>Parapsychologists are constantly protesting that they are playing by all the standard scientific rules, and yet their results are being ignored – that they are unfairly being held to higher standards than everyone else. I’m willing to believe that. It just means that the standard statistical methods of science are so weak and flawed as to permit a field of study to sustain itself in the complete absence of any subject matter.
Just as a thought experiment, suppose psi were actually real. How would you ever discover it, if you always interpreted positive results as evidence that your methods were bad?
There are plenty of people that believe they have discovered it, they just can't actually use it for anything practical except scamming rubes. I actually had a conversation once with a real person who said basically -
"The mistake the cold fusion guys made is they didn't apply it to something practical, like powering a car or heating a house".
Er, maybe there's a reason for that.
So my test for these things isn't so much did they achieve a P-value of less that 0.05, it's are their results good enough to use in a hospital to cure patients, or to propel a vehicle, or to use instead of a telephone. Are they actually useful for anything? Not just so that some people think they get a benefit sometimes, but that anyone can provably get a consistent benefit.
Lots of things many people think are just blue sky science are actually super-useful. Quantum mechanics is used to engineer semiconductors (the operating principle of a transistor is a quantum effect), relativity is used in GPS calculations to provide accurate positioning data, Chaos theory is used to extract useful information out of data once thought to be random.
Psi is super useful for making sensationalist TV shows about haunted houses and clairvoyants that claim this or that, provided you only watch the show and don't actually look into the facts behind the stories. If this stuff was true one or two police departments wouldn't have used one or two clairvoyants on a few cases, every police force would have a full time clairvoyant on the payroll and oil companies would fund clairvoyant schools and pay graduates top dollar to go prospecting for them.
I agree. I think it exists, but humans are pretty weak at it. I think we can get much better, and it's pretty rare to get results at a useful level, but the "baseline" abilities (parasympathetic activation by being watched, blind sight, remote viewing, to name a few) are accessible to all at a very rudimentary level with some training/awareness, but to get useful consistent results is very rare, and probably requires a lot of training combined with natural talent.
So on the "have it and aware of it" long tail you get a lot of psychics basically functioning as highly emphatic counselors with access to some out-of-band knowledge. Maybe at the high-end there are consultants who do work for big oil, corporate, aerospace and government. But for some reason (maybe the topic's history, Stargate, etc) they're secreted away.
How do you distinguish between it existing but being very weak, and it not existing but cognitive bias and random fluctuations in the data occasionally producing a false positive?
it's a good point, I'll have to think more about it.
have you read paper zero by Bem? what's your thoughts on it?
I went looking for some more scholarly evidence, which is quite hard to find, but I am grateful for the opportunity to look more into the existence of studies.
A 2018 review that finds cumulative support, published in American Psychologist[10], and here's an intro and write-up by the British Psychological Society [11]
A 2011 review of approaches to meta-analysis of psi studies that finds support[12]
A 2012 review of evidence and proposal of a quantum mechanical basis that finds support[13]
My take: Scholarly evidence is hard to find, but the evidence is there, and acceptance is growing. That claim that psi is impossible and unsupported is the bolder claim that requires strong evidence to be taken seriously.
Personally, I believe. And I do not understand the visceral resistance, especially from Americans, who are deeply religious people. I see no contradiciton between faith and psi. We take faith at face value, the feeling of connection to the divine, or belief in the main figures, and in stories, and saints, and miracles that speak of extraordinary powers, or people sharing how they knew their loved one had died, or speaking with deceased relatives. Do you really believe that is all cognitive bias and random fluctuations, personally I mean?
Another way of saying things is, we need to be more humble. We don't understand how it can work, but we need to recognize we don't know enough to dismiss it and say it's impossible. What if psi was part of God's plan? And by rejecting it, and the stories of people who tell it, we are turning our backs on one part of divine creation?
Research on the topic will always be, well, tricky. We're talking about determining that the cause of a particular event is nothing more than the most mysterious system in the entire known universe. Until we can fully understand the brain, we'll never be able to create the kind of universal causality that underpins scientific achievement.
If I can do something interesting, say, 7 out of 10 times, science is not going to be happy until it's 10 out of 10. How do you get from 7 out of 10 to 10 out of 10? It could be as simple as changing your diet or as complicated as changing beliefs.
Science is only interested in fully-causal relationships. But human beings are the things least-driven by causality in the universe. Which is why we tend to separate 'science' from 'the humanities'. Studying humans is extremely valuable. But they're not deterministic and so you need less rigorous ways to study them.
This is a very good point. Full-causal relationships. With something magic like this, science really will not be happy until it's 10 out of 10.
Probably diet, pharmacology, genetics, biome, and beliefs are important, but there's no studies. That would be interesting.
I think the human factor also comes into play. Somehow because it's obviously useful, and a human ability, it makes people treat it differently than if we could train a machine or an AI to do it. If there was a psychic AI machine that got 7 out of 10, using some quantum entanglement stuff, everyone would be losing their minds to research and improve it. But as soon as it involves humans, the scholars lose their verve.
The sheer mass of human vagary involved in that account presents a nigh-insurmountable obstacle, especially given that one of my determinations was that "if God doesn't want a thing to happen, it won't happen." That all alone kills any attempt to make it repeatable.
I suppose I could get together with a researcher and try to explore the space. But unless we can get to rigor and full repeatability, whose going to care?
'Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.'
And from that linked SSC article,
> ...But rather than speculate, I prefer to take it as a brute fact. Studies are going to be confounded by the allegiance of the researcher. When researchers who don’t believe something discover it, that’s when it’s worth looking into.
Good point. I don't see why we ought to bring emotion into it at all. It's obvious people are scared of the researching the topic. That makes them problematic for the science. There needs to be a way to analyse data without bias, similar to how exams are marked without knowing names.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...