(2020-12-21, 05:37 AM)Smaw Wrote: [ -> ]See I don't feel like that's true. This isn't someone who's dismissing parapsychology or coming with a materialist axe to grind. She's just read the book and put forward her opinions, which I feel like are substantial and valid. Problems with replication, effect sizes and a solid agreed upon theory that can predict results so we're not just working with data. Of course some of her problems could have been eleviated a little by doing some more research but she was only just reviewing the book.
Her points about whining about materialism and skeptics also interested me a bit. I feel like sometimes we stray into that territory, and recognition has certainly been impacted by skeptics but the quality of evidence is what stops a lot of scientists from having a keen eye on it. We have a lot of data, but its fragmented, small and loosely held together by us just not knowing how PSI works. Though of course I'm optimistic, and as studies and results improve people will be forced to take note regardless. I feel like Cardena's 2018 meta analysis was a milestone in that, considering the poor skeptical responses to it.
As for the posts by Chris and the like you mentioned if you have any good links to recommend I'd be thankful. I do a bit of reading on the PSI encyclopedia but it feels a bit difficult to get an idea of what's going on there sometimes because of all the seperate pages.
I looked over her site and it was clearly pseudo-skeptical advocacy. As for her assessment of the data, does she have a math background? I don't often comment on lab data because while I have an undergrad degree in math and worked in clinical research, those days are long, long behind me. I don't feel right trying to say a lot about methodology and statistics when I simply don't recall or learned all the intricacies.
She has a BS in Geosciences, so maybe she did some math there but it seems her primary work is in science education as her master's was used to....become a careerist blogger? Skeptics have a knack for suddenly developing a kind of skills-based-Psi when it comes judging parapsychology, though given the way scientists are treated as a sacred priesthood when they confirm the Materialist Evangelical faith I guess it doesn't extend to outside parapsychology. It has recently seemed to work generally in fits and starts as more scientists publicly declare their doubts about Materialism, so like the old lawnmower you have to tug a few times we might suddenly find ourselves with out-of-the-blue prodigies...
Regarding her other claims ->
Skeptics always claim the anti-Psi attitude in STEM is overblown, but there's a good record of this bias. The skeptic Piggilucci even admitted he would never hire Maaneli because the man was honest enough to say he was convinced by the data. Let's not even get started on how Sheldrake has been treated - for example how people swallowed Randi's lies that he'd falsified the dog telepathy work.
Just look at this Lewontin quote.
Bernardo Kastrup's talked about this issue, Brian Josepshon as talked about it, Radin has talked about the private support he's gotten from scientists who don't want to publish research when it suggests Psi, etc. Even one of the CSICOP founders left the organization because
he was disgusted by the bias in the Starbaby Scandal.
Most of us make note of the bias when it pops up and move on, heck at least a few (many?) parapsychologists are themselves materialists.
As for the status of the data, I think one can make some inference about the quality of the data given who's found it good enough to take seriously ->
Wiseman said remote viewing was proved for any non-controversial branch of science. It's convinced tech entrepeneur Ben Goertzel who wrote
"Evidence for Psi: Thirteen Empirical Research Reports", Maaneli who was willing to risk his future career in physics by coming out for Psi, the nobel Physicist [Brian] Josephson, and the former (111th) president of the American
Statistical Association Jessica Utts.
In the past it was enough to convince Einstein that it made Psi worthy of study. Turing in his famous 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, said,
"These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming."
About the dream telepathy experiment done by Stanley Krippner, Yale's Irvin Child said ->
The knock on parapsychology studies has long been that any so-called evidence of ESP is usually limited to negligible effects only detectable after scouring massive bodies of data. "Those to whom this criticism has any appeal should be aware that the Maimonides experiments are clearly exempt from it," wrote Irvin Child, Yale's former psychology department chair, in American Psychologist, the APA's flagship journal. "I believe many psychologists would, like myself, consider the ESP hypothesis to merit serious consideration and continued research if they read the Maimonides reports for themselves."
-From
this article about Krippner in the SF weekly.
See the
Psi Encyclopedia Entry for more persons who took Psi seriously.
Also
Fraud in Science and Parapsychology.
I wonder if anyone has a good anonymous survey on how many scientists take Psi seriously, by which I mean a global one. The data from China, Russia, and Japan alone could be illuminating.
For the stuff posted here, you can just search the name "Chris". Also see the resource threads in varied sections,
especially this one.