Is parapsychology a pseudoscience?

[Aepervius]

Interesting discussion. Just out of curiosity, how might a scientific test of this phenomenon go? I had a friend who was an occupational therapist. One of her clients was an autistic 15-year-old boy. She mentioned to me that she would play chess with him (she doesn't play well), and while she was thinking about her move, he would interrupt her and say that's a terrible move, make the move she was thinking about and show her why. She was quite nonplussed about it. I suggested that she take a deck of cards, look at each one, and ask him what the card was. She said that he got 34 right out of the deck. I suggested that he attempt to guess the cards without her looking at them, and she told me that he only got a couple.

While these are hardly scientific evidence of mind reading, it certainly is interesting. What suggestions might you have to test something like this more scientifically?

I can't comment on the card thingy. Not being there and seing it done.

But I did the same with my sisters while playing chess, and I am not an autistic child. I simply looked at where she was mostly looking at, then knowing her "habits" I knew which move she would want to do. I was right most of the time.

It is not paranormal at all. In fact I could do the same at other games with them.

ETA: which is also why when you do "hide the object" test , like with dowser, you separate the person putting the object under the hiding place and get her out, while the people judging should not be present when the object is hidden : for that exact same reason that we give cue by where we look at or avoid toroughly to look at.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Is anyone actually still doing parapsychology research? I mean, most all the university level facilities have been shut down.... The efforts conducted by both US and Soviet intelligence agencies were shut down as failures...

There may be some researcher with a project or two in the basement... But is there any actual organized research being done?

There is a psi research registry here:

http://www.koestler-parapsychology.psy.ed.ac.uk/TrialRegistry.html

There is a link to the registered studies in the fourth paragraph.

~~ Paul

 

[Cassidy]

I have just read a volume in series of the book Understanding the World and in it is chapter on parapsychology by Mario Bunge.

Here are some of the points he makes:

Precognition violates the principle of antecedence ("causality"), according to which the effect does not happen before the cause.

Psychokinesis violates the principle of conservation of energy as well as the postulate that mind cannot act directly on matter. (If it did no experimenter could trust his own readings of his instruments.)

Parapsychology makes no use of any knowledge gained in other fields, such as physics and physiological psychology.

The hypotheses in parapsychology are inconsistent with some basic assumptions of factual science. In Particular, the very idea of a disembodied mental entity is incompatible with physiological psychology; and the claim that signals can be transmitted across space without fading with distance is inconsistent with physics. Worse, parapsychologists brush these inconsistences aside, claiming that they deal with nonphysical phenomena, so that physicists and over natural scientists are not competent to study them.

Parapsychology is extremely poor in problems: all its problems boil down to that of establishing that there are paranormal phenomena, i.e. facts that cannot be explained by science. Nor is this problem formulated in clear terms, and this because of the appalling theoretical indigence of parapsychology.

The typical parapsychologist does not excel at handling formal tools, in particular statistics. Thus he consistently selects the evidence ("optional stopping" of a sequence of trials); he does not distinguish a coincidence (accidental or spurious correlation) from a causal relation or a genuine correlation; and he is not fond of mathematical models or even or informal hypotheico-deductive systems.

An interesting conclusion by Bunge



Any thoughts? Agree or disagree with Bunge?

Do you agree or disagree that parapsychology is a pseudoscience?

I have added a poll which will close in June. Interested in reading any responses.

Hi I'm new here, interesting read. I've been gathering hard evidence of supernatural occurances since last October. I am looking for an opinion on the evidence before I approach a UK based organisation ASKE. If I could type out my web URL I would welcome your take on the evidence I've displayed.

 

[Lusikka]

If you dig around you will find out quickly we are not so ignorant of parapsychology as you think. For example read the super-thread about ganzfeld, PEAR, precog, and other studies.

Thank you for this information. I highly appreciate Ersby for his work with ganzfeld. I understood his work was well balanced without the normal skeptical choosing. Unfortunately I cannot give any more comments. I have left ESP aside already for 25 years ago because the effect size in ESP tests is usually very small. I have since concentrated my gathering of information on PK and spontaneous cases. In my opinion there is much more convincing capacity in them. In practice it is impossible to separate ESP from coincidences, but objects are not normally moving without a physical cause.

