James Randi crosses over

[Laird]

the comments responding to that article are just really terrible.

How did you bring up the comments? I don't see any.

How did you bring up the comments? I don't see any.

I was on my phone, and there was a little thing at the bottom of the article that said "comments". Was an absolute pain in the ass to find of navigate though I don't even know how I found it.

[Laird]

I was on my phone, and there was a little thing at the bottom of the article that said "comments". Was an absolute pain in the ass to find of navigate though I don't even know how I found it.

Thanks. I've now discovered that the comments link was blocked by my ad-blocking plugin. I'm not sure why, because it's not an ad.

ETA: And yes, the comments are awful.

Good stuff, but Sci beat you to it in post #46.

Oops!

Agreed. Especially the ones who just immediately say 'parapsychology is bullshit' without any supporting examples or evidence other than 'it's not been definitively proven'. Did any of them even bother looking into the examples of Randi not being as 'rational' as he ought to be? 

I understand they may be angry that this has been released so early following his death and the article doesn't delve into examples of Randi's not-so-respectable behaviour, but many seem to just be reacting to this harshly because it's defending the taboo subject of ESP. 

The multiverse hypothesis, simulation theories, origin of life and all kinds of theories on consciousness also haven't been 'definitively proven' yet I don't see much complaining about them. And really, one commenter calling Sheldrake a 'woo machine' when Randi is the one who falsely claimed to have debunked his study. Despicable.

Here's an example of the kind of angered reactionary responses on that site:

ESP doesn’t have the facts on its side. There is no documented evidence of events that need to be explained. And it doesn’t have theory (law) on its side: there is no mechanism for any of the claims that are consistent with everything else we know about biology, physics, and psychology. It’s all pounding the table.

Spoken like someone who hasn't bothered doing any research into ESP and the published works on it. There ARE theories as to possible 'mechanisms', primarily to do with consciousness and its relation to the brain and the world. Notice how not one person in the comments can give an example that doesn't involve ad hominem, petty insults, or a misunderstanding of psi (no random commenter, psi is not necessarily expected to be detectable brain activity since it's considered to be more to do with the mind than the brain). And that's coming from someone who tends to be skeptical of most firms of psi. 

I'm also not inclined to take people who throw around the terms 'woo' and 'pseudoscience' so casually seriously. Nor anyone who argues that they're only going to take it seriously if it can be technologically applied, or tries using the 'prediciting lottery numbers' argument. 

I wouldn't bother with that site or audience. It comes off as immature and full of hateful content, and hateful people in my humble opinion. 

Funny thing I've noticed now-'bullshit' is a word pseudo-skeptics and anti-skeptics love to use constantly as much as 'woo'. It's childish if you ask me.

Edit: A quick skim through this websites pages tells me it's pretty much just a board for weird or random news articles, and due to the sensationalised title targeting a recently deceased person on a taboo topic, it incited harsh, reactionary responses from people who probably don't know (much) about the topic of parapsychology beyond what's in the article and what they saw on TV (some even admit to this).

Thought I'd add that the 'community' of this bizarre site come across like every other large forum that focuses on no specific topics at all: confusing and frustrating. That example of the guy bashing Sheldrake is interesting, considering if you look up his name on this site, you'll find others criticising his Wikipedia entry editors for the dishonesty. 

Places like this, where they lack any specific topic or theme, tend to attract all sorts of nasty people in my experience, especially militant skeptic's pretending to be experts on any given subject (hence Reddit, which is what this site may or may not be imitating). I don't really believe in most claimed psi powers myself but given what I've seen referenced on here I will gladly admit I have not read much literature on the topic outside of, for example, what Steve Taylor posts about. The sort of horrible people on these sites who viciously attack the concept of ESP (conflating parapsychological terms as they go) and claim it's 'very very unlikely to exist' without offering any supporting evidence or examples of it being disproven by studies are common online I guess, and we just have to live with it. Articles like that attract cynical people who claim to be open-minded but then never bother considering looking into evidence that isn't already picked apart like Dean Radin's work.

Articles like that attract cynical people who claim to be open-minded but then never bother considering looking into evidence that isn't already picked apart like Dean Radin's work.

The idea that some work has already been picked apart tends to be a matter of belief rather than fact. That is, the whole debunking school of thought depends not so much on invalidating a study as in creating the illusion that it has. Gullibility is not exclusively a characteristic of some sectors of society, it is distributed across all areas. The willingness and desire to believe that something is discredited plays a large role.

Nevertheless, citing Dean Radin as an example is probably appropriate given the attention he gets online, though I myself am skeptical of him and not convinced by his work. Skimming that website, which is nothing more than a quirky journalism/news forum imitating sites like Medium and Reddit, and looking up many names mentioned on here resulted in exactly what I expected: nothing, or at the least, very little, when it came to results. That is another clear indicator that these comments are not as informed as they think they are. 

