Principles of Curiosity

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/br...-363.4019/

Dunning interview made it to air

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/br...-363.4019/

Dunning interview made it to air

To be ambushed once by Alex Tsakiris, Mr Dunning, may be regarded as a misfortune; to be ambushed twice looks like carelessness.

To be ambushed once by Alex Tsakiris, Mr Dunning, may be regarded as a misfortune; to be ambushed twice looks like carelessness.

I gave Brian one important piece of advice: Request in advance any papers that Alex was going to reference in the interview. That would've been more interesting... That said, I think he handled Alex pretty well.

What is the paper that Alex refers to that says how rigorous the whole field of parapsychology is?

To be ambushed once by Alex Tsakiris, Mr Dunning, may be regarded as a misfortune; to be ambushed twice looks like carelessness.

A slightly more serious comment. It did seem very surprising in a way that Dunning didn't seem to have heard of Daryl Bem's work, or to have more than a vague idea of who Rupert Sheldrake was. But looking at the list of Skeptoid podcasts, I suppose we have to remember that parapsychology represents only a small fraction of the target area for sceptics:
https://skeptoid.com/episode_guide.php

I suspect a lot of sceptics just lazily assume that experimental parapsychology falls into the same category as the other stuff. In much the same way, even a lot of sceptical bloggers who concern themselves mainly with "the paranormal" seem to spend most of their time attacking ghost hunters, who I suspect are of minimal interest to most people here (though the SPR seems to be getting dragged in that direction at the moment).

I gave Brian one important piece of advice: Request in advance any papers that Alex was going to reference in the interview. That would've been more interesting... That said, I think he handled Alex pretty well.

What is the paper that Alex refers to that says how rigorous the whole field of parapsychology is?

I'm afraid it was the kind of interview where I kept changing sides. Mostly I was rooting for whoever wasn't speaking at the time.

I didn't understand what Alex was referring to there. He did make it sound as though it was a particular study. I suspect he was talking about the idea that parapsychologists have been aware for some time of the issues plaguing conventional psychology at the moment, and have taken a lead in developing remedies. I think that view is shared by moderate sceptics such as Caroline Watt.

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/br...-363.4019/

Dunning interview made it to air

I didn't listen, but read the excerpts Alex posted (I'm sorry, but I have trouble with Alex's voice). It went about as I expected. I did think it was interesting that Brian emphasized that the reason he wasn't familiar with the research was because it hadn't gained any sort of broader acceptance by scientists - that is, he is using people with expertise as the gatekeepers in terms of what he is going to attend to (which is appropriate).

I have to complain about his misuse of the Law of Large Numbers, though - the example he gave is pretty much the opposite. The Law of Large Numbers is about what you'd expect to see with a large number of trials. It specifically can't be generalized to a situation with too few trials to be representative (i.e. Brian's four or five trials). What Brian is really referring to is the idea that given a very, very large number of opportunities for a compelling match, many, many compelling matches will be produced due to happenstance. The birthday problem would be an example of this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem), where people might be at a party and regard the discovery that two of them shared a birthday as a synchronicity, given that intuitively the probability of this event would be very low.

I think we would run pretty short on friends if we were expected to dump any who sometimes exaggerated their accomplishments, though.   

Linda

What is the paper that Alex refers to that says how rigorous the whole field of parapsychology is?

I think it might be this:

https://www.sheldrake.org/research/exper...c-research

I'm not sure how that helps, given that the comparisons are probably not valid. For example, I went through the NEJM studies (from Table 1) to see what kinds of studies were and weren't blinded. All the clinical trial studies were appropriately blinded. Blinding wouldn't really be relevant for the remaining studies. About half were lab studies. That is, an automated laboratory test was applied to a group of subjects and the results reported. About half were cohort studies - at the time the information was collected, what use was going to be made of that information was unknown, which means the observations were effectively blinded. And a handful were case reports.

So I suspect that all that paper shows is that the frequency of studies which should use blinding varies between fields, not that parapsychology is more rigorous in this regard. And since any risk of bias is relevant, not just the risks that are ameliorated by blinding, it doesn't tell us anything about the overall rigor of parapsychology. If you look at this list for risks of bias, you can see that Parapsychology has yet to address many of these risks:

http://cobe.paginas.ufsc.br/files/2014/1...e.RCT_.pdf

Table 8.4.a: A common classification scheme for bias
[img=0.46875x0.46875]file:///page7image11280[/img]Type of bias Description Relevant domains in the Collaboration’s ‘Risk of bias’ tool
Selection bias.
Performance bias 
Attrition bias. 
Detection bias. 
Reporting bias 


However, to be fair, I suspect that the risk of bias in parapsychology isn't all that high, because the effect sizes that are reported tend to be small. Since the effect sizes from the various biases can be very large, it suggests that even if the effect sizes we see in parapsychology represent a measure of the residual bias (as per http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/ar...ed.0020124), much of that effect has been blunted.

Linda

Perhaps the correct skeptical position isn't an aversion to being fooled, but an acknowledgment that it is entirely normal to get fooled?

You must live in a very tricky environment, Malf ....I thought you were an avocado pear (very nice too) grower ?  Nothing tricky there is there ?

A slightly more serious comment. It did seem very surprising in a way that Dunning didn't seem to have heard of Daryl Bem's work, or to have more than a vague idea of who Rupert Sheldrake was. But looking at the list of Skeptoid podcasts, I suppose we have to remember that parapsychology represents only a small fraction of the target area for sceptics:
https://skeptoid.com/episode_guide.php

I suspect a lot of sceptics just lazily assume that experimental parapsychology falls into the same category as the other stuff. In much the same way, even a lot of sceptical bloggers who concern themselves mainly with "the paranormal" seem to spend most of their time attacking ghost hunters, who I suspect are of minimal interest to most people here (though the SPR seems to be getting dragged in that direction at the moment).

I don't think many 'skeptics' (or proponents) are interested in 'small effect size psi' justified by mathematical significance. To paraphrase, there are lies, damn lies, and Radin analysis.

It was an odd show. Alex doesn't really define what the "thing" in the podcast title is. If the question was "why has the Skeptic movement run out of steam?" then there are plenty of reasons, but I didn't hear them covered in this podcast. 

The Skeptic movement of, say, ten years ago was interested in big media-friendly targets like homeopathy and 9-11 conspiracy theories or they wanted a skeptical look at topics that people could relate to in their every day life, like bad statistics or food fads etc. They were never interested in parapsychology per se since it was too niche. Internal frictions just tore the movement into increasingly smaller pieces. They haven't stopped being influential, though.

As for the podcast, listening to the two of them talk about the Geller work at Stanford is weird. It was two people who don't understand the subject trying to make themselves seem more knowledgable than they are. 

Dunning is wrong about criticisms of Geller for taking the research money. I've never heard of that and, frankly, why wouldn't he? SRI offered a fee for services rendered, and Geller fulfilled that. End of story.

Meanwhile Alex is also wrong when he says that these experiments still stand up today. Targ and Puthoff misrepresented the work with Nature regarding the nature of the target and what Geller said in response. Now, if Randi's falsehoods undermine his position, then why don't Targ's and Puthoff's falsehoods do the same?

Besides, I thought the new Skeptiko was above this kind of skeptic-vs-proponent thing? Unless Alex thinks it'll raise his profile a notch.