But the situation is not good after all. Only extremely few skeptics read original parapsychological articles. The great majority is reading only skeptical literature and therefore they don't compare the information and notice the many flaws in skeptical articles.

The plain fact, as somebody said, is that at the moment parapsychology has no predictive power (snark) whatsoever, and it could be held that at the moment it does not goes beyond looking at stochastic number list as someone pointed out. And for the few series where there is "something" seen above average, it is never isolated , properly studied, and used to predict anything, not even any theory to falsify.

As a matter of fact parapsychology has predictive power after all. There is a small positive correlation between test results and belief of subjects in psi, extraversion of subjects, and inspiring test leaders. If somebody is dying so now and then there is to wait physical phenomena in the same room or elsewhere, for example clocks stopping and pictures falling down from walls. Parapsychologist Peter Fenwick gives some information about dying here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcogQBGK-Zo

Skeptics have nothing to learn parapsychologists about testing methods, statistical methods and so on. Reading the book "An Introduction to Parapsychology" it would be possible to understand that. Something can be read here:
http://books.google.fi/books?id=E3E...nepage&q=parapsychology randomization&f=false

Unfortunately there have been also individual cases of sloppy testing methods during the more than 120 years of methodological research.

 

[Stray Cat]

... If somebody is dying so now and then there is to wait physical phenomena in the same room or elsewhere, for example clocks stopping and pictures falling down from walls...

Clocks stop and pictures fall from walls even more so when there is no one dying*.



* Well of course there's always someone dying (roughly 155,000 per day worldwide) but I mean with no one significant to that clock or picture dying.

 

[Vinegar Tom]

Regarding the autistic boy mentioned earlier, this has to be the "Clever Hans" effect. For those who don't know, Clever Hans was a horse who could apparently perform arithmetic which, while very simple, was clearly way beyond the mental capabilities of a horse. What was actually happening was that the horse, who knew he'd be rewarded if he got the trick right, was using his very keen animal senses to pick up subtle cues from his trainer. These clues were so subtle that the trainer himself honestly thought Hans was a super-intelligent horse!

Autistic humans are much smarter than horses, and incredibly focused. It's entirely plausible that an autistic boy could predict the chess move you were thinking of by watching your body language. Of course, if he was genuinely telepathic, he'd be able to do this even if his opponent was invisible to him. I'm betting he can't. Clever Hans suddenly stopped knowing that 2+2=4 when he couldn't see his trainer.

By the way, I'm in no way knocking the autistic boy we're talking about. He may be extremely intelligent, and a genuinely good chess player. I'm just questioning his telepathic powers. And since he's autistic, good luck in having a conversation with him about that.

 

[DoomMetal]

Hi I'm new here, interesting read. I've been gathering hard evidence of supernatural occurances since last October. I am looking for an opinion on the evidence before I approach a UK based organisation ASKE. If I could type out my web URL I would welcome your take on the evidence I've displayed.

Send me a personal message with the web url, I would be interested in seeing your website.

 

[Stray Cat]

Send me a personal message with the web url, I would be interested in seeing your website.

Train crash thread all about it can be seen here.
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=259768

 

[Lusikka]

Clocks stop and pictures fall from walls even more so when there is no one dying*.

* Well of course there's always someone dying (roughly 155,000 per day worldwide) but I mean with no one significant to that clock or picture dying.

Thank you for your answer. Perhaps you watched the Fenwick video because you knew the importance of the physical phenomena relating to the dying person. Most often the clock stops or the picture falls in his/her home about at the moment of death. Those phenomena are so common that they cannot be only accidental coincidences. I guess even some writers here have heard about such phenomena in the circle of their acquaintances.

When the pictures fall, it is important to check how it has happened. Most often in the case of deathbed phenomena the hooks or nails and the strings are intact. The picture has been hanging on the wall tens of years and unexplainably falls down about at the moment of death of a person for whom the picture has been important. But naturally that is only a worthless anecdote?

One of my friends and her relatives observed once how four small decorative ceramic fishes fell down from the wall during the time of 12 hours, beginning in the evening. Two of the falls were heard and two fishes were only found on the floor. All the nails and strings were intact. The husband of a friend family had died elsewhere on the same day.

