Tom Salinsky

Tags: debate, derren brown, evp, ghosts, harry houdini, pareidolia, quora

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• steve

  >>”BUT UNTIL A TEST LIKE THIS IS DONE…”

  Wow. Really, Tom? I think you will find quite a lot of tests like this have been done.

  Finding this took me all of two minutes, but there is loads more interesting stuff out there:

  http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2320/is_n4_v57/ai_15667541/

  Not really trying to convert you – I’m sure we could start debating standards of empirical proof and whatnot, but I was just surprised you were not aware of the extensive research done on this sort of thing.

  As with so many other fields, there are people on both sides of the ESP fence with no basis for their beliefs other than their own emotional prejudice and there are also skeptical people on both sides who believe they have a rational basis for their position.

  What is interesting to me are the scientific double-standards in such matters: parapsychological evidence is routinely ignored; methodologies are criticised out of hand; excessive standards of further proof are demanded; Sagan’s comically anti-empirical dictum “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” is often cited, with seemingly no recognition of the cultural and institutional biases that might inform those defining what consitutes the “extraordinary”.

  Anyway, like I say, Rupert Sheldrake’s PR guy clearly isn’t doing his job properly. 🙂

  Also just found this blog, which you might find interesting as a fairly intelligent viewpoint coming at things from the opposite direction:

  http://subversivethinking.blogspot.com/

  Pulled this off of it:

  >>At least one prominent skeptical psychologist, Donald Hebb, has conceded that 1)The evidence provided by Rhine for ESP is scientifically sufficient to convince us of any other issue; and 2) that his (Hebb) own rejection of that evidence is based on subjective opinion and personal prejudice:

  “Why do we not accept ESP as a psychological fact? Rhine has offered enough evidence to have convinced us on almost any other issue… Personally, I do not accept ESP for a moment, because it does not make sense. My external criteria, both of physics and of physiology, say that ESP is not a fact despite the behavioral evidence that has been reported. I cannot see what other basis my colleagues have for rejecting it… Rhine may still turn out to be right, improbable as I think that is, and my own rejection of his view is – in the literal sense – prejudice” (Quoted in Chris Carter’s book Parapsychology and the Skeptics.)

• Tom Salinsky

  // Wow. Really, Tom? I think you will find quite a lot of tests like this have been done.

  I didn’t mean to imply that they hadn’t. I was talking about how we find things out, rather than surveying the current state-of-the-art.

  // parapsychological evidence is routinely ignored;

  Examples please?

  // methodologies are criticised out of hand;

  What does “to criticise out of hand” mean? If the methodologies are flawed then they should be criticised. If the methodologies are free of flaw then they will presumably be free of criticism.

  // excessive standards of further proof are demanded;

  Such as?

  //Sagan’s comically anti-empirical dictum “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” is often cited, with seemingly no recognition of the cultural and institutional biases that might inform those defining what consitutes the “extraordinary”.

  I have no idea what you are talking about here. If I claim to have a sister who lives in California, then it is reasonable for you to accept that claim on face value. If I claim to have a sister who lives on Mars, then it would be reasonable to ask for further evidence before accepting this claim. That’s what Sagan is getting at. Just what is so “anti-empirical” about that?

  The Hebb quote is not very interesting, being one man’s opinion. That one chap found the evidence irritatingly convincing once (if he did, I’d love to see the quote in its full context) doesn’t really tell us anything about the power of that evidence to build a consensus. And that’s how science works. If the evidence is compelling enough, then it sweeps away bias. If the evidence is not that compelling, then we probably don’t have a real phenomenon – especially when so many people have looked so hard for so long and not found it.

• Tom Salinsky

  Ah, I also notice that the Hebb quote is from 1951. I daresay if he were alive today to read some of the criticisms of the Rhine studies, and the failure of other researchers to replicate them, then it is possible he might have a different view. Hard to debate the current state-of-the-art with decades-old quotes.

• steve

  Thanks for responding, Tom. In answer to your questions (sort of…):

  – The Hebb quote is an example of the kind of thinking I was characterising.

  – “out of hand” means without looking closely at the methodology before criticising.

  – “Examples please” of parapsychological evidence routinely ignored… Erm, all of it? It’s been years since I read much on this subject so the specific examples have merged into a broad recollection of the general state of play. Guess I will have to pull something off the internets instead:

  ***
  >>A prominent skeptic’s FAQ makes this incorrect claim about parapsychology:

  “And, there is not a single example of a scientific discovery in the field of parapsychology that has been independently replicated. That makes parapsychology absolutely unique in the world of science.”
  http://www.randi.org/jr/faq.html

  According to parapsychologist Dean Radin, the truth is:

  A meta-analysis of the database, published in 1989, examined 800 experiments by more than 60 researchers over the preceding 30 years. The effect size was found to be very small, but remarkably consistent, resulting in an overall statistical deviation of approximately 15 standard errors from a chance effect. The probability that the observed effect was actually zero (i.e., no psi) was less than one part in a trillion, verifying that human consciousness can indeed affect the behavior of a random physical system.
  http://www.deanradin.com/para2.html#ninea
  ***

  – Who is right? Who gets to judge whether evidence is “compelling” or not? Both sides clearly have a lot invested in being right. The parapsychologists clearly believe that the evidence they have is entirely “compelling” and are just waiting for a Kuhnian paradigm shift to clear away all the people incapable of looking objectively at the evidence.

