Yeah, it's rather sad. It's a cultural problem, where new generations are sucked into meaningless subjects of debate over culture war nonsense.
It feels like a sign of cultural degradation... 
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
~ Carl Jung 
(2025-05-23, 06:23 AM)MarcusF Wrote: …. I agree that it's going in circles. In fact, I’d go further and argue that the effort to obtain evidence for the paranormal using rigorous methodologies like pre-registration and double-blinding is on the decline. I’m not aware of any such studies being conducted anymore. At the same time, there don't seem to be any genuinely new ideas or promising solutions being proposed for the mind-body problem. The debate feels stagnant, with familiar positions being rehearsed rather than advanced. 
I think the biggest problem for spaces like this is that the pseudo-skeptics lost. Publicly it's a wash, you can find people more than willing to talk about paranormal subjects without the feeling of shame the pseudo-skeptics tried to push.
Academically there's still some push back, though STEM+Philosophy spaces that would never have hosted Sheldrake in the early 00s now have people like him and others who believe in Psi and Survival [writing essays, doing interviews, etc]. Panpsychism and Idealism are seen as respectable positions, even if the religious dominance of the Materialist faith still corrupts academia. As such there's just no longer a need for everyone who was opposed to the pseudo-skeptical vision to gather together under one big tent. We also don't have a centralizing figure like Kastrup or Tom Cambpell, nor do we even have a shared vision for what reality is ultimately like. There's also no researchers like Parnia or Alexander-Gomez to directly share new results here. There's no podcast like The Telepathy Tapes to tune into, and I am not sure any of us would want to run such an endeavor or see it representing the forum as a whole. Really I can't see a solution besides interviews, whether they be text based [or] audio. Though it's also not completely clear to me what new discussions people would bring...
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
(This post was last modified: 2025-05-24, 07:17 PM by Sciborg_S_Patel. Edited 4 times in total.)
- Bertrand Russell 
(2025-05-24, 07:14 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: Really I can't see a solution besides interviews, whether they be text based [or] audio. Though it's also not completely clear to me what new discussions people would bring... I think the whole issue as to whether evolution by RM+NS is actually possible, should make a big dent in conventional ways of thinking. In a way this issue has been around for quite some time under the guise of The Third Way in biology. IMHO, this has been a way to search for evolutionary processes with should not exist. They seem to find them, but like to keep their significance obscure. David
(2025-05-24, 10:31 AM)sbu Wrote: I agree that it's going in circles. In fact, I’d go further and argue that the effort to obtain evidence for the paranormal using rigorous methodologies like pre-registration and double-blinding is on the decline. I’m not aware of any such studies being conducted anymore. At the same time, there don't seem to be any genuinely new ideas or promising solutions being proposed for the mind-body problem. The debate feels stagnant, with familiar positions being rehearsed rather than advanced. The problem with "rigorous methodologies", is that they can cover up positive evidence for paranormal phenomena. As an example, consider the AWARE research effort. The problem is that it simply does not follow that if people can view themselves from outside their bodies in NDEs, then they should notice extraneous pictures or whatever placed on top of cupboards. There is a well known psychological experiment in which people are asked to study a video clip for some reason, and they then don't notice someone in a gorilla suit! The mind filters out irrelevant information. I myself encountered something of this sort the other day. I was in a fairly intense discussion with 2 other people, and someone else entered the room and sat behind me. I did not realise she was there until the end of the discussion! David
(2025-05-24, 08:06 PM)David001 Wrote: I think the whole issue as to whether evolution by RM+NS is actually possible, should make a big dent in conventional ways of thinking. Oh I meant what people think new members will contribute? I don't mean to say it's pointless to try and increase the number of active members, but we also need to consider how that engagement might work. There's a challenge because after a point you need some expertise in the subject. I feel like I know a little bit about physics, philosophy, biology, runes, shamanism, etc...but there are specialized spaces for all of those. As a nexus of varied subjects, the best case I can think of is that people come here to talk to others who don't have the same beliefs as them, or who have come around to seeing some value in Psi & Survival evidence but aren't sure what it means.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
Could we get interviewed, or otherwise publicised by Jeffrey Mishlove? He seems to be close to our point of view (except perhaps the sceptics).
David
(2025-05-25, 04:32 PM)David001 Wrote: Could we get interviewed, or otherwise publicised by Jeffrey Mishlove? He seems to be close to our point of view (except perhaps the sceptics). Do you mean we could get an interview from Mishlove? edit: To be clear I mean we ask him questions and post the answers here.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
(This post was last modified: 2025-05-25, 05:40 PM by Sciborg_S_Patel. Edited 1 time in total.)
- Bertrand Russell 
Activity isn't down all that much, especially given the usual fluctuations, although the number of members visiting on a regular basis has been slowly declining since its last (local, not all-time) peak about two years ago, and the board's ongoing viability is potentially of concern if that trend continues.
In any case, we three remaining regularly-active founders haven't even discussed this amongst ourselves, let alone discussed closing the board, let alone wiping its archives, so set your mind at rest there, @David001. It's unfortunately true that we aren't easily found on search engines. Years ago I was semi-regularly tracking where we placed on Google for various search queries, especially "parapsychology forum". There were periods between 2017 and 2020 (the last time I checked before a day or two ago) when we were on the first page of results for that phrase: third result overall was the highest we got, on more than one occasion. When I checked a day or two ago, we weren't even within the first ten (I stopped looking after that) pages of results for that phrase. Ouch. My attempts at search-engine optimisation have (or had) basically been to:
Regarding the way forward for our board, here are a few possibilities, not all of them mutually exclusive, and some repeating/summarising prior suggestions in this thread: Keep on keeping on: Continue exactly as we are, risking the possibility of a slow, gradual death, or at least of an ultimate end point at which there is a handful of us left having the same sort of discussions, at a much reduced frequency, that are currently popular. Broaden and/or refine our effective topicality: Find out what members want to have conversations about that we aren't already having conversations about, why those conversations aren't happening, and how we can facilitate and nurture them. @Larry, for example, has made clear that he wants us to have more conversations about congressional hearings on UFOs, the organisations investigating UFOs, the simulation hypothesis, telepathy and related phenomena in non-speaking autistic savants, DMT entities, and how these all intersect. Attract new members like the ones we have: Either through SEO, more interviews, or endorsements by popular organisations or figures like Jeffrey Mishlove, try to increase our active membership without changing the type of members we have, to forestall the possibility of a slow and gradual death. Establish ourselves as a venue for professional discussions: Attract professional parapsychologists (and related professionals) to discuss their work and the field, and to brainstorm research possibilities, etc. This is the most ambitious option. Some challenges and considerations:
Warm wishes to all of our members and potential new members.
This seems worth adding, re search engine visibility:
According to our two last monthly "Search performance" emails from Google (another one is due soon), we achieved the following stats for March and April: Code: March: 333 clicks, 6.18k impressions, 268 pages with first impressions.So, it's not like we're invisible, however, aside from "psience quest" and "psiencequest", the search phrases that actually get us hits are kind of random, suggesting googlers who are interested in specific topics, not finding a place to have ongoing discussions. Here are the search phrases in the report from March with listed "Clicks" greater than zero: Code: Top queries Clicks Impressions CTR PositionI also checked for phrases over the past year, not just in March as above, and it's a similar story. |
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