 

[Stray Cat]

Thank you for your answer. Perhaps you watched the Fenwick video because you knew the importance of the physical phenomena relating to the dying person. Most often the clock stops or the picture falls in his/her home about at the moment of death. Those phenomena are so common that they cannot be only accidental coincidences. I guess even some writers here have heard about such phenomena in the circle of their acquaintances.

Yes, they can be coincidence. To my knowledge no one has ever really done the maths needed to rule out coincidence. In fact it would be a difficult sum to get accurate enough data to work with. The number of people dying is easy(ish) at roughly 155,000 per day, but how many things fall off walls or clocks stop (or a whole list of other things that happen anyway but are only attached with some level of perceived relevance where something else happens within an unspecified time frame).

Family pets dying
Lost items turning up
Cars breaking down
Batteries in electrical equipment failing
Claps of thunder happening

Just a short list of other things that have been imbued with significance over the centuries because no one has actually realised the numbers involved in working out the odds of them likely being nothing more than coincidence.

So to come back to clocks stopping and pictures falling.
I have in my own house (and it's not a big house and nor do I have any affinity with clocks, in fact I don't like clocks) 6 clocks (some if them are in the DVD player and microwave oven etc. but are just as prone to breaking as any other clock. If we take this as an average and we work out from that, a very rough amount of clocks in the world (Taking the world population at 6 billion and presuming that there are 5 people in each household, there are 7,200,000,000 clocks in the world.
OK we'll be really generous (there are reasons why many of the third world countries may not own a single clock etc.) let's estimate only 200,000,000 clocks. Now I know I'm only using ballpark figures and that the maths is much more complicated than this but that's 46,451 clocks per freshly dead person per day that could stop within an arbitrary time frame that would allow significance to be attached by a grieving relative.
That some clocks do stop at some time is expected by the figures. That some people report it in connection to the death of a family member is to be expected. The significance of it is nothing more than people attribute to it. When a clock stops, people don't rush around phoning all their family to see who's died, it only seems significant when it happens the other way around.

When the pictures fall, it is important to check how it has happened. Most often in the case of deathbed phenomena the hooks or nails and the strings are intact. The picture has been hanging on the wall tens of years and unexplainably falls down about at the moment of death of a person for whom the picture has been important. But naturally that is only a worthless anecdote?

It's only a worthless anecdote in relation to providing accurate evidence of anything. We can use it to discuss all manner of things in detail which makes it very useful.
But really it all comes down to numbers again. The very few instances where people have attached significance to the falling of a picture and the death of someone ignores the very large amount of pictures that there are and the very large amount of deaths that there are. I've also known people who's pictures have fallen off the walls apparently inexplicably who have attached other sorts of significance to the event. No one has died, but they've maybe just left a job, just watched a ghost movie, it was Halloween etc. etc.

One of my friends and her relatives observed once how four small decorative ceramic fishes fell down from the wall during the time of 12 hours, beginning in the evening. Two of the falls were heard and two fishes were only found on the floor. All the nails and strings were intact. The husband of a friend family had died elsewhere on the same day.

And there you go. Exactly how far do these coincidences have to stretch in order for them to have significance attached to them?
Not a family member, but the husband of a family member, not at the moment of death but over a 12 hour period. Do you realise that as long as you stretch the criteria for significance, you can make anything appear significant? But that the significance is only a product of the human ability to see patterns and can not be separated from what would be expected by coincidence.
When things that happen all the time happen at the same time as other things that happen all the time are connected in our heads, it's not always easy to separate the two events and it may be easier and more comforting to allow the connections to mean something to us personally, but there is nothing paranormal happening as can be seen by simply doing the maths. That is something that grieving relatives don't usually think to do (and rightly so).

 

[Drs_Res]

How many clocks in hospitals stop when someone dies at one?

 

[jhunter1163]

I think that the "psychology" part, the study of why some people believe the wacky things they do, is legitimate science. But as far as the actual subject matter parapsychology purports to examine, no, I don't think there's anything that science can be applied to there.

 

[Lusikka]

Precognition violates the principle of antecedence ("causality"), according to which the effect does not happen before the cause.

