You don't have to be an expert on a topic to see that something is either extremely unlikely or plausible. (Anyone can still be wrong in there conclusion mind you.)
"There's a group of human's that can breath fire like a dragon"
Just using some basic knowledge of evolution and genetics, that seems pretty unlikely. What would the evolutionary pressure be ? Would there be enough time for that development? No parallel's in other mammals etc.
You can do the same to see if something is plausible. For this discussion specifically. We know there are physical difference's between populations (Height, drug tolerance, skin colour)
These observable differences are caused by different genes. What are the chances that none of these differences in genes are in the brain ? Basically zero.
So it's very plausible you'd find some differences. Just using some simple reasoning.
(Reading a little bit about it, Sam Harris basically makes this exact point.
It really is basic logic)
The history of philosophy shows that what sounds logical tells us little about how the world physically works. There's nothing logical about time dilation or quantum physics.
I mean, if the community around Astro Codex said upfront "We don't care about empiricism, we make things up based on what sounds logical to us" I would at least give them points for honesty.
The guy who runs Astro Codex blog claims he is an empiricist.
It's nuanced. We are evolved creatures, with certain intuitions about things.
You can point to domains about where it fails completely. (For understandable reasons)
But that doesn't mean intuition is useless, in fact I'd say it's rather underused for how valuable it actually is. Parachutes and RCT's come to mind.
Being empirical is really hard and rather un-natural for humans. It's a best effort thing. Current institution don't help as much as I'd like, it still takes many decades for information to propagate (And even longer for corrections where the consensus was wrong)
"There's a group of human's that can breath fire like a dragon"
Just using some basic knowledge of evolution and genetics, that seems pretty unlikely. What would the evolutionary pressure be ? Would there be enough time for that development? No parallel's in other mammals etc.
You can do the same to see if something is plausible. For this discussion specifically. We know there are physical difference's between populations (Height, drug tolerance, skin colour)
These observable differences are caused by different genes. What are the chances that none of these differences in genes are in the brain ? Basically zero.
So it's very plausible you'd find some differences. Just using some simple reasoning. (Reading a little bit about it, Sam Harris basically makes this exact point. It really is basic logic)