Merged The razor of Hitchens and the Spirits!

Calderaro said:
Can studies on near-death experiences be empirical evidence of the existence of spirits?
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Do you have any specific studies in mind? Please provide a citation to the study of near-death experience that you think best provides that evidence.

You posted a video in which someone purporting to be a scientist discussed that evidence in a religious context. That post has received replies which you have ignored. You cited Ian Stevenson as a source for scientific evidence of reincarnation. That post has received replies which you have ignored. Stop being rude and address what other people say.
 
Calderaro said:
A manifestation of pseudo-skepticism is the rejection of personal experiences reported by individuals who claim to have had contact with spirits.
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JayUtah said:
Straw man. You're not engaging with anything that's being said to you. You're simply hurling slogans. This increases the chances that you will simply be written of as a crank and ignored.

The straw man you're relying upon now was already dispelled in this post https://internationalskeptics.com/f...hitchens-and-the-spirits.373363/post-14475918 , and the key sentiment has been underscored by other contributors. No one is rejecting the experiences claimed by others. However, the undisputed effect portion of the claim has nothing to do with attributed cause portion of the claim, which can be separately questioned. Skepticism properly realizes that how one interprets an experience—including attributing it to various possible causes—is independent of the experience itself.

Citing the effect as evidence of a cause to which it has merely been attributed is classic circular reasoning. Identifying it as such is proper logical analysis, not pseudo-skepticism. You must provide separate evidence of the causation, which is where deduction can play a proper role in devising testable hypotheses.
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What Calderaro is doing here is attempting to deflect criticism of his argument by portraying it as a personal attack.
 
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Carrot Flower King said:
Have we not already done Beichel and Windbridge?
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We have, and it's not really applicable to cite her work as evidence relevant to near-death experiences. She mostly investigates claims to mediumship. Of the work you linked to, most is survey and metric work. Of the three two publications that purport to test hypotheses, two are inconclusive. The neuroscience research (which conflates electroencephalograph with electrocorticograpy) merely purports that mediums engaged in alleged mediumship are in a different state of mind—as measured according to electrophysiology—than certain other activities. The other inconclusive study purports to eliminate external methods of cheating in purported mediums. The conclusive study has been discussed here. She purports to have a "quintuple blind" protocol that she can use to "certify" mediums. For all its purported rigor, it still relies upon subjective human judges to score the correctness of predictions, and it is unclear how these judges' ability to do so was validated.
 
Carrot Flower King said:
Go on then, explain what the supposed research tells us -

https://www.windbridge.org/research/completed-studies/

What is there in any of that I should pay any attention to? Why should I go to the bother of reading it?
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Heh! :sneaky:

Quadruple blind experiments...what does that even mean? Nobody knows anything about anything or if anything is even happening?? Sounds about right.

And "certified mediums"? How does one get such a certification? Is there a college? Thought this was what the research was all about in the first place.

Looks very much like a pseudo-scientific scam for sucking free money out of gullible old billionaire donors to this "research".
 
Norman Alexander said:
Quadruple blind experiments...what does that even mean?
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You can add -tuples to the blindness of a study any time a person who is providing, collecting, analyzing, or interpreting data is blind to the variable. A quadruple-blind study is one in which only the principal investigator knows the control-versus-experiment assignment. Quintuple-blind means even the principal investigator does not know it. Obviously there's a limit to how much reliability and reproducibility you can improve by additional blinding. In the shadier pseudosciences, turning up this knob is sometimes used to distract from sketchy methodology elsewhere. In those instances it's equivalent to the magician showing you that there's no rabbit up his sleeve.

Norman Alexander said:
And "certified mediums"? How does one get such a certification? Is there a college?
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That's part of what Windbridge Research Center appears to do.

Norman Alexander said:
Thought this was what the research was all about in the first place.
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One of the common criticisms of Beischel is that she admits to becoming interested in the afterlife and mediumship after someone close to her died. Some claim this biases her in favor of proving that mediums can contact the dead.

Norman Alexander said:
Looks very much like a pseudo-scientific scam for sucking free money out of gullible old billionaire donors to this "research".
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Allegations of bias and shaky methodology aside, one of the more damning items is the fact that someone on her "certified mediums" list was exposed as an obvious, proven fraud. I forget his name, but she kept on certifying him. Regardless of what you might think of the proposition that mediums can be scientifically tested and certified, it doesn't appear that her method is very reliable.
 
