Turing and Kahneman believe wrong things! Sort of, not really.

Andrew Gelman in his blog post Turing and Kahneman and statistical evidence seem to trash the two giants. But really he isn't.

It looks like Alan Turing (AT) supports ESP:

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.

And of course ESP is wrong! (By 'wrong' I mean of course that there's lots of evidence against it, despite AT's statement to the contrary).


It also looks like Daniel Kahneman (DK) supports general priming effects age-word priming on walking speed.

When I describe priming studies to audiences, the reaction is often disbelief . . . The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.

But wait! To their defense! Priming in general is a well established phenomenon, just not in this particular instance. (it just turns out that the age-related priming on gait was a statistical fluke).

The two experts are really just aying that as far as they know, from the data, one might need to believe in implausible things. Science is filled with such implausibilities. Afterall, it doesn't feel like the Earth is turning, the Sun obviously is just moving across the sky. Things are complicated, you have to actually see additional data to be more accurate (Copernicus's model was not as accurate as Ptolemy's when first proposed).