"Why I am no longer a skeptic"

As we have some members now who weren't around when this was discussed on Skeptiko, I'd like to bring it back up:

Why I am no longer a skeptic by Stephen Bond.

I'd especially like to hear what skeptical members make of his points. Because I can tell you that everything he wrote about, is a reason I hold no interest in "organized" skepticism and find myself so unsympathetic to the Wisemans and Shermers of the world, even when I agree with the points they're trying to make.

Makes me recall the questionable tactics of skeptics thread.

I know they are proponents. That's why I included them to show that I'm not being an uninformed skeptic in this regard. Even proponent scientists agree that the level of evidence and risk of bias is not where it needs to be to be persuasive. 

Linda

Not all of them, and Utt's is a proponent because of the strength of the research.

Unfortunately, I'm not. When we formally went through this (risk of bias and GRADE level) in exquisite detail on the old old forum for the ganzfeld studies, we discovered that the risk of bias was higher and the GRADE level lower than our intuition (mine and proponent scientists) would lead us to believe. I agree that the quality has some similarities to psychology research, but recent investigations have shown that some of it also has problems with low evidentiary value. The same sorts of reforms that mainstream research is undertaking can also be applied to parapsychology. 

Linda

You see I'm very skeptical of what you're saying due to befriending one, and discussing in great detail with another scientist, who both produced a paper on the Ganzfeld, this research - both said the research was stronger then they expected. 

Parapsychology has been constantly improving for decades, and still producing positive and significant results. You are overstating the issue of bias and being misleading about the views of some of the people you mentioned earlier.

Sorry, but even proponents say this (those who are familiar with how evidence is evaluated and where risk of bias is a problem). For example, Stevenson stated that the vast majority of his case reports were too weak to provide evidence for reincarnation. The best which could be said was that they were suggestive. The presentment studies mostly don't exclude an expectation bias (see Julia Mossbridge's pre-registered studies at the KPU registry where she specifically tries to find research designs which may overcome this problem). I can give you lots of other examples, if necessary. 

Linda

Stevenson was meticulous and it's not scientific to make bold statements, even though some of his better cases were very striking. Will have to look into the Mossbridge thing, but I'm skeptical of what you're saying, not because I think Parapsychology is perfect, but because you're attempting to paint a misleadingly negative picture of the evidence. It seems like because the statistical evidence is strong, we're now resorting to saying the statistics must be wrong. What next?

Sorry, but even proponents say this (those who are familiar with how evidence is evaluated and where risk of bias is a problem). For example, Stevenson stated that the vast majority of his case reports were too weak to provide evidence for reincarnation. The best which could be said was that they were suggestive. The presentment studies mostly don't exclude an expectation bias (see Julia Mossbridge's pre-registered studies at the KPU registry where she specifically tries to find research designs which may overcome this problem). I can give you lots of other examples, if necessary. 

Linda

Now to be fair here, Stevenson was notoriously careful about not making any especially speculative conclusions because he knew the implications that could have when people read his paper - people who respected the scientific method and who he was hoping would respect his research.

Too weak to provide evidence for "reincarnation" - but what does that mean? A very specific, ego-centric reincarnation as would be most commonly deduced from the term? There's obviously a variety of interpretations of what reincarnation could be like, some of which the evidence is more strong for, and some which it's weaker for. 

Furthermore, while I know you weren't speaking specifically to this, the implications of his research aren't (at least right now) necessarily most impactful for what they show might be "true" (i.e. reincarnation in one form or another), but rather for what they show might not be (reduction of all conscious experience and memory to the brain, etc). I find those studies, and the ones carried further by Tucker and others, to be persuasive and very strong evidence - but not directly for reincarnation, as much as the challenges they bring to reductionism in its various forms. Again, I do think, depending on which reincarnative (made up word alert) theory you're discussing, the evidence has varying degrees of strength to support a positive theory. But in its current stage, I think its greatest impact is felt in the implications it has as a negative theory - a set of data that is very hard to explain in terms of any reductive model. 