JayUtah said:
You can add -tuples to the blindness of a study any time a person who is providing, collecting, analyzing, or interpreting data is blind to the variable. A quadruple-blind study is one in which only the principal investigator knows the control-versus-experiment assignment. Quintuple-blind means even the principal investigator does not know it. Obviously there's a limit to how much reliability and reproducibility you can improve by additional blinding. In the shadier pseudosciences, turning up this knob is sometimes used to distract from sketchy methodology elsewhere. In those instances it's equivalent to the magician showing you that there's no rabbit up his sleeve.
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That sounds very much like nobody involved with this "research" except for the top guy knows that they are involved in a research study in any way at all. In effect, it means the top guy is probably pulling numbers out of his fundamental orifice and typing them up as "a scientific study". Or what most people would call "science fiction".
JayUtah said:
That's part of what Windbridge Research Center appears to do.
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So to be a certified medium, you need to go to medium school. How did they ever get the first certified medium?
JayUtah said:
One of the common criticisms of Beischel is that she admits to becoming interested in the afterlife and mediumship after someone close to her died. Some claim this biases her in favor of proving that mediums can contact the dead.
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Like so many others before her. Pity she doesn't have the skepticism of Harry Houdini.
JayUtah said:
Allegations of bias and shaky methodology aside, one of the more damning items is the fact that someone on her "certified mediums" list was exposed as an obvious, proven fraud. I forget his name, but she kept on certifying him. Regardless of what you might think of the proposition that mediums can be scientifically tested and certified, it doesn't appear that her method is very reliable.
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She is hardly the first to realise that if she can get some crackpot billionaire interested in funding an "paranormal research institute", and then milking that funding with regular well-formatted but utterly nonsense "studies" that prove nothing and go nowhere, she has a gravy train for life. I refer, of course, to Targ and Puthoff as predecessors.
 
Calderaro said:
research conducted by Dr. Julie Beischel and her team could be evidence?

About Dr. Julie Beischel – Windbridge Research Center

www.windbridge.org www.windbridge.org
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For information, and as previously mentioned, Beiscel has a doctorate in "Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology", so while she is entitled to use the title 'Doctor' she has no relevant education or qualifications in this subject area.

For further information:
The Windbridge Research Centre (https://www.windbridge.org/about-us/)
...was co-founded by husband and wife research team Mark Boccuzzi and Julie Beischel, PhD, in July 2017. The Center took over the peer-reviewed research on the topics of life after death and after-death communication that had been conducted at the Windbridge Institute, LLC, since 2008...
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The Windbridge Institute, LLC (https://windbridgeinstitute.com/about/) was
...Founded in 2008 by husband and wife research team Mark Boccuzzi and Julie Beischel, PhD, The Windbridge Institute, LLC, is dedicated to conducting world-class research on phenomena currently unexplained within traditional scientific frameworks.

We focus on basic and applied parapsychological research within the areas of Mindfulness, Creativity, Intuition, Synchronicity, and Intention.

Goals​

1) Normalize reports of psi functioning (precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance, and mind-matter interactions)

2) Optimize psi functioning through the use of traditional mindfulness practices, new emerging technologies, and creative expression

3) Utilize psi to solve real-world problems...
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Norman Alexander said:
That sounds very much like nobody involved with this "research" except for the top guy knows that they are involved in a research study in any way at all. In effect, it means the top guy is probably pulling numbers out of his fundamental orifice and typing them up as "a scientific study". Or what most people would call "science fiction".
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Quintuple-blind studies are not unheard of in medical research. It's a proper methodology any time an analyst's subjective judgment might need to apply—especially when the fifth element is the study sponsor, who might have a vested interested in a particular outcome. However it doesn't compensate for such things as the analytical criteria themselves being made-up garbage. For that reason, better protocols that eliminate subjective judgment altogether are usually the order of the day.

For example, if a quadruple-blinded experiment protocol requires me to analyze cognitive ability based on writing samples, I could very well be blinded to whether I'm looking at an essay written by a control-group member or a variable-group member, but if my analytical procedure is simply to count the syllables in each word, the blinding does absolutely nothing to improve the validity of the study. This is what I mean by the semblance of rigor in one area masking a flaw elsewhere.

In Beischel's study, the subjective judgment part of the protocol scores how well the purported medium's statements match those provided by those who knew the dead person. But it's not clear in her research how the adjudication criteria were developed and validated.

Norman Alexander said:
So to be a certified medium, you need to go to medium school. How did they ever get the first certified medium?
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Let's say, oh, a crystal ball.

Norman Alexander said:
She is hardly the first to realise that if she can get some crackpot billionaire interested in funding an "paranormal research institute", and then milking that funding with regular well-formatted but utterly nonsense "studies" that prove nothing and go nowhere, she has a gravy train for life.
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Studies that "prove nothing and no nowhere" seems to comprise the bulk of the institution's research activity. I mentioned the three studies that actually attempt a hypothesis test. The rest of the work seems to center around trying to measure different properties of her pool of "certified mediums" without any particular goal in mind. In pseudoscience this goes by the jargon term, "p hacking," which is the scientific equivalent of throwing a whole bunch of conjectural spaghetti at the wall to see if any of it sticks. You measure a whole bunch of things and then try various combinations to see if you can get a p-value for any of it that achieves significance (i.e., p < 0.05). If you do, then you manufacture a speculative reason for why you think that is.

junkshop said:
For information, and as previously mentioned, Beiscel has a doctorate in "Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology", so while she is entitled to use the title 'Doctor' she has no relevant education or qualifications in this subject area.
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These fields would ostensibly qualify one to conduct laboratory experiments and field research with reasonably reliable basic controls. However, psychology research requires additional controls to prevent deliberate deception, which don't appear to have been successful in her research.

Thermal said:
The tall one and short one were dressed inappropriately?
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Or as I say it when speaking on the subject, "Modern skepticism has certainly taken its toll on psychics, but there is still a small number of mediums at large."

(I'll show myself out.)
 
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