Right

Psychokinesis violates the principle of conservation of energy as well as the postulate that mind cannot act directly on matter. (If it did no experimenter could trust his own readings of his instruments.)

Right otherwise, but to postulate that mind is directly acting on matter in PK is going too far in speculation. The mechanism is unknown. Fortunately psi is interfering rather seldom in our lives.

Parapsychology makes no use of any knowledge gained in other fields, such as physics and physiological psychology.

Wrong. Parapsychology makes use of all scientific knowledge when it is needed in the research. For example statistics in evaluating the test results, psychology in planning the tests, and physiology in measuring unconscious reactions. An example here:
http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_11_2_radin.pdf

The hypotheses in parapsychology are inconsistent with some basic assumptions of factual science. In Particular, the very idea of a disembodied mental entity is incompatible with physiological psychology; and the claim that signals can be transmitted across space without fading with distance is inconsistent with physics. Worse, parapsychologists brush these inconsistences aside, claiming that they deal with nonphysical phenomena, so that physicists and over natural scientists are not competent to study them.

Wrong, in the simplicity of the claims. Not all parapsychologists think or have thought that there are disembodied mental entities, although many observations are pointing in that direction.

Parapsychology is extremely poor in problems: all its problems boil down to that of establishing that there are paranormal phenomena, i.e. facts that cannot be explained by science. Nor is this problem formulated in clear terms, and this because of the appalling theoretical indigence of parapsychology.

Wrong. Parapsychology is full of established problems. There are innumerable well formulated hypotheses put forth during more than a hundred years. And there factually is a huge quantity of observations and test results which are impossible to explain by present-day science.

The typical parapsychologist does not excel at handling formal tools, in particular statistics. Thus he consistently selects the evidence ("optional stopping" of a sequence of trials); he does not distinguish a coincidence (accidental or spurious correlation) from a causal relation or a genuine correlation; and he is not fond of mathematical models or even or informal hypotheico-deductive systems.

Wrong in most claims of the bad quality of parapsychological research. See here:
http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/Examskeptics/Zingrone_critics.html

 

[Stray Cat]

Wrong. Parapsychology is full of established problems. There are innumerable well formulated hypotheses put forth during more than a hundred years. And there factually is a huge quantity of observations and test results which are impossible to explain by present-day science.

And exactly how many of these "innumerable well formulated hypotheses" have ever been falsified?
In fact presuming there is even one well formulated hypothesis, perhaps it'd be an easy task to cite the one you think is the best example parapsychology has to offer.

Wrong in most claims of the bad quality of parapsychological research. See here:
http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/Examskeptics/Zingrone_critics.html

What an incredibly long whinge someone is having at the critics just because they would prefer the critics to lower their standards rather than the parapsychologists raise theirs... of course it's no surprise that this sort of special pleading is utilised on a website totally dedicated to whinging about those nasty sceptics who won't allow people to dress BS up as science.

 

[Vinegar Tom]

I think that perhaps the term "pseudoscience" is unfair here. If you honestly think that something is science and you try to scientifically investigate it, you're a scientist. You may be wrong, but science accepts that possibility. Skeptics do themselves no favors by labeling all their opponents in deliberately insulting ways, not unlike the habit of certain people at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum who call anyone who disagrees with them "sheeple".

What we should really be discussing here is whether parapsychology follows the rules of science or faith. Astronomy, for example, detected the planets Uranus and Neptune because their existence was necessary to explain anomalies in the orbits of other planets they know about already. Their record isn't perfect - Pluto was discovered by mistake due to a prediction based on inadequate data that suggested it ought to exist, but really should have been a great deal larger than it is. And a lot of effort went into trying to spot the non-existent planet Vulcan, which was invoked to explain irregularities in the orbit of Mercury that were eventually explained by a very clever chap called Einstein. But the thing is, astronomers made predictions that were sometimes amazingly accurate. And when they weren't, they kept looking until they found out why they'd made a mistake. and then admitted it and revised everything accordingly.