So in my point of view, evidence that is against something is every bit as valuable, and in some situations more valuable, than evidence that is for something (not that the same evidence cannot serve dual roles, of course). I'm confident that's the case as much in general scientific research as it is for any type of other research like the studies by Stevenson and Tucker. Saying that the evidence is broadly weak is, therefore, sort of a misrepresentation. It's based on perspective too, and I think many are caught up in trying to prove or show that something is/might be the case, and they forget the importance of showing the alternative.

Sorry, but even proponents say this (those who are familiar with how evidence is evaluated and where risk of bias is a problem). For example, Stevenson stated that the vast majority of his case reports were too weak to provide evidence for reincarnation. The best which could be said was that they were suggestive.

Let's try to pin this down - just focussing on this one topic.

Surely the obvious point is that reincarnation reports could be correct, but not supply enough evidence - so example, if a child claimed to be the reincarnation of his uncle, he wouldn't be able to provide much new information that was not known to the parents, even if he was in fact the reincarnation of his uncle.

So we really need to look at the best cases. One case involved a boy who remembered being a fighter pilot in the Second World War. He came up with all sorts of technical information about the planes, his colleagues, etc etc.

Now obviously you could argue that this might have been totally faked - though this was before the internet, if I remember correctly, so it would not have been easy, and even with the internet, it would have been hard to extract all the necessary details.

It seems to me that you are more or less forced to claim that all the very detailed examples such as the above, were faked if you want to propose that reincarnation or some sort of psychic effect was not operating.

It doesn't seem to me that any statistical technique can guard against totally fake data. If you want to claim the data is only suggestive, you really need to take the relevant cases and explain why they are only suggestive.

The fact that Stevenson chose to express himself so cautiously, can't alter the actual evidence he collected, and which has been supplemented by Jim Tucker. If you want to quote Stevenson's extremely cautious statement (which may well have been toned down for reasons of academic politics), you need to show what it was about the body of quality reincarnation reports that justifies Stevenson's expressed doubt.

David

Let's try to pin this down - just focussing on this one topic.

Surely the obvious point is that reincarnation reports could be correct, but not supply enough evidence - so example, if a child claimed to be the reincarnation of his uncle, he wouldn't be able to provide much new information that was not known to the parents, even if he was in fact the reincarnation of his uncle.

So we really need to look at the best cases. One case involved a boy who remembered being a fighter pilot in the Second World War. He came up with all sorts of technical information about the planes, his colleagues, etc etc.

Now obviously you could argue that this might have been totally faked - though this was before the internet, if I remember correctly, so it would not have been easy, and even with the internet, it would have been hard to extract all the necessary details.

It seems to me that you are more or less forced to claim that all the very detailed examples such as the above, were faked if you want to propose that reincarnation or some sort of psychic effect was not operating.

It doesn't seem to me that any statistical technique can guard against totally fake data. If you want to claim the data is only suggestive, you really need to take the relevant cases and explain why they are only suggestive.

The fact that Stevenson chose to express himself so cautiously, can't alter the actual evidence he collected, and which has been supplemented by Jim Tucker. If you want to quote Stevenson's extremely cautious statement (which may well have been toned down for reasons of academic politics), you need to show what it was about the body of quality reincarnation reports that justifies Stevenson's expressed doubt.

David

Here's a couple links that I find very interesting. the story I find quite evidential.

First is a quick review of the importance of Stevenson's work.



The next is the story of "Sweet Swarnlata" A Case from Dr. Ian Stevenson

Scroll down to about 3/4 of the page to see the story.
Sweet Swarnlata

Let us be clear on something, are we expected to believe that Stevenson doubted his own evidence so it should be dismissed? Or was Stevenson merely being cautious in the face of unbridled scepticism in his profession? So he used terms like suggestive instead of proof, as any careful researcher would. In his last paper (Stevenson, 2006) he mentions the book which was written by an initially sceptical Washington Post journaist who accompanied him on his travels in the East. The book title includes the words "Scientific Evidence". Stevenson seemed quite at ease with that title.

