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Where do you draw the line?

It is not a matter of what can be dismissed out of hand, everything is subject, or can be, to a certain amount of inquiry. Mostly proportional to how interesting one of the outcomes is.

A lot of attention gets paid to psychics, for example, because a true psychic of any flavor would be a heck of a thing to have around. We could beat the protoss for starters. However, the few psychics that have been tested, whether a representative smaple or not, have failed to test postively. I am genuinely unaware of any experiments even tangentially suggesting something that is necessarily a paranormal occurence.

Of course, part of that is semantics. I suppose the claim way back when that photons bend when exposed to gravity would be taken as crackpot. Turns out it's not only true, but a corner stone of modern physics, or something like that.

However, the claim that photons bend when exposed to gravity can be tested by watching a planet pass through the arc of stars and watching them bend, whereas the claim that you can blind folks by sicing slouch-god on them... eventually... is essentially untestable because all the times when nothing happens (i.e. all of them) "don't count".

Where was I?

Anyway, I find it interesting that throughout recorded history there have been people claiming to have great personal paranormal power, or not-great paranormal power, but great is more common, that don't amount to more than parlor tricks. The fact that they can repeatedly pop up attests to our attachment to the possibility that the world might be radically different than we think it is, which I suppose is good. The difficulty comes in figuring out exactly how the stupid thing works.
 
Wrath of the Swarm said:
And even in the case of beliefs about "deep" physical properties, there's lots of evidence that led us to those beliefs. Challenging them requires evidence capable of overwhelming the existing evidence - which is quite a lot. Refusing to evaluate claims deeply when it is obvious they don't have that level of evidence is perfectly reasonable.

Refusing to evaluate counterclaims about any random thing you might believe about the universe's nature is not reasonable.
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At what iteration do you cease looking for the boogyman under your child's bed? If you do stop looking, why do you? Please answer this directly. Thank you.
 
Ed
Thirty years ago I proved a dead person passed a message to me in a dream, information which I later passed to the police and was subsequently proved correct. At least a dozen sceptical friends wrote down the info the day after my dream. Six weeks later this info was read out on the national news. The dozen or so sceptical friends slunk away when I pointed out that this could only have been a paranormal experience. So Ed if sceptics persist in keeping their heads in the sand and not even considering the truth when it jumps at 'em they will never believe anything other than their own experiences in life. If only I'd have known what to do with that incident years ago instead of just telling a bunch of sceptics.........ah well, if it happened today I'd be a millionaire
 
Re: Re: Where do you draw the line?

T'ai Chi said:

I think that any paranormal topic that can have scientific experiments carried out and the data analyzed statistically, as these have, should be payed extra attention to. As these are the most promising, skeptical attention should be focused on these 95%! (as opposed to crop circles, Loch Ness, or Bigfoot). In addition medical claims are serious, by their nature, and should be taken 100% serious by skeptical researchers.

Things like analyzing (mathematically) medium transcripts seem OK, but I think the mathematics involved is a lot trickier (guesses in transcripts are not like radioactive decay), as it is more difficult to model. But, mathematical clairity should be strived for whenever possible. Sometimes this is not practical, and we'll have to be happy with descriptive, and not inferential, statistics. In many cases, building up data is an excellent way to say, 'hey, look what I know about this process!'



In my opinion, ruling something out just because it uses subjective measures is somewhat nieve (read: "stupid"), because you could chuck that baby right out the window.

In fact, for example, there is Bayesian statistics which thrives on handling subjectivity in a scientific manner (incorporating prior beliefs into the models), and researchers in this field have done some truly spectacular things.

Judges rating something isn't necessarily a bad thing or unscientific. There are many psychological, medical, and social subjective measures that are quite useful when there is no way to get an objective measure. Scientists just realize there are many things we cannot measure. Luckily, smarter statisticians ;) have realized that even non-measurable things are still data and can be analyzed.

Also, for example, there are many ways one can rate the 'agree-ness' of the judges ratings to see if their judgings are consistent and matching (the ideal) or all over the map with their ratings, and then proceed from there. [/B]
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When a waffelly approach is used as opposed to an objective one I smell deceit. When there is a hint of deceit in paranormal research the wise man runs. Remember, we are not talking about kids doing a science fair project, we are talking about professionals who have heard all of the critisisms over the years.

The history of paranormal research is one of deceit, unfortunately, much like creation "science". This is a reality brought on the researchers themselves. Frankly, the lack of self policeing also causes one to get ones anntenni up. Remember Ronald Regans first commandment? "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican". Same goes for the paranormal. Frankly, it is the only line of human endevor where I suspect lies and deceit from the gitgo (well, that and politics:D ). All I am talking about here is how one subjectively culls. Tell me, would you trust ANYTHING coming from Schwartz? Whould you invite Hannibal Lector to dinner, in the country, at night, when you are serving fava beans and a big Amorono? At some point common sense must prevail.
 
Ed said:
At what iteration do you cease looking for the boogyman under your child's bed? If you do stop looking, why do you? Please answer this directly. Thank you.
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The question is not whether I eventually stop. The question is whether I am logically justified in doing so. When the evidence required to confirm or disprove a hypothesis about the boogyman is beyond my ability to acquire, I stop looking. That point is where I am logically justified in failing to seek out more evidence.
 
