of hitting either.” Eliezer Yudkowsky calls this “privileging the hypothesis”. [0]
> There’s a tougher case. Suppose the Christian says “Okay, I’m not sure about Jesus. But either there is a Hell, or there isn’t. Fifty fifty. Right?”
> I think the argument against this is that there are way more ways for there not to be Hell than there are for there to be Hell. If you take a bunch of atoms and shake them up, they usually end up as not-Hell, in much the same way as the creationists’ fabled tornado-going-through-a-junkyard usually ends up as not-a-Boeing-747. For there to be Hell you have to have some kind of mechanism for judging good vs. evil – which is a small part of the space of all mechanisms, let alone the space of all things – some mechanism for diverting the souls of the evil to a specific place, which same, some mechanism for punishing them – again same – et cetera. Most universes won’t have Hell unless you go through a lot of work to put one there. Therefore, Hell existing is only a very tiny part of the target. Making this argument correctly would require an in-depth explanation of formalizations of Occam’s Razor, which is outside the scope of this essay but which you can find on the LW Sequences.