  – What’s that? You need me to show off more of my tremendous googling skills? No probs:

  “If I had found a similarly strong result within a mainstream research area, I would have unhesitatingly published it. However, because of various factors (e.g. my then mentor warning me that publishing this investigation would be a career ender for me as a budding academic), this study [which ‘found strong evidence for telepathy in a study of U.S. pre-teens’] was relegated to the file drawer.” Some research professor called Friedman at the Uni of Florida.

  “The other major challenge to the skeptic’s position is, of course, the fact that opposing positive evidence exists in the parapsychological literature. I couldn’t dismiss it all.” Susan Blackmore in Confessions of a Parapsychologist (p.74)

  – “I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do. (…) if I said that a UFO had just landed, you’d probably want a lot more evidence. Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionize [sic] the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions. Right now we don’t have that evidence.” Richard Wiseman Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), 2008

  etc.

  I’ll keep googling if you like. I am sure you can find grounds to object to any piece of ‘evidence’ I half-arsedly pull off the web. But at what point in the repeated dismissal of evidence for different psi phenomena does the accumulated sum of evidence begin to alter our idea of what is “normal” and what ought to require “extraordinary evidence”?

  – I think my point is: all of this psi stuff could be total nonsense created by very poor scientists with no grasp of genuinely controlled empirical research. Their methodologies should be critiqued, and studies should be held to the same standards as all other fields of science.

  But a cursory familiarity with the field makes it very clear that they are not held to the same standards; they are held to higher standards and even when they are met the evidence is “filed” or ignored – ‘because it can’t possibly be true, because we know the world doesn work like that’. This is not science. In my view, there are a lot of people claiming to be “rational” scientists who themselves react strongly, emotionally, angrily – irrationally – to claims of parapsychological evidence.

  Which leads us to sisters on Mars. Why shouldn’t scientists dismiss these studies without too much bother when the claims are so palpably ridiculous and contrary to what we know of everyday life?

  I don’t think the Martian sister analogy is apt:

  – If you say you have a sister on Mars, I am reasonably confident, on the basis of being generally clued up on global human activity, that there are no human beings on Mars, indeed that no human beings ever landed there. I can’t dismiss the possibility of some deep black governmental project to mine some vital mineral there that we were never told about, so I can’t reject the idea completely, but generally, I would be prepared to say it is a highly unlikely and outlandish claim, on the basis of fairly solid knowledge about the nature of the material world.

  – If I say that evidence has been found for some weak degree of telepathy between twins, however, this is not of the same order of outlandishness and unlikelihood: firstly because we cannot have concrete certainty about such immaterial effects in the same way we can about the lack of Salinskies on Mars, and secondly because we have actually been hearing anecdotes about such things for years; indeed, they are just one small part of a much wider and widely-held human belief in all manner of psi effects and experiences.

  – The question, therefore, is “why is this claim seen by some as unlikely or outlandish?”

  – What counts as “ridiculous” is culturally and socially defined. There is no logical program that can decide what is beyond the pale of “reasonable” expectation. There are plenty of people (including scientists) who think that the idea you can create a meaningful statistical model for a chaotic system like the global climate is “ridiculous”; ‘sister on Mars’ ridiculous. I don’t agree with them, but I would need them to agree to go pretty deep into the scientific evidence and arguments with me before I could convince them of this. If they refused, they could then happily carry on going around saying there is no “meaningful” evidence for climate change.

  – As far as parapsychology goes, there are plenty of people for whom psi effects are entirely part of their everyday experience (as they perceive it). People for whom seeing ghosts, experiencing poltergeist activity, feeling when someone is watching them or suddenly thinking of someone just before they phone are part of normal reality.

  – These might all be cognitive illusions, and it is worth doing some scientific research to see if they are, but the claim that these things are as unlikely as you having a sister on Mars does not tally with these people’s perspective on reality. What percentage of the global populace has some belief in these things? A majority, perhaps?

  – As we have seen, there is also now a sizeable archive of psi studies that purport to show some statistically significant phenomena resembling these reported experiences.

  – If not based on what most people consider reality, then, and if there is at least some experimental evidence (of contested significance) that phenomena demanding explanation do exist, the argument must be that these things are unlikely because they violate our established scientific understanding of how the world works.