Having an "open mind" does not mean you are a complete idiot. It does not mean that everytime someone tells you the same thing you reevaluate it for appropriateness. It does not mean that you believe reality randomly changes because you cannot prove that it doesn't. It does mean that you evaluate all new claims based on their evidence and level of pragmatic importance. For instance if you said faeries exist and live in Brazil I would say fine, faeries exist and live in Brazil. Why would I say fine? Because it doesn't affect me at all to believe that faeries exist and live in Brazil and if I say fine you'll leave me alone.
 
Wrath of the Swarm said:
The question is not whether I eventually stop. The question is whether I am logically justified in doing so. When the evidence required to confirm or disprove a hypothesis about the boogyman is beyond my ability to acquire, I stop looking. That point is where I am logically justified in failing to seek out more evidence.
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I don't know when one would be logically justified. The question is when would you be practically justified. The the case above when would you stop? Assume the kid varies the story a bit each time thus presenting a different claim.
 
Ed said:
I don't know when one would be logically justified. The question is when would you be practically justified.
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You would be practically justified when the risk of not detecting the monster times the penalty for that condition is greater than the risk of expending resources on a nonentity times the penalty for that condition.

What's that? We can't evaluate that inequality unless we presume to know what the probabilities are, and we can't do that and consider our position to be valid unless we actually verify the probabilities ourselves?

[ding]
 
Wrath, you've lost me. I have no idea what are your criteria for deciding when a paranormal claim can be ignored without fear of being labeled close-minded.

~~ Paul
 
Claims cannot be validly discarded without some analysis. If the claim is presented without sufficient evidence to override the evidence for the null condition (generally the presumed invalidity of the claim), it is reasonable to discard it. The claim itself is invalid in that condition, although the assertion being claimed might be true.
 
Does he have sufficient evidence to support his claim?

If the claim itself is not logically inconsistent, and you avoid examining it, you are in the wrong.

That said, Zammit's challenge seems to be rather backwards. Performing all of the necessary tests and experiments necessary to refute the point (particularly when much of the evidence comes from poorly-conceived and -carried-out "experiments") would be extremely difficult. Furthermore, the null hypothesis that would need to be rejected is that there is no such afterlife. If the presented position requires refuting, then there must be sufficient reason to have reached it in the first place.
 
Yes, he clearly has it backwards, because he requires us to refute every single claim, which number is growing every day. The onus should be on him to prove the claims.

However, I still don't see how I can answer your question "Does he have sufficient evidence" without examining every claim to see if any of them hold up.

I don't know how to reconcile the above two paragraphs in any reasonable way that does not involve rejecting at least some claims out of hand.

~~ Paul
 
max said:
Ed
Thirty years ago I proved a dead person passed a message to me in a dream, information which I later passed to the police and was subsequently proved correct. At least a dozen sceptical friends wrote down the info the day after my dream. Six weeks later this info was read out on the national news. The dozen or so sceptical friends slunk away when I pointed out that this could only have been a paranormal experience. So Ed if sceptics persist in keeping their heads in the sand and not even considering the truth when it jumps at 'em they will never believe anything other than their own experiences in life. If only I'd have known what to do with that incident years ago instead of just telling a bunch of sceptics.........ah well, if it happened today I'd be a millionaire
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I simply don't know. OTO events are a problem, in parapsychology as well as everyday life. I will assume, for argument's sake, that you are an honest man and are not dissembling or even shading the truth.

The question is, does your experience provide a pass, even a little bit, to the tedious stream of pretenders?
 
max said:
Ed
Thirty years ago I proved a dead person passed a message to me in a dream, information which I later passed to the police and was subsequently proved correct. At least a dozen sceptical friends wrote down the info the day after my dream. Six weeks later this info was read out on the national news. The dozen or so sceptical friends slunk away when I pointed out that this could only have been a paranormal experience. So Ed if sceptics persist in keeping their heads in the sand and not even considering the truth when it jumps at 'em they will never believe anything other than their own experiences in life. If only I'd have known what to do with that incident years ago instead of just telling a bunch of sceptics.........ah well, if it happened today I'd be a millionaire
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How much information? How specific? Is it an absolute impossibility that you could not have known this information yourself, or gained it from somewhere? What does "subsequently proved correct" mean? Did the police already suspect along the lines of the information you gave them, or was the information completely unknown, and unsuspected by them at the time? Not knowing the information we cannot make any objective judgement here.
 
I consider the following things not worth investigating:

the claims of Peter Popoff
psychic surgery
sending homeopathic vibrations through telephone lines
the claims of Benny Hinn
map dowsing
self levitation (yogic flyers)
Scientology
divination (such as tea leaf reading)
ectoplasm


I consider the following items too silly to believe in, but consider some investigation useful in helping to debunk them:

the claims of Dennis Lee
remote viewing
homeopathy
past life regression
the lost civilization of Atlantis
Loch Ness monster
mind reading
Nostradamus
 
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