The Present Phase of Stagnation in the Foundations of Physics Is Not Normal

I think most work-a-day scientists are focused on useful repeatable results, and aren’t too bogged down in the metaphysical underpinnings. They may reflect on these things privately I guess, as we do here. In my experience, if they equate ‘naturalism’ with ‘materialism’ they’ll consider ‘the material’ in broader terms than normally presented here.

Imagine a group of scientists completely obsessed with the metaphysical underpinnings of their experiments, proudly designing experiments around their conclusions. This sort of bias wouldn’t be best practice, and may lead to results that are only marginally statistically significant and tricky to replicate.

My mistake for having succumbed to the temptation to discuss. (When will I ever learn?) I've now deleted the discursive posts.

Don't be so touchy, Chris. You know I respect your opinions and your input - I was just frustrated at failing to get my point across. There was no need to delete anything, I wasn't offended by anything you said.

Don't be so touchy, Chris. You know I respect your opinions and your input - I was just frustrated at failing to get my point across. There was no need to delete anything, I wasn't offended by anything you said.

I didn't think you were offended.

I think most work-a-day scientists are focused on useful repeatable results, and aren’t too bogged down in the metaphysical underpinnings. 

But the metaphysical underpinnings are of primary importance, at least with some disciplines. The great physicists of the early 20th century combined metaphysics with physics to come up with paradigm shattering theories. People like Einstein, Bohr, Shrödinger and Heisenberg were, as I have already mentioned, deeply concerned with metaphysics. OK, these are not what you would call work-a-day scientists but what elevated them? Perhaps the lack of concern for those metaphysical underpinnings is the very reason for the opinion expressed in the OP and the title of this thread.

Stagnation is, IMHO, the result of scientists (at all levels) having concluded that they have the nature of reality down pat and that all that needs to be done is to work within this universally accepted (metaphysical) framework and continue producing nice new tech for the government, corporates and their ever-demanding public or brain-controlling drugs for the criminally inclined or GM food for the starving masses. 

I think most work-a-day scientists are focused on useful repeatable results, and aren’t too bogged down in the metaphysical underpinnings. They may reflect on these things privately I guess, as we do here. In my experience, if they equate ‘naturalism’ with ‘materialism’ they’ll consider ‘the material’ in broader terms than normally presented here.

Imagine a group of scientists completely obsessed with the metaphysical underpinnings of their experiments, proudly designing experiments around their conclusions. This sort of bias wouldn’t be best practice, and may lead to results that are only marginally statistically significant and tricky to replicate.

The first paragraph is correct. For example. Consider the worldwide claims of spirits aka ghosts-hauntings. Typically this is classified as belonging to the immaterial realm. Suppose ghosts are proven to be real not just figments of imagination. Suppose we also discover their nature what then? Do they remain immaterial? Or do we broaden the definition of what material means? We broaden the definition.


The second paragraph also correct.

The first paragraph is correct. For example. Consider the worldwide claims of spirits aka ghosts-hauntings. Typically this is classified as belonging to the immaterial realm. Suppose ghosts are proven to be real not just figments of imagination. Suppose we also discover their nature what then? Do they remain immaterial? Or do we broaden the definition of what material means? We broaden the definition.


The second paragraph also correct.

I think the answer would hinge on what we discovered about their nature?

Improved practice within those disciplines? Understanding human frailties?

I’ve no doubt questionable practices have gone on in science (and other) fields. Science seems to have a better set of tools than most other fields to pick up such problems (as that thread demonstrates).


Indeed.

That was an interesting article. I had to re-read the research article by Bierman et. al. again, though, because I thought they still left a little room for the Ganzfeld studies to not be all about QRP's (rather than concluding "the current state of the Ganzfeld debate does not support the reality of psi"). They concluded that QRP's accounted for an estimated 60% of the hit rate in the Ganzfeld studies. They suggested the remainder could be due to a real anomaly or unrecognized QRPs. The problem is that there are additional QRPs known to be present in the Ganzfeld studies, as well as other parapsychological studies, which they did not include in their model - specifically undisclosed flexibility in dependent variables (e.g. hit rate as determined by independent judges, subject, or researcher(s)) and in conditions (e.g. regrouping or selecting sets of subjects according to various conditions (e.g. school attended or major), to form groups with significant results). These kinds of QRPs grossly inflate the finding of significant results (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10....7611417632). Maybe Vyse was focussed on the unrecognized QRPs part of it when he stated the research did not support the reality of psi. But I think it wouldn't have hurt for him to explain that. Otherwise, people will tune out if it looks like he is misrepresenting the research.