  – This may have been true when we were all good Newtonians and action-at-a-distance was a heresy in violation of the stable and known material world, but the sheer damn strangeness and incompleteness of modern physics leaves huge gaping holes which might easily be found to provide a reasonable explanation for psi effects.*

  – So: There is no basis to consider claims of psi effects outlandish in terms of consensual social reality; there is no lack of reported scientific evidence that such unexplained phenomena exist; and there is no scientific reason to dismiss them as impossible, or even unlikely. I think it is not, therefore, the equivalent of you claiming you have a sister on Mars; it is much more like you claiming you have a sister in Tasmania – surprising, a little disconcerting perhaps, but perfectly possible given what (little) we know about the way the world works. Parapsychological hypotheses should be considered like any other scientific hypothesis that seeks to explain reported phenomena – requiring no more, or less evidence, than any other such claim.

  *(I am not saying that quantum physics ‘proves’ psi’s existence, merely that the argument for saying psi requires a higher level of proof has no basis in our current scientific model. Quantum physics is, at best, neutral on the subject – some would argue that it is tilted a little towards psi, psi being the sort of thing we should really expect in a universe where consciousness and all the particles in existence are somehow entangled at the fundamental level.**)

  **(This article [I just found] suggests that the real “intellectual chall­enge is determining whether weird quantum effects have equivalents on the human scale, within the brain” and, more speculatively, that “what we might call telepathy, clairvoyance, precognit­ion, psychokinesis, and meaningful coincidences [might all be considered] merely different manifestations, under different condit­ions, of the same universal principle.” http://www.forteantimes.com/features/commentary/5506/forseeing_a_fortean_future.html).

• Tom Salinsky

  // The Hebb quote is an example of the kind of thinking I was characterising.
  But it’s a decades-old quote of a quote which only tells us what one person might have thought once. Of what real relevance or interest is it?

  // “out of hand” means without looking closely at the methodology before criticising.
  I think this is a confusing phrase. The criticism might very well – usually does – involve an assessment of the methodology. Skeptics might *dismiss* a supposed instance of psi out of boredom because they’ve seen so many examples before, all flawed in the same way, but that doesn’t mean that a rigorous criticism is not possible, only that this particular person doesn’t have the energy or time to do it right now. Perhaps this is what you mean when you say “routinely ignored”. But isn’t it fair enough to not delve too deeply into an experiment which on its face offers nothing new? A person only has so much time after all. Scientists have specified what they would find compelling and psi researchers keep offering them things which fail to clear this bar. Then the scientists say “that’s not good enough, for the reasons we have already given” and the psi researchers whine that they are being “dismissed” or “ignored”. But I say that the psi researchers are offering nothing new.

  Randi’s claim that parapsychology experiments are not replicable is NOT refuted by Dean Radin performing a meta analysis. A meta analysis ignores the details of methodology which would be vital in determining the difference between a genuine replication of the same procedure by different researchers and a pair of similar but non-identical experiment.

  // Who gets to judge whether evidence is “compelling” or not?

  Sometimes it’s easier than others. People who can tell the future would provide compelling evidence for this power by winning the lottery six times in a row for example. There are also mathematical methods for assessing this. The key is to measure how much the probability of the null hypothesis is changed by the evidence from the experiment as this obviates the need to agree on a prior probability.

  // Some research professor called Friedman at the Uni of Florida

  This is not sufficient detail for me to verify the claim, sorry. Of course, anyone can claim that they have found “strong evidence for telepathy”. But what we need is a low-probability result which is replicated by different researchers.

  Have you read Susan Blackmore’s book? She tells a very compelling story about how solid belief in psi was eroded and finally destroyed through a process of repeatedly subjecting it to forensic analysis. It’s no surprise that in an early page of that book she represents herself as being more open to the possibility of psi. You badly misrepresent her actual views today by providing this quote out of context. Where did you get it from?

  I agree with Richard Wiseman. I don’t know what experiment allows him to conclude that “remote viewing is proven” but a result which would require us to toss out most of biology, most of chemistry, most of psychology and almost all of physics probably does require especially rigorous testing before we all agree that that’s what the universe is actually like.

  // But at what point in the repeated dismissal of evidence for different psi phenomena does the accumulated sum of evidence begin to alter our idea of what is “normal” and what ought to require “extraordinary evidence”?

  At the point I’ve given – more than once now I think. We need an experiment which shows…
  – A large effect size
  – A low probability
  – Repeated by independent researchers

  Get me some of those and we’ll talk. I have no problem whatever with dismissing supposed “evidence” which shows a small effect size (since this is indistinguishable from noise in the data), a high probability of being achieved by chance (for obvious reasons), not repeated (because hidden flaws in the methodology remain hidden and it may have been a fluke). What do you see as unreasonable about this position? If I toss a coin and correctly predict the outcome – am I psychic? If not, why not?