But astrology? At no point was it predicted that backward extrapolation of human destiny showed that at least two planets must exist which are just as important as the known ones. Yet as soon as Uranus and Neptune were shown to exist, they were somehow part of the scheme. As were numerous asteroids, until it all got so complicated that it was quietly shelved by almost everybody because they weren't proper planets anyway. Meanwhile, Pluto, which wasn't predicted either, and has recently declared not to be proper planet, became a component in every mainstream horoscope. Though since the size and distance of a planet has absolutely no bearing on its astrological significance, presumably the existence of an unknown but almost certainly huge number of trans-Plutonian objects comparable in size to Pluto, whose orbits are currently unknown, means that all horoscopes are failing to take into account factors which greatly outnumber the ones they know about, but are just as important?

Psi research has many of the same problems. Humans cannot detect extremely weak stimuli because if they could, everyday phenomena would overload their ludicrously sensitive organs of perception. So the existence of a force too feeble to be directly detected by any machine yet built, but still capable of transmitting information between people, or even directly affecting fairly large objects, is odd to say the least! Leaving aside gravity because that's downright ridiculous, and the strong and weak nuclear forces because their effective range is far too small, the only known force that can possibly cause Psi is electromagnetism. Which happens to be an extremely well-understood force which can be detected or blocked very easily indeed. If electromagnetism caused ESP, we'd know it by now.

What we have instead is a force whose problems were very well summed up by Albert Einstein when he politely refused to write a foreword to J. B. Rhine's pioneering work on ESP. While Einstein found the concept very interesting and kept an open mind, his big objection was that a mysterious force which doesn't diminish with distance sounds a lot like an experimental error rather than something which actually exists.

Another problem is that laboratory Psi experiments give barely detectable results, yet attempt to recreate anecdotal phenomena which are very detectable indeed! It's as if the Higgs Boson was sometimes a clearly visible object the size of a basketball, but in every scientific context it's so much less dramatic that you need the LHC to spot one. Though in a non-scientific context, some random person might see one rolling across the carpet, and it must be true because they sounded really sincere.

This is magical thinking. Allah needs to be real because if he isn't, every Muslim who takes it on trust that the ultimate truth about everything was revealed a long time ago to a man who said he went off by himself to a cave and had a book which just happens to repeatedly state that he's the most wonderful person who has ever lived dictated to him by the Archangel Gabriel has made a mistake. ESP needs to be real because if it isn't, every parapsychologist who takes it on trust that poltergeists can throw pianos when there aren't any cameras present, and a whole lot of stories about extraordinary experiences people have had must be true because obviously nobody ever says anything for any reason other than that it's the literal objective truth. Strangely, this almost omnipotent force dwindles to the very borderline of detectability even in a successful experiment, and vanishes altogether is there's anybody in the room who doesn't believe strongly enough in this totally unproved concept with zero theoretical basis. I can see a few problems developing here!

And we haven't even considered the fact that extremely simple ideas which should be easily testable in laboratory conditions, such as whether or not one person can tell which playing-card another person is looking at, have gradually given way to absolute nonsense such as the power of somebody to determine a number in a sealed envelope at another location, and then, without being able to say what that number is, provide information about the map-reference it refers to, even if they don't happen to be one of the tiny number of people who can tell you anything at all about a map-reference provided to them by entirely non-paranormal means. Please explain to me what kind of force can provide this much absurdly specific information under absurdly specific conditions without making us all omniscient!

Science operates on the basis that if something has to be true because the evidence says so, you're stuck with it, even if it's kind of awkward. Parapsychology claims that undetectable forces which don't need to exist for any reason except to render parapsychology valid can do absolutely anything so long as nobody's watching too closely. That's not science - that's magic!

 

[DoomMetal]

Wrong in most claims of the bad quality of parapsychological research. See here:
http://www.skepticalinvestigations.o...e_critics.html

Thanks for this link. At least Nancy L. Zingrone has bothered to read some of the skeptical material of parapsychology, this is very rare indeed as most proponents ignore it. I would have to agree with Stray Cat though, that article itself is just a long series of rants whinging at the skeptics. It's mostly personal complaints. Totally worthless.

In one section she seems to attack Richard Wiseman for some of his comments about Eusapia Palladino and his analysis of the flawed Fielding Report. This is so boring. Some modern psi proponents still wish to defend Palladino, fact is she was caught cheating in every country she was investigated in total by about 40 different scientists. There is no reason to take her seriously and it amazes me how some modern day parapsychologists are still talking about this stuff. She was debunked years ago.