Linda

In this case, a particularly shoddy piece of work by Stuart Vyse, based in large part on distortion and innuendo.

Just to give one example of the level of misrepresentation, the section entitled "Is Psi Real?" briefly recounts Daryl Bem's involvement in Ganzfeld studies, and concludes "the current state of the Ganzfeld debate does not support the reality of psi (Bierman et al 2016)".
https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/s...bem_and_me

In fact, the paper referred to - which is an attempt to model the results of Ganzfeld studies by simulating the effects of hypothetical questionable research practices (QRPs) - found that the effect of QRPs alone produced a poor fit to the data. To obtain a good fit they had to include in addition a "real anomalous effect" (whether psi or a further unidentified methodological problem):
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/articl...ne.0153049

More evidence of the dismal standards of sceptical comment ...

Just to be crystal clear about this, here's the relevant part of the abstract of the paper by Bierman et al.:
"Restricting the parameter space to ranges observed in studies of QRP occurrence, under the untested assumption that parapsychologists use comparable QRPs, the fit to the published Ganzfeld meta-analysis with no anomalous effect was poor. We allowed for a real anomalous effect, be it unidentified QRPs or a paranormal effect, where the HR ranged from 25% (chance) to 31%. With an anomalous HR of 27% the fitness became F = 1.8 (p = 0.47 where F = 0 is a perfect fit). We conclude that the very significant probability cited by the Ganzfeld meta-analysis is likely inflated by QRPs, though results are still significant (p = 0.003) with QRPs."
[my emphasis]

Of course the work of Bierman et al. doesn't in itself rule out a conventional explanation, but it finds that the conventional explanations those authors considered were very unlikely to account for the observations. Of course, it's no surprise at all that hypothetical questionable research practices could inflate the significance of the observations. But the usual sceptical assumption is that the significant results are entirely the result of QRPs. The surprise is that when Bierman et al. tried to simulate this process, he found that it didn't produce a good fit for the observations. (Another simulation by Peter Bancel earlier this year produced a similar conclusion.)

It would be bad enough to misrepresent that conclusion by itself as "no support for psi". Vyse went well beyond that and claimed that the Ganzfeld debate as a whole provided no support for psi - and cited this paper as his authority!

I think most work-a-day scientists are focused on useful repeatable results, and aren’t too bogged down in the metaphysical underpinnings. They may reflect on these things privately I guess, as we do here. In my experience, if they equate ‘naturalism’ with ‘materialism’ they’ll consider ‘the material’ in broader terms than normally presented here.

That has been my experience as well. Most of the scientists I know are dismissive of metaphysics. The most they might agree to is that the methods which produce useful results falls under “methodological naturalism”. Since paranormalists also use this method when making claims, it becomes silly for anyone to claim that science assumes a materialist or naturalist metaphysic. It doesn’t, regardless of whether or not individual practioners also adopt those metaphysics.

However, this strawman is too entrenched to be given up.

Imagine a group of scientists completely obsessed with the metaphysical underpinnings of their experiments, proudly designing experiments around their conclusions. This sort of bias wouldn’t be best practice, and may lead to results that are only marginally statistically significant and tricky to replicate.

Cute.

Linda

I tend to agree with Malf's guess that most scientists just do the work and don't bring whatever metaphysical view, if any, they may have into it.

The rub here are those rather loud voices representing "science" (perhaps to the chagrin of some/many? scientists).

Krauss, Dawkins, etc.  Even Tyson and Nye to a large degree.

In their understandable fight against fundamentalists they elect to paint themselves into a corner and present science as a religion.  They invoke materialism if not by name certainly by their broader words.  It leaves no middle ground which is where, I suspect, many scientists actually would reside metaphysically: "Who knows for sure, but I tend to believe X" type of thing.