(2019-07-03, 09:16 AM)Chris Wrote: Thankfully there's no need to pay to read this article, as the authors have summarised their arguments in another article in the Skeptical Inquirer, which is available here:
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2019/07/wh...t-be-true/
As suggested by the abstract, they rely on a priori arguments that psi is impossible, rather than examining the experimental data. Indeed, they go so far as to say:
"We did not examine the data for psi, to the consternation of the parapsychologist who was one of the reviewers. Our reason was simple: the data are irrelevant."
It's perhaps worth pointing out that although they claim the data are irrelevant, they do actually make one claim about the data. They claim that attempts to replicate Daryl Bem's "Feeling the Future" studies "almost uniformly failed." That is perhaps the impression they got from a small number of failures that were publicised soon after the publication of Bem's paper. But the meta-analysis published by Bem and others in 2015 covered 90 studies and showed an overall Z value of 6.4 (and the result remained significant when Bem's original studies were excluded).
This meta-analysis is one of the ones included in the paper by Cardeña which Reber and Alcock are responding to. The second section in Cardeña's Table summarising the data is headed "Precognition/Bem-type studies." But it appears that Reber and Alcock really are serious about not examining the data.