SPR Study Day - The Psychology of the Sceptic

[fls]

I wonder if there are any psychologists who would care to read this and comment on it. Of course any comments from anyone are welcome as well.

SPR Study Day - The Psychology of the Sceptic

I think this is an interesting read, but while it starts out with the pretense that it is a serious bit of social psychology, the author really just seems to have taken an opportunity to indulge in whining and special pleading to a non-critical audience (presuming he didn't get booed off the stage).

I can concede all of the author's points - I don't really know if the stories about Edison or the Wright brothers are true, although one could guess that they may be subject to misrepresentation, since some of the other information in the speech is - and it still doesn't advance parapsychology one bit. Recognizing what it is that must be overcome in order to gain a wider acceptance of your idea does not excuse you from the necessity of making that attempt. The author destroys his own argument by providing numerous examples clearly showing that the pathway to acceptance was not by "explaining to our audience that they need to be aware of what may be going on in their own minds".

Linda

 

[godless dave]

If a medium is caught cheating once, why on Earth should she get the benefit of the doubt from then on?

Because it's mean and you'll hurt her feewings, you big meanie.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Re the OP- I would simply point out that people are human. There are some rather nasty types on both sides of the fence. The same intolerance is shown by both. I think the sceptics have the vast majority of evidence on their side though- and that is what counts.

And I still want to know how Eusapia pulled off the Naples thing. Mind you, ditto the Scole affair not so very long ago!

cj x

I know two witnesses to Scole, whom I trust as honest(though of course foolable). I can think of no explanation of what they say they saw, unless they were drugged. Even then, there is a consistency to their accounts inconsistent with hypnotics or hallucinogens.

If you have any hypothesis on the matter I'd be interested to read it.

 

[Limbo]

Re the OP- I would simply point out that people are human.

Speak for yourself!

I think the sceptics have the vast majority of evidence on their side though- and that is what counts.

Chris: You have to remember that the argument is not really about the evidence. The argument is about their assumptions and their preconceptions. Their preconceptions are, with these sort of phenomena, that they don’t make any sense and challenge their world view. So, they’re going to do anything they possibly can to dismiss evidence that challenges their preconceptions.

Alex: I don’t agree with you, and one of the good things about really getting in and really creating a dialogue with these guys is – what I see is – they really believe that they have examined the evidence, and they believe that they’ve honestly come to a different conclusion.

http://www.skeptiko.com/blog/?p=38

 

[tyr_13]

You all don't understand! This piece is science because it has the word psychology in it.

See, skeptics even reject science just to fit their biased world view.

I do find it very funny that many different groups us the tactic of 'accuse the opposition of exactly what we're doing'. A short list: Direct TV v. Cable, Mac v. PC, believers v. skeptics.

 

[Gr8wight]

Chris: You have to remember that the argument is not really about the evidence. The argument is about their assumptions and their preconceptions. Their preconceptions are, with these sort of phenomena, that they don’t make any sense and challenge their world view. So, they’re going to do anything they possibly can to dismiss evidence that challenges their preconceptions.

That's right. Demanding actual evidence before accepting unlikely claims is unfair, and closed minded!

 

[Ersby]

The argument is about their assumptions and their preconceptions. Their preconceptions are, with these sort of phenomena, that they don’t make any sense and challenge their world view.

I read his most recent posting about coincidence which, coming right after post about the psychology of the skeptic, was pretty ironic. In it he alludes to the idea that coincidences somehow point to an underlying truth. I find this thinking pretty shoddy, and mirrors exactly the kind of thinking he's criticising in others. In other words, there are too many psi-believers out there for whom...

Their preconceptions are, with these sort of phenomena, that they make perfect sense and reaffirm their world view.

 

[Moochie]

That's right. Demanding actual evidence before accepting unlikely claims is unfair, and closed minded!

Yep. There's just no getting away from evidence, or the lack of it. Believers in fantasy can bitch all they like about those pesky skeptics; all it shows is an inherent intolerance for reality.


M.

 

[Sefarst]

The impact or otherwise of experimental parapsychology is a large subject, but it's clear enough that the statistical effects gained in the ganzfield, remote viewing and staring experiments, for instance, has not reached sufficient scale and intensity to impact on the universal imagination. Certainly not in the way that the actual experience of an apparition or near-death experience impacts on an individual. Subjectivity is something parapsychology is fated always to deal with. The more we can understand about the role it plays, the more indeed we can objectify it, the more easily we will be able to make ourselves and our claims understood.

I don't think anyone misunderstands the claims or misunderstands the people that make the claims. We just don't believe them. The best way to root out this subjectivity that "parapsychology is fated always to deal with" is to subject it to the rigorous examination of skeptics. If your claims can survive that, you've succeeded in objectifying them.