 

[DoomMetal]

Lusikka what is the mechanism of psi? Do you have any papers on this? Why hypotheses are being tested? (I am well read in this area, but just want to see how much you know).

 

[Lusikka]

And exactly how many of these "innumerable well formulated hypotheses" have ever been falsified?
In fact presuming there is even one well formulated hypothesis, perhaps it'd be an easy task to cite the one you think is the best example parapsychology has to offer.

Sorry, but I can't produce anything reasonable here. In my opinion there is too much quantum entanglement in too many hypotheses and I leave them aside. It's too complicated and too vague for me. I am most interested about observations. Quantum entanglement is OK for me if there only would be reliable observations about it.

What an incredibly long whinge someone is having at the critics just because they would prefer the critics to lower their standards rather than the parapsychologists raise theirs... of course it's no surprise that this sort of special pleading is utilised on a website totally dedicated to whinging about those nasty sceptics who won't allow people to dress BS up as science.

I think you have misunderstood her message in the really very long article. Would you, please, quote the text from which you have drawn those conclusions.

A too optimistic quote here:
"This article outlines four ways in which critics have failed to go the distance in their approach to psychical research and parapsychology and seeks to put the skeptics on notice - tolerance of inadequate, incomplete, and unfair criticism is a thing of the past."

Another quote:
"We suffer frequently and without protest the proliferation of criticism that is out-of-date by many decades or inherently flawed methodologically or statistically."

She gives actual examples of these bad quality criticisms. Are they flawed in your opinion? I have understood she wants to receive not lower standard criticism but criticism which is more truthful and scientific.

 

[Stray Cat]

Sorry, but I can't produce anything reasonable here. In my opinion there is too much quantum entanglement in too many hypotheses and I leave them aside. It's too complicated and too vague for me. I am most interested about observations. Quantum entanglement is OK for me if there only would be reliable observations about it.

So; make your claim and then fail to cite a single example of it.
From innumerable to none in a nano second... Now that's something worth investigating.

I think you have misunderstood her message in the really very long article. Would you, please, quote the text from which you have drawn those conclusions.

I have drawn the conclusion from the whole if the text and it's against forum rules to quote whole texts from other sites.
No I don't think I have misunderstood her message at all, She wrote it on a website that is dedicated to woos whinging about sceptics.

A too optimistic quote here:
"This article outlines four ways in which critics have failed to go the distance in their approach to psychical research and parapsychology and seeks to put the skeptics on notice - tolerance of inadequate, incomplete, and unfair criticism is a thing of the past."

What she completely fails to understand (or she ignores) is that the methods and overall approach of parapsychologists have been extremely well criticised over the decades and the subject as a whole has failed to heed any of the criticisms. So much like what happens in these forums, people no longer go through the whole process of examining every detail of the latest silly test that shows some silly thing happening.
It is not anyone's job to debunk silly claims and when the exact same problems have been pointed out for decades and not addressed, there is no real need to go waste one's time checking the sloppy research for the nth time.

It would be fair to say: Tolerance of inadequate, incomplete and unfair parapsychological research is a thing of the past

And we're at the point where it would be reasonable to criticise these constant claims (that that boild down to "something is happening and we don't know what" and the usual parapsychology conclusion goes against scientific understanding) by simply saying; "stop being silly"

Another quote:
"We suffer frequently and without protest the proliferation of criticism that is out-of-date by many decades or inherently flawed methodologically or statistically."

Well no, "without protest" is a silly claim in an article that who's sole purpose is protesting about it. But that aside, within the scientific process when criticism is made, the author of any research has the right (and duty) to reply to such criticism. If someone's criticism is unjust, then the researcher should be able to show why that is the case.

In all the decades of parapsychology research, not a single hypothesis has been falsified. This is not the fault of the critics, it is entirely the fault of the flawed methodology of the researchers.

Take the example from last year when the proton was measured travelling faster than light. The main proposed criticism was that someone had measured something wrong (not a detailed nor exact criticism you'll notice), the researchers could have whinged about the criticism not being fair, but instead they double checked everything until they found a lead not plugged in all the way. Now there is no critic who could have proposed such a mundane cause for the error, but as the researchers were being extremely thorough in addressing the issue, they discovered the fault, fixed it and accepted the reality that protons don't travel faster than light.