  // But a cursory familiarity with the field makes it very clear that they are not held to the same standards;

  Then may I suggest a more than cursory familiarity is required. Breezy headline-grabbing press releases from the researchers themselves are not likely to expose subtle flaws in the methodology.

  // there are a lot of people claiming to be “rational” scientists who themselves react strongly, emotionally, angrily – irrationally – to claims of parapsychological evidence.

  Maybe. Maybe not. Scientists will no doubt react with passion to all sorts of stimuli. But science is dispassionate, and only interested in evidence. I have only seen low-quality evidence which are adequately explained without inventing magic powers. If you know different, by all means show me. My criteria are clearly set out above.

  // I don’t think the Martian sister analogy is apt:

  If you say you can read minds, I am reasonably confident, on the basis of being generally clued up on physics and biology, that there is no transmitter in the brain, nor energy to drive such a thing – indeed no medium through which thoughts could be projected. I can’t dismiss the possibility of some deep black governmental project to hide evidence of such things from prying eyes, so I can’t reject the idea completely, but generally, I would be prepared to say it is a highly unlikely and outlandish claim, on the basis of fairly solid knowledge about the nature of the material world.

  See what I mean?

  // we have actually been hearing anecdotes about such things for years

  Here are some other things we have been hearing anecdotes about for years. For each one would you say you are a believer, a skeptic, undecided or have no information?
  – The power of prayer
  – The existence of ghosts
  – Dowsing for water
  – The Loch Ness Monster
  – Bigfoot
  – Alien visitations
  – Alchemy
  – Perpetual motion machines
  – Vaccinations causing autism
  – Homeopathy curing all manner of complaints

  // There is no logical program that can decide what is beyond the pale of “reasonable” expectation.

  Of course there is. Occam’s razor for a start. Or the sheer amount of repeatable, testable, reliable science which would have to be binned if it turned out that X was the case. Don’t be fooled by the need for cultural relativism. It’s polite at parties to say “oh, everyone has their own way of looking at the world,” but the power of science (in part) its ability to cut through these distorting factors and look only at what can be demonstrated.

  // If they refused, they could then happily carry on going around saying there is no “meaningful” evidence for climate change.

  But if the consensus of the scientific community isn’t with them, then they just become more cranks – unless they can provide evidence sufficiently compelling to move the consensus. This is a bad example, because the consensus is currently so weak. But in some ways, it’s a good example, as we are watching the consensus shift and evolve. This is the other power of science. You may not believe me, but I’ll state this with as much conviction as I can. I do not believe in psi because I have seen no compelling evidence. You show me evidence of the kind I have described and if it pans out I WILL CHANGE MY MIND. I will, I will, I will. To do anything else genuinely would be “ridiculous”.

  // the claim that these things are as unlikely as you having a sister on Mars does not tally with these people’s perspective on reality.

  Why are we interested in people’s perspective on reality? That tells us about their perspective. I’m interested in what the world is actually like. My perspective of this table is that it is smooth and solid. Careful, patient, scientific research tells me that it is in fact made of tiny atoms separated from each other by many times their own width. It would be fatuous to say “yes, but that doesn’t tally with my perspective and so it’s wrong.”

  // there is also now a sizeable archive of psi studies that purport to show some statistically significant phenomena resembling these reported experiences.

  With small effect sizes, and not replicated by other researchers. Statistical significance is just a line drawn in the sand. It’s an arbitrary milestone and with a small effect size, if you pile up enough iterations you can eventually struggle past it, but it’s still indistinguishable from noise in the data, so why is it of interest, except to researchers with a reputation at stake?

  // but the sheer damn strangeness and incompleteness of modern physics leaves huge gaping holes which might easily be found to provide a reasonable explanation for psi effects

  This is your weakest argument yet. “Quantum effects seem peculiar to me personally and so may be used to explain any psi phenomenon I please”. That our brains did not evolve to find the quantum world easy to understand does not imply that on the macro scale you can see the future. Provide a rigorous account of a mechanism and we have something we can test. Simply saying “quantum” with a hopeful expression does not magically make a very unlikely hypothesis more plausible.

  // the real “intellectual chall¬enge is determining whether weird quantum effects have equivalents on the human scale, within the brain

  And yet every experiment ever done has confirmed that quantum effects cannot be replicated at the macro scale. They exist only at the subatomic level. So this is nothing but handwaving and wishful thinking at present.

  // There is no basis to consider claims of psi effects outlandish in terms of consensual social reality
  But I’m not interested in what you call “consensual social reality”. I am interested in what the world is actually like.