 

[Limbo]

Pathological Disbelief

Brian D. Josephson

Department of Physics, University of Cambridge

Lecture given at the Nobel Laureates’ meeting Lindau, June 30th., 2004

[...]

Characteristics of scientific sceptics, according to Beaudette:

1. They do not express their criticisms in those venues where it will be subject to peer review.

2. They do not go into the laboratory and practice the experiment along with the practitioner.

3. Assertions are offered as though they were scientifically based when in fact they are mere guesses.

4. Satire, dismissal and slander are freely employed.

5. When explanations are advanced ... ad hoc reasons are constantly advanced for their rejection. These reasons often assert offhand that the explanation violates some conservation law.

6. Evidence is rejected outright if it does not answer every possible question at the outset

[...]

Usually, experiments and their analysis determines what the scientific community thinks about a subject.

With parapsychology a dominant factor is editor power, (the ability to control journal content), combined with the ease of making denunciations if the situation is such that, as is typically the case, assertions that are made do not have to be properly substantiated.

Here we have an extract from an unusually candid letter from a Nature editor:

“We are not keen at all on considering an article about the paranormal, but if you think there is something significantly new to be said on this well-worn and antiscientific topic and want to submit an article ... I will read it, discuss it with my colleagues and let you have our views.”

Conclusion: why bother with facts, when it’s so much easier to be an armchair critic?

Now what about the argument "if X were true, we’d have to start all over again?"

I have news for such people: physicists did decide they needed to start all over again (string theory, M-theory, quintessence, cosmological constant ...). Anything goes among the physics community (time travel, cosmic wormholes ...), just as long as it keeps its distance from anything remotely mystical or New Ageish, because we, the keepers of that special kind of knowledge we call science, are quite certain that such people have it all wrong ...

 

[Ersby]

None of what Brian said applies only to skeptics.

And did he really include a smiley in his presentation?

 

[fls]

Limbo,

I'm really struggling to find your point. I realize that you have been persuaded that the evidence for various paranormal phenomena is such that it should be more generally accepted - that there is a reluctance that unfairly holds back the dissemination of these ideas. What I'm wondering, if we concede the idea that sometimes (maybe even often) human nature interferes with the search for knowledge, is how you think that advances the field of parapsychology? You have amply demonstrated that ideas subject to satire, dismissal and slander, criticized in venues not subject to peer-reivew, rejected for spurious reasons, or that require us to start all over again within a field, can gain widespread acceptance. What you have not demonstrated is why parapsychology should be considered exempt from that consideration.

Linda

 

[remirol]

Here we have an extract from an unusually candid letter from a Nature editor:

“We are not keen at all on considering an article about the paranormal, but if you think there is something significantly new to be said on this well-worn and antiscientific topic and want to submit an article ... I will read it, discuss it with my colleagues and let you have our views.”

Conclusion: why bother with facts, when it’s so much easier to be an armchair critic?

Have you considered the possibility that the editor is just tired of seeing submissions with no facts or evidence attached, hence his request for something "significantly new"?

 

[Limbo]

I'm really struggling to find your point.

I'm surprised to hear you say that. I thought you were more insightful than that.

Anyway I'm not taking questions atm...not really in the mood. I'm only giving food for thought which people are free to reject or consider.

"The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have the demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, a charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share in the same crusading zeal and the same total lack of humor, charity, and common human decency.

These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogmas enter the brain, all intellectual activity ceases."

http://www.rawilson.com/trigger1.shtml

"In the editorial of the March/April 2003 issue of Infinite Energy, the late Gene Mallove reports on breakthrough research in acupuncture which showed that stimulating a specific acupuncture point in the foot leads to instantaneous activation of the visual cortex of the brain. Measurement of the speed of transmission was only limited by the instrumentation's time resolution and shown to be "at least 1,000 times any known nerve transmission speed". This important result was

"submitted to Science, and then Nature, which both rejected without review according to Dr. Joie Jones. Subsequently, five sympathetic Nobel laureates in the biological sciences, who were impressed with the paper, urged Nature to reconsider its decision. It did not. Therefore, the paper had to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which does not censor the work of its participants."

Again, the leading scientific journals of the world take it upon themselves to act as a paradigm police- suppressing information that could revolutionize our understanding of nature.

http://www.suppressedscience.net/news.html

 

[remirol]

Anyway I'm not taking questions atm...not really in the mood. I'm only giving food for thought which people are free to reject or consider.

Oh. You should've told us this was an "output-only" thread back at the beginning... would have saved me a lot of time. In the future, could you please flag those threads in which you intend to talk, but not listen, in some way, so I can pre-emptively discard them and move on to actual discussion threads?

 

[fls]

I'm surprised to hear you say that. I thought you were more insightful than that.

That's okay. You answered my question here:

Anyway I'm not taking questions atm...not really in the mood. I'm only giving food for thought which people are free to reject or consider.