I realise I shouldn't expect anonymous people on such forums, blogs and news website comment sections that have no specific theme, focus or topic, to be filled with experts. Especially given how often they cite Wikipedia like it's the only resource there is, leading to (paraphrased) claims such as:

William James was deceived by Leonora Piper who was proven to be using cold reading and guesswork. 

That statement is a half-truth, since actually researching Piper for longer than 10-20 minutes should reveal that this was never 'proven', only speculated. But of course if you only cite Wikipedia as your resource, which the site itself doesn't advise, and don't bother doing any further research then that shouldn't be surprising (which of course is what I saw). 

This is a recurring trend with commenters on websites that don't deal with these topics regularly, but given the substantial use of 'woo', 'pseudoscience' and 'bullshit', they're clearly very hostile towards them. And yet they claim to be open-minded to evidence. Yeah, sure they would. I'm sure that's why so many were resorting to immature insults rather than providing actual examples of cases where ESP has been 'definitively disproven' in their arguments. 

I swear those people seemed to think Sheldrake, Radin and the Rhine London centre are the only parapsychologists out there. If I want to discuss parapsychology online, some unoriginal news forum with no particular theme or focus whatsoever that don't even have a post about someone as relatively well-known as Ian Stevenson, isn't where I'd go. I shouldn't take heed to what a forum/blog about video games had to say about NDEs over this forum for example. It's just a shame that website seems to be 'popular', or at least garnered a lot more attention than normal thanks to that article. Checking the average number of comments on posts they get, a spike of roughly 250 is somewhat abnormal for them.

Another point I thought I'd make is that it is ironic to me how James Randi's many fans that cropped up on that site forum behave as hypocritically as the 'woo-machines' they accuse. The most obvious example of this is not only the many unsubstantiated or poorly explained/evidenced accusations against people like Sheldrake, but also the laziness of their refutations. 

This is a perfect example of this behaviour, taken from a comment thread from 2014, when a user cited the list of evidenced case studies, meta-analysis reports, debates, theories etc. collected by Radin (members here probably know which one I'm referring to given that it is available to read on the Wiki):

I just read over 3 of those studies’ methodologies. They were all meta reviews. All three of those applied very small P-Values (in the range of P<0.0001 or so) to their data. This, at first glance seems to bolster their conclusion. Except that the size of the error grows in proportion to the declining P-values. The effect size seems impressive, but when you use such small P-values, in conjunction with only a handful of trial subjects, all you’re doing is opening yourself up to researcher degrees of freedom, and systemic bias.

These studies that are cited are nothing short of fishing expeditions and cherry picking. With the small numbers of subjects, and the effect sizes ranging from miniscule to modest, the best that can be said are that the results are inconclusive in hand-picked scenarios with poorly applied statistical methods.

This to me is intellectually dishonest and lazy for a few obvious reasons:

• Neither this commenter, nor anyone else who replied to the original comment or in the thread, actually read any of the studies in full. In fact they just ignore them and go on to ridicule the original commenter. Reading 3 of the several dozen studies listed here, and deciding to dismiss them all because of the limited methodology, is ludicrous and irrational. 
  
• The exact same criticisms can (and have) been levelled at studies on consciousness supporting certain (often materialist) theories and yet pointing this out only earns cynical retorts from the same people who dismiss these studies.
  
• Half of the links listed aren't even experiments where p-values would be relevant, some are even links to recommended reading. So you still cannot just hand-wave away the rest of it because of just 3 studies, which this commenter didn't even bother naming, so one ought to be suspicious as to whether or not he actually really read them, or just skimmed them.
  
• The thread was made in 2014 when Radin was still uploading cases. There are several uploaded from 2015 which the commenter would not have been able to read and should still be taken into account even if Radin's work, in my opinion, is far from foolproof.
  

Additionally, another 'critique' was someone linking to Radin's Wikipedia page and referencing how Chris French criticised him. It has been well-established by actually open-minded and interested researchers that Wikipedia is not a good source for controversial topics like this, and there are a lot of examples to be found on here, and other sites like Michael Prescott's blog. Not only that, but this is a weak criticism for anyone who actually just clicked on the link, because you'll immediately notice that a lot of the claimed evidence wasn't conducted by him and again has nothing to do with small p-values or dodgy statistics. 

That was from 2014. No wonder 90% of the comments on that Randi article don't address the overarching implications.

[Laird]

I have no idea what that commenter means anyway by "applying" p-values. You don't "apply" p-values; p-values are outcomes. ETA: As for what s/he means by "the size of the error grows in proportion to the declining P-values", it's anybody's guess. It sounds quite like nonsense.