...all you have to do is provide one piece of evidence (or a mountain of evidence...I don't care what it is) that conclusively establishes that even a single event is fraudulent (that what someone says they experienced is not what they experienced).
I know for a fact that you cannot even begin to do this and I know, and can very effectively argue, why that is the case. As for the other couple of hundred million, I'll be back later.
This is not a good-faith demonstration of your attempts to meet the burden of proof.
Furthermore, this is yet another attempt at dishonestly shifting that burden of proof.
You, sir, are no scientist, and do not understand the requirements for scientific investigation. I have no interest in furthere discussion with you until you at least make a good-faith effort at rational discourse.
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That said, I got to thinking last night: what would such an investigation look like? I think it may be useful to have an outline in this thread, so that others can see that we're not just dismissing this stuff arbitrarily.
It's said that there are hundreds of millions of anecdotal reports. Fine, okay, we can take that as a given. Now the task is to determine which of these reports can actually inform us about ESP phenomena.
We can immediately eliminate anything said by a known fraud. Sylvia Brown, John Edwards, and thier ilk have no credibility and are known to make false statements; therefore, anything said by them can be dismissed without further consideration, on the premise that it is almost certainly fraudulent. Anything stemming from their statements can as well--so, for example, if an audience member says "Sylvia spoke to my dead mother!", or someone bases their claims on one of Edwards' books, those claims can be dismissed from further consideration as well.
Anyone with a history or family history of serious mental illness, particularly serious hallucinations, can be dismissed from consideration. Unlike the first case I'm not saying that they're lying, or even necessarily wrong--it's just that there are so many confounding factors that it would be impossible to disentangle any real statement from any fake one. The family history thing I included because undiagnosed mental illness is rampant--there is a stigma attached to even seeing a psychiatrist, even today, so if someone's extended family (grandparents and their offspring) has been diagnosed with a mental illness that could give a false positive the reports of the non-diagnosed perosn are questionable. Since we're trying to demonstrate something that violates everything known about how the world works, we want the best-quality data we can get.
For the same reasons outlined above, anyone with a history of chemical abuse, or who has taken certain drugs, is out. I read today, for example, that certain antimilarial drugs can cause halucinations. Such confounding factors may make it impossible to differentiate real ESP events from side effects of drugs.
The same applies for sleep deprivation. Any claims made about ESP in the first year after the birth of a child should be discarded, due to the fact that parents for the first year (roughly; it varies from child to child) are fairly massively sleep-deprived.
There are a few I've certainly left out--the general principle is, if there is doubt about their state of conciousness, we cannot take the report at face value, and for the purposes of demonstrating ESP, to give ourselves the best chance possible, we should discard them.
Of those that are left (a very small number at this point) any that do not contain sufficient detail to examine in depth should be discarded. For example, if someone says "I saw my dead mother the night she died", and that's it, there's nothing we can investigate. It's not that we're saying the report is wrong, necessarily, it's just that we cannot prove it either way, and therefore cannot consider it at this stage.
The holy grail of this research would be finding someone who has meticulously documented their instances of ESP, in a journal or diary or something. A dream journal would be a fantastic resource for someone claiming to have had prophetic dreams.
But here we run into a final hurdle: how to count hits and misses. This is no easy task. For example, I once had a dream that I was a T. rex in Florida and watched a rocket shoot off into space. At the time (middle school, I think) I had not even considered living in the South, and while I loved the Saturn V rockets I had no interest in space exploration. Nor did I know of Tyrannosaurids in the South. In the past two years I've worked extensively on NASA bases in the South, I have worked in Florida, and I discovered that there were Tyrannosaurids discovered in Alabama. So, given a wide enough definition of a "hit", I can count no less than three hits for that one dream--which was obviously not a prophetic dream in any sense, just a really fun dream I fondly remember. My point is, we need a tight enough definition of "hit" to prevent stuff like that from seeping in. This is extremely tricky. Personally, I'd say we need to make it as constrained as possible, not to remove as many reports as possible but rather to ensure that any that do survive this analysis are accepted by even those who doubt the conclusion. Obviously the definition of a "hit" will depend on the nature of the ESP phenomenon in question; I'll leave that to those more knowledgeable than I. But it MUST be written down, it MUST be consistent throughout the study, and it MUST be used by EVERYONE involved.
Does this seam like a lot? Sure. Do I care? Not in the least. This is how a scientist would approach this question, and nothing less is acceptable.
There is one thing I do want to note that differentiates science from pseudoscience. I have been assuming throughout this example that the researcher in question accepts ESP as real. Therefore, I biased the study against that conclusion. This is standard scientific practice--we know that everyone has their pet hypotheses (it's inevitable), and it's therefore impossible to analyze all working hypotheses on equal terms. To compensate for this, scientists routinely are MORE harsh with their pet hypotheses than with the alternatives. Darwin's works are a fantastic case study in exactly that--he gave his opponents every chance to disprove him. The reason is simple: If we set our pet hypotheses up for failure and they still survive, even our opponents will admit that there's something to our pet hypotheses.
In contrast, annnnoid and his ilk have set vastly higher standards for disproof of their pet hypotheses than for proof of them. Someone saying "I once had a dream that came true" counts as proof--but to disprove it, we are expected to find ONE explanation that disproves ALL of them IN DETAIL. This is the exact opposite of scientific SOPs, and is tailor made to insulate the pet hypothesis from criticism.
When a scientist wants something to be true they do everything they can to prove it false. When a pseudoscientist wants something to be true, they do everything they can to prevent it from being proven false. It's not universally true, but it's a very common pattern to watch out for.
Anyway, that is what we should expect from serious research into anecdotal claims of ESP. That's pretty much the only way anecdotes can be turned into useful data. Until someone does this--and shows their work, in detail--there is literally nothing to talk about. All we have is a bunch of random claims and the petulant demand that we accept them at face value, which is hardly a scientific, or even rational, approach to anything, much less something of this level of importance (if true). What I've outlined above is what taking this idea seriously would look like, in broad strokes. If the ESP advocates can't even do that, why should WE take it seriously?