Linda

 

[kookbreaker]

One is the case of the Wright brothers. It's not just that people disbelieved in the idea that heavier than air machines could ever fly. That wasn't so unreasonable - there'd been plenty of ludicrous failures, of people strapping artificial wings to their arms and launching themselves off cliffs, with disastrous results. But in this case people went on disbelieving it after the brothers had been doing it for a couple of years and their flights had been repeatedly witnessed by townspeople travelling on the railway next to their landing strip.

Not quite true. Remember that the Wright brothers were very, very coy about doing demonstrations. They had only select witnesses, and avoided anyone who would knew anything about powered flight since they were afraid their patents would be stolen. They didn't publicly demonstrate their craft until years later.

You'd expect the news to have travelled like wildfire, but far from it. The editor of the local newspaper thought the idea so obviously absurd that he never even sent a reporter to check it out, and no reporter did so on his own initiative.

Indifference of reporters is not an issue.

As for the scientists, Simon Newcomb, a professor of astronomy at John Hopkins University, published an article just weeks before the Wright's first historic flight proving scientifically that powered human flight was 'utterly impossible'. Unsurprisingly Newcomb was also a strident sceptic of parapsychology.

Gross misrepresentation. Newcomb's claim (and at the time it was accurate) was that man could not fly without crashing on landing. He was right. The Wright brother's flights pretty much ended with a controlled crash. He never said flight was impossible. His exact quote was:

"Once he slackens his speed, down he begins to fall--Once he stops, he falls as a dead mass."

The concept of landing was a problem for all aviators of the time. In the same comments he stated:

“Quite likely the twentieth century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exceeding that of a bird. But when we inquire whether aerial flight is possible in the present state of our knowledge; whether, with such materials as we possess, a combination of steel, cloth and wire can be made which, moved by the power of electricity or steam, shall form a successful flying machine, the outlook may be altogether different.”

In other words, he was afraid the materials and technology might not be up to snuff.

So, we have a deceptive use of the Wright Brothers.

I point out to 'paranormalists' who point to the Wrights that even with skepticism, they were able to fly. And ten years later planes were making a decisive difference in WW1.

Go ahead, tell me any paranormal 'experiments' will come to even a fraction of that kind of accomplishment ten years from now.

 

[Limbo]

Oh. You should've told us this was an "output-only" thread back at the beginning... would have saved me a lot of time. In the future, could you please flag those threads in which you intend to talk, but not listen, in some way, so I can pre-emptively discard them and move on to actual discussion threads?

I presented material and asked for comments, which people are providing. And I appreciate it.

I don't see why I have to get involved in dragged out debate about it, it's not necessary and it won't solve anything. I'm interested in gathering responses, not debating material. Just respond to the material if you wish, or ignore it. No one is holding a gun to anyone's head...I'm not forcing to all to comment. Neither will I be bullied into a pointless debate at this time.

 

[fls]

http://www.suppressedscience.net/news.html

One should almost ask them not to give examples.

Here is the paper that is referred to in the quotes:

http://www.pnas.org/content/95/5/2670.full

Other examples include the work of Masaru Emoto.

Dean Radin suggests that the research by Daniel Simons using the famous gorilla clip accounts for knowledgeable scientists' lack of belief.

Yet it never seems to occur to them that asking us to accept such patently ridiculous 'evidence' for their argument serves only to weaken their point (that lack of acceptance is based on prejudice) and support our point (that acceptance corresponds to evidence).

Linda

 

[Limbo]

What Gorilla?: Why Some Can't See Psychic Phenomena

[...]

"Because of these blind spots, some common aspects of human experience literally cannot be seen by those who've spent decades embedded within the Western scientific worldview. That worldview, like any set of cultural beliefs inculcated from childhood, acts like the blinders they put on skittish horses to keep them calm. Between the blinders we see with exceptional clarity, but seeing beyond the blinders is not only exceedingly difficult, after a while it's easy to forget that your vision is restricted.

An important class of human experience that these blinders exclude is psychic phenomena, those commonly reported spooky experiences, such as telepathy and clairvoyance, that suggest we are deeply interconnected in ways that transcend the ordinary senses and our everyday notions of space and time.

Exclusion of these phenomena creates a Catch 22: Human experiences credibly reported throughout history, across all cultures, and at all educational levels, repeatedly tell us that psychic phenomena exist. But Big Science -- especially as portrayed in prominent newspapers and popular magazines like Scientific American -- says it doesn't.

Well then, is this gorilla in the basketball game, or not? One way to find out is to study the question using the highly effective tools of science while leaving the worldview assumptions behind. That way we can study the question without prejudice, like watching a basketball game without preferring either the white or black team. Neutral observers are much more likely to spot a gorilla, if one is indeed present."

[...]