  // there is no lack of reported scientific evidence that such unexplained phenomena exist
  But there is total absence as far as I know of high quality evidence (large effect size, low probability, replicated successfully)

  // and there is no scientific reason to dismiss them as impossible, or even unlikely
  Yes there is. That reason is that psi phenomena are totally incompatible with vast amounts of replicable, reliable science upon which our everyday lives depend.

  Let me finish with some remarks of my own. This complaint that “they just don’t listen. We have all this evidence but they just won’t look at it,” is also one I’ve seen before. What you assert is happening “routinely” is that genuinely new research showing high quality evidence for psi is being generated and mainstream scientists refuse to even read it. Yet, when challenged, you cannot produce a single example of this actually having happened. I submit that this is because it does not happen. I submit that one of the following things happens.

  a) Mainstream, skeptical researchers genuinely do pore over the research or attempt to replicate it. The Internet is crawling with blogs and podcasts where this is being done constantly. Skeptics love this kind of thing. It’s what they do.
  b) Mainstream skeptical researchers look at the evidence and fail to find it convincing and so reject it at that stage.
  c) Mainstream skeptical researchers can see at a glance that nothing new has been attempted and so return to their other work.

  So to the extent that this “ignoring” happens at all, it happens only in the third case. But isn’t this fair enough? Mathematicians were routinely inundated with supposed proofs of Fermat’s Last Theorem before Andrew Wiles actually cracked it. The a prior assumption that any one of these would be nonsense would have been a correct one. Physicists and engineers are constantly shown supposed perpetual motion machines, none of which are actually powering our cars and factories today. Ignoring the latest version of a familiar experiment which has been shown to be flawed many times in the past is a high percentage bet. Newspapers and magazines on the other hand, love this kind of story. A team with really compelling new demonstration would have no problem getting massive coverage for it.

  Of course, fifty years ago, significant research was well under way. Governments, military organisations, labs and research teams got massive funding in the 1950s and 60s. But most were closed down when they repeatedly failed to demonstrate any useful results. And the reason that the army doesn’t have crack teams of mind readers, the reason that governments don’t build bridges by mind power, the reason that hedge fund managers don’t use tarot cards to predict the market is that NONE OF THESE THINGS WORK.

  When someone can show that in fact they do, we’ll all know about it. But the onus is on the psi researchers is to show something genuinely new and compelling (once more – low probability, large effect size, replicated successfully). The onus is not on busy scientists to constantly leave their work to carefully examine every single boringly repetitive supposed psi result with forensic care. It’s not the results would prove compelling if only they were examined. It’s that every time they are, they are found wanting and so some people stop wanting to look. If you think this attitude amounts to dismissal, then so be it. But there’s a small army of skeptics out there who will happily descend on any study which you can show has been ignored up till now. Find such a study, and I’ll find you such an army.

  And if the study pans out – WE WILL CHANGE OUR MINDS. It’s the skeptic’s code.

  Cheers

  Tom

• steve

  Having considered your arguments, and in the absence of me being bothered to go and do the research myself, I think I will cede some ground on the available quality of psi evidence and the response to it. I found the general characterisation of the scientific community’s response as inadequate convincing because it precisely replicates the response in other areas about which I know a little more.

  I maintain, however, that there are some serious logical problems with the demand, on the grounds that they are inherently unlikely, that superlative evidence for psi phenomena be provided.

  Your characterisation of the scientific community as being ready to believe in psi phenomena at a moment’s notice does not strike me as entirely likely, either. Wonderful to discover you are so pure in your commitment to the empirical process, but far less controversial paradigm shifts in science have taken decades to be accepted, as Thomas Kuhn has very adequately demonstrated.

  Most interesting to me is the idea that psi phenomena are “extraordinary claims” because they violate our current understanding of the physical universe.

  But first, let’s get a few other things out of the way:

  // it’s a decades-old quote of a quote which only tells us what one person might have thought once.

  Lucky I thought to provide other, more recent quotes demonstrating exactly the same approach, then.

  //Scientists have specified what they would find compelling and psi researchers keep offering them things which fail to clear this bar.

  We’re back to who gets to set the bar, and whether it is set at a reasonable and equitable level. “Statistical significance is just a line drawn in the sand”. Maybe I’m not even arguing for the high quality of psi research so much as pointing out the lower standards by which other research is accepted! I’d like to see your army of skeptics let slip on a lot of mainstream pharmaceutical “research”, for example – it would probably, as you say, be a better use of their time.

  But I think it is a circular argument to say “these are extraordinary claims because they are very unlikely, and they are very unlikely because there is no proper evidence, and there is no proper evidence because the evidence would need to be really, really strong to convince us of these extraordinary claims.”

  To me they are just not that extraordinary. I see no strong reason to prefer one possibility over the other.

  I like the distinction you have implied here between “scientists” and “psi researchers”. Perhaps “some scientists who want a very high level of proof” and “some other scientists who think that is unreasonable” would be fairer.

