Parasychological paper makes mainstream psychology journal

Interesting sceptical comments on this Twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/Kane_WMC_Lab/status/...3834642434

I can't see any indication that any of the people ridiculing the paper have actually read it, though.

I can't see any indication that any of the people ridiculing the paper have actually read it, though.

Though if the paper isn't available free of charge, maybe there's little incentive to do so. If one is a sceptic, one can only find one of two things: empty nonsense, or perhaps worse, a valid result.

Interesting sceptical comments on this Twitter thread:

That same twitter feed also retweeted a comment on problems of non-replication (of conventional science):
https://twitter.com/stephen_want/status/...2871103488

Though if the paper isn't available free of charge, maybe there's little incentive to do so. If one is a sceptic, one can only find one of two things: empty nonsense, or perhaps worse, a valid result.

Most of the commenters did look as though they had some kind of academic affiliation, so I'd have thought they'd be able to read it for free through their institutions. One of them, Anne Cleary (professor of cognitive psychology at Colorado State University), tweeted 36 minutes after the link was posted, saying "Thank you for sharing! I'm going to cite this in some work I'm about to submit on trying to explain away the notion "psychic abilities" as cognitive illusions." Whether she's a quick reader or whether she formed her opinion without reading it, I don't know. ("Trying to explain away" doesn't exactly suggest an unbiased approach, but I suppose it's at least candid!)

If more sensible sceptics do read it, I think a fair criticism may be that as a ten-page survey of all the arguments and evidence about psi, this can't treat the material in very much depth, and the devil is likely to be in the detail.

"I'm going to cite this in some work I'm about to submit on trying to explain away the notion "psychic abilities" as cognitive illusions."

How innovative! That has never, ever, been done before.

The phrase "trying to" carries some connotations. Without the full context it's not clear what its significance might be in this instance.

How innovative! That has never, ever, been done before.

I was curious about Anne Cleary's work, and found this article:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...125046.htm

It seems her main interest is in deja vu. She used the video game "The Sims" to expose subjects to two "thematically unrelated" but (possibly) geometrically similar themes - or example, a junkyard or a hedge garden with (possibly) the same spatial layout - and found that they were more likely to report experiencing deja vu when the spatial layouts matched.

Then she tried exposing them to a series of events which was spatially similar but "thematically" different, and asked them not only whether they were experiencing deja vu, but also whether they thought they knew what was going to happen next. If I understand the article correctly, about half those who experienced deja vu also felt they knew what would happen next, but in those cases their predictions about the future did no better - that is, they agreed no better with their past experience - than chance. Iin other words,even when they felt they were remembering something, they weren't remembering what happened after that something.

The conclusion is billed as "deja vu doesn't help us predict the future". This seems to go quite a bit beyond what the experiments actually established, but as the journal article is behind a paywall I don't even know whether that's an accurate report of Anne Cleary's conclusions.
(Edit: Judging from the abstract, it's probably not an accurate report of what the paper says.)

But what I really don't understand is why she should be keen to cite a paper which argues that there is strong evidence for precognition from experiments whose design should have precluded "cognitive illusions". It seems to run directly against what she is claiming. I suppose we'll have to wait for the paper, and hope that we mere mortals won't have to pay too much to read it.

Curious. I don't considered deja vu as something paranormal, much less as "helping us predict the future". I would argue that the best examples of precognition would be from dreams, and that they are generally more detailed than a vague feeling of familiarity. It seems like she is only going to cite this paper to prove a point, maybe to stick it near the end of a sentence arguing how people delude themselves.

Curious. I don't considered deja vu as something paranormal, much less as "helping us predict the future". I would argue that the best examples of precognition would be from dreams, and that they are generally more detailed than a vague feeling of familiarity. It seems like she is only going to cite this paper to prove a point, maybe to stick it near the end of a sentence arguing how people delude themselves.

Out of interest, I wonder how you do consider deja vu?