In the short time while all that was happening there started on the internet (on paranormal websites etc.) discussions with woos positing that protons were the answer to all the paranormal happenings and that 'science' would have to face the truth now.

Do you see the two different approaches here?

She gives actual examples of these bad quality criticisms. Are they flawed in your opinion? I have understood she wants to receive not lower standard criticism but criticism which is more truthful and scientific.

I have seen examples of bad criticism myself. I agree it's not usually helpful when someone's criticism is as poor as what it is criticising. Several examples of really poor and inadequate explanations for UFOs for example, but just because someone's mundane explanation for a UFO sighting doesn't actually fit, does mean that the UFO was alien. You see, pointing out bad criticism doesn't magically give credence to something which is yet to be proven by science.

Bring me evidence of the paranormal, not evidence that we don't know everything. I already know we don't know everything, but we know a damned sight more now than we did 200 years ago and yet not a single bite of that new knowledge has come from parapsychology. Advances in science have lead to parapsychology having to retreat from levitating mediums spewing ectoplasm from their every orifice to someone looking at some pictures to see if there is a minutely detectable altering of their brain pattern a thousandth of a second prior to seeing the picture... I just hope when they ran that series of tests, they made sure all their leads were plugged in fully, afterall, we know what happened with the protons.

 

[Lusikka]

No I don't think I have misunderstood her message at all, She wrote it on a website that is dedicated to woos whinging about sceptics.

Bad logic. If somebody has taken a scientific article on his website and although there are flaws in some other articles there, that has not deteriorated the original scientific article. Its value is in its content.

What she completely fails to understand (or she ignores) is that the methods and overall approach of parapsychologists have been extremely well criticised over the decades and the subject as a whole has failed to heed any of the criticisms. So much like what happens in these forums, people no longer go through the whole process of examining every detail of the latest silly test that shows some silly thing happening.

Extremely well criticized? You did not read the examples she gave? There exist innumerable more similar examples. I have found them myself in big quantities, checking the original parapsycological research. Choosing of the facts, coloring of the facts and even outright lies. Unfortunately skeptics have believed everything without critical thinking.

Take the example from last year when the proton was measured travelling faster than light. The main proposed criticism was that someone had measured something wrong (not a detailed nor exact criticism you'll notice), the researchers could have whinged about the criticism not being fair, but instead they double checked everything until they found a lead not plugged in all the way. Now there is no critic who could have proposed such a mundane cause for the error, but as the researchers were being extremely thorough in addressing the issue, they discovered the fault, fixed it and accepted the reality that protons don't travel faster than light.

In the short time while all that was happening there started on the internet (on paranormal websites etc.) discussions with woos positing that protons were the answer to all the paranormal happenings and that 'science' would have to face the truth now.

Do you see the two different approaches here?

A few links, please. I suspect you are not making difference between parapsychology and New Age. The websites called "paranormal" are normally NA websites.

Several examples of really poor and inadequate explanations for UFOs for example, but just because someone's mundane explanation for a UFO sighting doesn't actually fit, does mean that the UFO was alien. You see, pointing out bad criticism doesn't magically give credence to something which is yet to be proven by science.

I agree. The logic is sound.

Bring me evidence of the paranormal, not evidence that we don't know everything. I already know we don't know everything, but we know a damned sight more now than we did 200 years ago and yet not a single bite of that new knowledge has come from parapsychology. Advances in science have lead to parapsychology having to retreat from levitating mediums spewing ectoplasm from their every orifice to someone looking at some pictures to see if there is a minutely detectable altering of their brain pattern a thousandth of a second prior to seeing the picture... I just hope when they ran that series of tests, they made sure all their leads were plugged in fully, afterall, we know what happened with the protons.

Thousandth of a second? What article do you mean? The Radin article I gave as a link (http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_11_2_radin.pdf) measured for example electrodermal activity (EDA). The maximum of the anticipating difference was at 1 second and the effect began at 3 seconds before the picture was seen. A robust measuring system and in the literature there are several experiments showing the same effect. In my opinion that ought to be evidence.