  //But I say that the psi researchers are offering nothing new.

  If you have already dismissed all the previous studies as flawed, then yes, the psi researchers will have little extra to offer you. As you say, if there were strong effects to be had, they would have been shown and replicated by now.

  The interesting thing about alleged psi effects, of course, is that the less crazy advocates maintain that these are very weak effects, and thus very difficult to prove, replicate and/or distinguish from statistical noise. Very _convenient_, obviously, but also – if such things were to exist – more likely; otherwise, as you point out, we would be seeing lottery winners and mindreaders on every street corner.

  // A meta analysis ignores the details of methodology which would be vital in determining the difference between a genuine replication of the same procedure by different researchers and a pair of similar but non-identical experiment.

  I would be grateful if you could go and explain this to those who like to cite metastudies in opposition to evidence of the efficacy of acupuncture! 🙂

  // This is not sufficient detail for me to verify the claim, sorry.

  Don’t be sorry! If it was important to my argument I would have bothered to find a proper source.

  //Where did you get it from?

  Probably here: http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/Examskeptics/Concessions_debunkers.html

  (Hostage to fortune #122…)

  I think my argument was that there is an emotional component for most researchers on both sides of the psi issue which inevitably feeds into their judgement of what a “reasonable standard of evidence” consists of. I find the extent to which this divides ostensibly open-minded and objective researchers surprising.

  I think Blackmore’s position is pretty well known – apologies if it looked like I was trying to pull a fast one there. FWIW, and unsurprisingly, the scientific reasoning she gives in the book for dismissing positive results in her own psi experiments has itself been criticised by pro-psi humanoids.

  //I’m not interested in what you call “consensual social reality”.

  Excellent. Let’s skip all that and get onto what you consider the weakest part of my argument, and I consider the essential core of it:

  //a result which would require us to toss out most of biology, most of chemistry, most of psychology and almost all of physics

  This is where we fundamentally disagree. I see absolutely nothing in modern biology, physics or psychology that could not co-exist with the establishment of weak telepathy or precognition.

  //there is no transmitter in the brain, nor energy to drive such a thing – indeed no medium through which thoughts could be projected.

  There is no transmitter in the photon that allows it to communicate with its entangled partner, nor energy to drive the process. There is no medium through which gravity operates. There is no real explanation for how scientists can ‘teleport’ particles from one side of the laboratory to the other. It is precisely my point that our neat, ‘almost complete’ account of the universe has already had to have been thrown away and replaced with a messy, fudged, incomplete version that takes account of these anomalies.

  As you say, “the power of science [is] its ability to cut through these distorting factors and look only at what can be demonstrated,” but this is also its limitation. I think there is a tendency (more marked amongst laypersons than actual scientists) to forget that “what can be demonstrated” is a small fraction of reality.

  There is a difference between using scientific uncertainty as cover for baseless claims, and pointing out that certain kinds of explanation for unexplained phenomena remain possible due to the breadth of our ignorance in that field.

  There’s also a big difference between postulating a special hidden “telepathy gland” in the brain and saying “time and consciousness are themselves mysteries, we know nothing about how they work, so if we _were_ to discover some mechanism whereby small parcels of consciousness can occasionally ‘leak back’ through time, it wouldn’t require us to tear up our textbooks and start again – in fact, it would be a very exciting clue which would help us fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge about how the universe works through further experimentation”. In this context, precognition is a pretty neutral suggestion – might exist, might not, no good reason to assume either way from basic physics or biology. So then we can only fall back on consensual reality and what constitutes an “extraordinary claim.”

  //That our brains did not evolve to find the quantum world easy to understand does not imply that on the macro scale you can see the future.

  This is the inversion of my argument that I provided a whole asterisked parenthesis to warn against. “Quantum” explains nothing. But it re-establishes that we know very little about what the universe, time, space or consciousness actually are; we therefore have very little basis to judge a priori things such as precognition or telepathy as being unlikely.

  This is pretty much my whole point.

  //And yet every experiment ever done has confirmed that quantum effects cannot be replicated at the macro scale.

  I’m not sure I agree with this. Do you mean “replicated” in a specific way? Aren’t lasers, for example, reliant on the operation of quantum effects at the macro-scale? e.g. http://www.rp-photonics.com/quantum_optics.html

  //Occam’s razor

  Our current model of physics is more complicated than previous models. This is not a violation of Occam’s razor; the model had to be changed to take account of anomalous data that could not be explained by the old model. If it were shown that psi phenomena inexplicable under our current model do occur, and we had to alter our model to a more complicated one to take account of it, this would similarly not be a violation of Occam’s razor.

  //Provide a rigorous account of a mechanism and we have something we can test.