In 1997–98 I committed myself to a project that seemed foolhardy, but also had the possibility of making my research better known to the general public. I agreed to a writer's request to accompany me on field trips in Asia. He would look over my shoulder as I conducted my interviews for the cases. He was to pay his own expenses and afterwards would be free to write about his experiences without censorship by me. This turned out well. The writer was Tom Shroder, who is now a senior editor with The Washington Post. Tom was a companionable traveler, and he endured well the frequent roughness of journeys in Lebanon and India. The book he wrote is entitled "Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives" (Shroder, 1999). It seems fair to me and, more importantly, fair to the children who claim to remember past lives. The book has indeed made better known the cases of these children.

Here's what Shroder had to say about Stevenson in his Washington Post obituary:

To Dr. Stevenson and his many admirers, his detailed case studies provided more than ample room for, as he liked to put it, "a rational person, if he wants, to believe in reincarnation on the basis of evidence."
...
Dr. Stevenson retired from active research in 2002, leaving his work to successors led by Dr. Bruce Greyson. Dr. Jim Tucker, a child psychiatrist, has carried on Dr. Stevenson's work with children, focusing on North American cases.

Tucker said that toward the end of his life, Dr. Stevenson had accepted that his long-stated goal of getting science "to seriously consider reincarnation as a possibility" was not going to be realized in this lifetime.

But in 1996, no less a luminary than astronomer Carl Sagan, a founding member of a group that set out to debunk unscientific claims, wrote in his book, "The Demon-Haunted World": "There are three claims in the [parapsychology] field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study," the third of which was "that young children sometimes report details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation."

We should bear in mind the difference between cynicism and scepticism as highlighted by a non-proponent in his Scientific American blog:

What those mechanisms involve, exactly, is anyone’s guess—even Stevenson’s. But he didn’t see grandiose theorizing as part of his job. His job, rather, was simply to gather all the anomalous data, investigate them carefully, and rule out, using every possible method available to him, the rational explanations. And to many, he was successful at doing just that. Towards the end of her own storied life, the physicist Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf—whose groundbreaking theories on surface physics earned her the prestigious Heyn Medal from the German Society for Material Sciences, surmised that Stevenson’s work had established that “the statistical probability that reincarnation does in fact occur is so overwhelming … that cumulatively the evidence is not inferior to that for most if not all branches of science.” Stevenson himself was convinced that, once the precise mechanisms underlying his observations were known, it would bring about “a conceptual revolution that will make the Copernican revolution seem trivial in comparison.” It’s hard to argue with that, assuming it ever does happen.

They were. I don't know if they are still there or if they were some of the victims of the mass deletions undertaken by Alex, Andy and David. This kind of stuff (formal evaluations of the evidence) was the kind of thing Alex and his minions (;-)) found offensive. 

I may have copies on my computer (won't know till I get home).

If you do have copies, I'd be interested to see them. Google suggests they are no longer on Skeptiko.

Of course, Ganzfeld experiments aren't the whole of parapsychology, but that protocol has obviously been more closely scrutinised than most. So it would be equally interesting if you could remember significant methodological criticisms of the more recent Ganzfeld studies. To be honest, I'd be surprised if the Ganzfeld methodology, as refined in the light of the Honorton-Hyman exchanges, could fairly be described as "poor", but perhaps I'm missing something.

You see I'm very skeptical of what you're saying due to befriending one, and discussing in great detail with another scientist, who both produced a paper on the Ganzfeld, this research - both said the research was stronger then they expected. 

Parapsychology has been constantly improving for decades, and still producing positive and significant results. You are overstating the issue of bias and being misleading about the views of some of the people you mentioned earlier.

I'm just trying to provide a realistic perspective to counter those proponents who overstate the strength of the evidence.  I'm coming from the same place as Kennedy, where the reforms just now taking place in parapsychology and psychology were undertaken decades ago with Evidence-Based Medicine. I have been immersed in evaluating evidence over that time, so I understand what other scientists see when they look at stories documented after the fact and research studies performed with many degrees of freedom. I also understand what kind of studies have changed minds which clung strongly to old ideas.

Linda