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Perhaps one might say that the true Determinism has never yet been tried?
The problem with this analysis is that it's entirely post hoc. The fact is that neither Skinner, nor his colleagues, nor their peers in the Academy, nor the public at large recognized their approach as "highly crude" in advance. Nor did they frame their efforts as a risky attempt at breaking through a formidable obstacle. Rather, they claimed that they already had the method to arbitrarily shape human behavior, and all that remained was to implement it.
Having claimed the ability to demonstrate determinism experimentally, they were gifted considerable resources at elite institutions with which to carry out their work, and given enormous leeway and influence on society even before their methods had been rigorously verified. And of course, the result was absolute, categorical failure. They demonstrated no greater insight into shaping human behavior than previous, non-Determinist methods had offered, and in fact their influence coincided with a general degradation in such capabilities society-wide. All their predictions of a demonstrable determinism were falsified, which is why we are now discussing unfalsifiable determinism instead.
Suppose I predict with 100% confidence that a stock is going to double in value. You buy some, and it drops to 0. I tell you that this was just a weird confluence of one-off factors, but seriously, here's a new stock that's totally going to double in value. You buy some, and it drops to zero. I tell you that it was criminal activity by competitors, who are being investigated by the FBI now, but hey, here's another stock that's totally going to double in value.
At this point, your confidence in my latest stock pick actually doubling in value should be lower than for a stock you picked completely at random. My track record not only gives you no confidence in my current prediction, but negative confidence, especially if you discover that I directly benefit from people putting faith in my predictions. Determinism was by no means the first branch of Psychology claiming to have "solved" the question of the mind, only to have all its predictions categorically falsified. Neither was Determinism the first branch to derive considerable social, political, and economic benefits for its adherents by lying in this fashion.
You claim that Free Will cannot work the way it appears to, because that would violate Materialism. Then you claim that there's no evidence of anything other than materialism. It is certainly true that there is no evidence contradicting materialism, provided we discard all the evidence that contradicts materialism because it contradicts Materialism. This is fair enough, because Materialism is an Axiom, and all reason is irreducibly axiomatic. The trouble comes from losing sight of what we have actually done, and allowing ourselves to imagine that what was chosen was instead compelled.
However one approaches the question, though, the fact remains that all the evidence available to us about free will is that it actually exists, and it works exactly the way one would expect it to. We can, in fact, exercise our will, intentionally strengthen or weaken it, and otherwise manipulate it by treating it as Will, by bringing the act of choosing into focus in our minds. We cannot manipulate it arbitrarily through other mechanisms, only use it or use it against itself. We can only seduce, we cannot compel, and that result has been surprising to a great many previous and even current Materialists.
And yet it has not been, despite numerous predictions to the contrary. We are confident saccades exist because we can observe and record them and directly compare them to our subjective experience. There are no saccades for free will, no observations that show a clean break with our understanding of our ability to choose. Claiming that such a break might exist is not evidence that it does exist, especially not after previous predictions that it did exist have been falsified.
Why does the apparent existence of free will not dramatically increase your prior of being in a simulation?
Certainly. And that is why you are skeptical about gravity, no? Free will is equally ubiquitous as gravity, after all.
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