  Not my job. As I understand it, how it works is:
  – Some anomalous data appears (in this case, of course, there is a controversy about whether there is even any real anomalous data in the first place).
  – Scientists hypothesise various alterations to their models that might take account of it.
  – They conduct various experiments attempting to deduce the correct version, favouring the simplest explanations.
  – Sometimes the simplest explanation is more complicated than what they had before.
  – Sometimes, if we are lucky, later breakthroughs integrate two bits of more-complicated model into an even-simpler-than-before model. Like: “oh RIGHT, so consciousness is just some kind of phase-entrained quantum resonance of neuronal positions existing in enfolded 11-dimensional space. AND telepathy is just a very rare and weak macro-quantum effect that occurs when two phase-entrained systems happen to resonate very closely with each other, which is why the effect is stronger between individuals who know each other well, or who share a similar genetic profile. Well that all makes sense, then. Look, we only need half the equations to describe everything now. High five!”)

  ***

  Well, this is what I get for starting a conversation like this when I am at home not-revising for exams. Do let me know when you are done with this. Clearly, we are not going to (be able to) respond to all of each other’s favourite points. For now, I am enjoying it, though! It’s been a while since I actually tried to formulate logical arguments in words.

  Odds and ends from the cutting room floor:

  //NONE OF THESE THINGS WORK… When someone can show that in fact they do, we’ll all know about it.

  Or none of these things work in a strong, reliable or replicable way.

  //The reason that the army doesn’t have crack teams of mind readers

  I assume you mean “the reason that the army doesn’t have crack teams of mind readers ANY MORE.”
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
  (Entertainingly:
  “An analysis conducted by Professor Jessica Utts showed a statistically significant effect, with gifted subjects scoring 5%-15% above chance, though subject reports included a large amount of irrelevant information, and when reports did seem on target they were vague and general in nature. Ray Hyman argued that Utts’ conclusion that ESP had been proven to exist, especially precognition, ‘is premature and that present findings have yet to be independently replicated.'” Beginning to sound familiar, right?)

  // we have actually been hearing anecdotes about such things for years

  I think you ignore my point here. We have been hearing anecdotes of people successfully treating glaucoma with cannabis for years. At first, these were dismissed as the wishful thinking of a bunch of potheads pushing their pro-legalisation agenda. But, as the anecdotes continued to pile up, they provided a general social basis for deciding that it was reasonable to dedicate some time and effort to investigating scientifically. As you suggest, this ought to be moderated by whether the claims violate our established understanding of physical reality (perpetual motion etc).

  But, in the absence of any physical reason to consider it unlikely, if we are looking for a general rule of thumb to decide whether to bother investigating an issue, it is reasonable to consult social consensus. In the case of psi, we would find an enormous number of reports of such phenomena throughout recorded history. The number of claims that your sister lives on Mars, conversely, totals one.

  My question was, if you are pretty sure there are no red squirrels in the forest, and the claim that someone saw one is therefore considered outlandish and unlikely, how many reddish squirrels do you have to see before “it was probably a trick of the light”, “it was probably a squirrel covered in red dust”, “it was probably bleeding from a skin condition” become the more improbable explanations, causing you to look again at the initial assumption that the existence of red squirrels in the forest was at all unlikely in the first place? In the real world, most of us would not wait to capture every squirrel in the forest and put them under a spectrometer before thinking to question our initial assumptions.

  Fun quiz time:
  //
  – The power of prayer: possible, I suppose. It would be more likely as some kind of direct non-local resonance of consciousness than the intercession of bearded entities, tho.
  – The existence of ghosts: meaning actual spirits of dead people? There are plenty of alternative ‘psychic imprint’ ideas around, after all. I have no strong opinions on the likelihood of some aspect of consciousness after death, given that we know so little about what either of those things are.
  – Dowsing for water – maybe. If you allow for a possible mechanism, there would certainly have been a strong evolutionary iincentive to develop this kind of sensitivity. Some kind of geo-magnetic sensitivity seems not unreasonable, like how pigeons use it to navigate? I would vote for more research to be done (unless you showed me that it’s already been done to death and there’s no point).
  – The Loch Ness Monster: I like the elephant explanation.
  http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0309_0603009_loch_ness.html
  – Bigfoot – probably. The Homo Floriensis thing convinced me; why wouldn’t there have been other hominids surviving at the fringes of Sapiens society, only to be driven to extinction or near extinction by the industrialisation and population growth of the last century? Seems more likely than not, given what we know of biological diversity.
  – Alien visitations: Biological organisms in flying machines? Not seen anything particularly convincing. Definitely some weird anomalies out there worthy of attention, though, whether meteorological bizarrities or in the content of people’s hallucinatory trances. The Brian Appleyard book is an amazing account of just how much _weirder_ than flying saucers the whole subject gets when you start digging.
  – Alchemy: The practice of combining jing and shen in the dantien and then moving it through the microcosmic orbit? Totally! (oh, right. you meant the lead/gold thing, didn’t you? Nah, probably not).
  – Perpetual motion machines: I like to think they really do work, just once, in the laboratory, and then never work again, because God is fucking with us.
  – Vaccinations causing autism – Haven’t actually looked at the evidence on this one. “Cause” is a loaded word in complex biological systems. I’m still waiting for a good explanation as to why, when it is known that vaccinations cause a certain stress on the immune system, giving multiple vaccinations at once wouldn’t cause a greater stress, or why we are so sure that there could be no negative consequences from this. I am told Wakefield’s research was definitely not up to scratch, though!
  – Homeopathy curing all manner of complaints: A much bigger stretch than most other complementary modalities. Unlike psi phenomena, which deal only with consciousness and suchlike ethereal imponderables, homeopathy really does require us to postulate new physical mechanisms, and invoke every gap in physical and biological knowledge available to try to create an explanation. That said, I know very smart people who swear by it, and have read some interesting attempts at explaining why it might be possible.

• Tom Salinsky

  // I think I will cede some ground on the available quality of psi evidence and the response to it.
  Good to know.

  // there are some serious logical problems with the demand, on the grounds that they are inherently unlikely, that superlative evidence for psi phenomena be provided.
  I wouldn’t put it quite like that. If a new result was found which didn’t contradict existing verifiable results, then there would be no reason to doubt it. But if a new result is found which contradicts decades of existing research, then the most reasonable a priori assumption is that the new result is an error. To overcome this objection, further evidence in support of the new result will be required, and a new theoretical framework is needed which explains all the old results just as well as the old theory did.

  // Your characterisation of the scientific community as being ready to believe in psi phenomena at a moment’s notice does not strike me as entirely likely, either.
  I don’t think I said that either. I said that decades ago this was regarded as an open question, but after huge expense and enormous effort has turned up no useable results, it is now regarded as a closed question, pending further evidence of a very high quality.

  // far less controversial paradigm shifts in science have taken decades to be accepted, as Thomas Kuhn has very adequately demonstrated.
  I submit that Kuhnan paradigm shifts are the exception rather than the norm and that they become increasingly rare as the scientific method develops. As I said above, as our understanding of the universe increases, we are less and less likely to abandon thoroughly tested methods. Even Einsteinian relativity is an extension to Newtonian physics – it does not replace it the way that phlogiston was entirely abandoned in the seventeenth century.

  // // it’s a decades-old quote of a quote which only tells us what one person might have thought once.
  // Lucky I thought to provide other, more recent quotes demonstrating exactly the same approach, then.
  But they all suffer from the same flaw – one person’s opinion taken out of context tells us next-to-nothing about the scientific consensus.

  // // Scientists have specified what they would find compelling and psi researchers keep offering them things which fail to clear this bar.
  // We’re back to who gets to set the bar, and whether it is set at a reasonable and equitable level.
  Then tell me whether or not the specific criteria I have given are reasonable or equitable and if not why not.

  // I’m not even arguing for the high quality of psi research so much as pointing out the lower standards by which other research is accepted!
  Examples please? I think you’ll find that the standards are pretty high wherever you look. It’s just that no-one is going to doubt your claim that this pill is likely to reduce swelling because it is very, very easy to demonstrate the existence of pills which are likely to reduce swelling and there is a sound theoretical framework which can clearly explain the mode of action of these items. Whether or not this pill actually does tend to reduce swelling and whether or not the risks and side-effects are worth the benefits will still be rigorously examined however.

  // But I think it is a circular argument to say “these are extraordinary claims because they are very unlikely, and they are very unlikely because there is no proper evidence, and there is no proper evidence because the evidence would need to be really, really strong to convince us of these extraordinary claims.”
  I agree. But I’m not making that argument.

  // To me they are just not that extraordinary. I see no strong reason to prefer one possibility over the other.
  That simply suggests to me that you have not considered either
  – The physics involved in creating psi phenomena
  – What the world would look like if psi phenomena were real

  To a child with very little knowledge of the world, Santa Claus doesn’t seem that extraordinary. But when you start to consider in detail what it would take to bring such activities about, then the possibility begins to seem rather more remote.

  // The interesting thing about alleged psi effects, of course, is that the less crazy advocates maintain that these are very weak effects, and thus very difficult to prove, replicate and/or distinguish from statistical noise. Very _convenient_, obviously, but also – if such things were to exist – more likely; otherwise, as you point out, we would be seeing lottery winners and mindreaders on every street corner.
  But then what’s the point? A universe in which I can predict the toss of a coin 50.05% of the time is functionally identical to a universe in which I can predict the toss of a coin 50% of the time. Who cares. It’s like claiming that every item in your house has been stolen and replaced with a perfect replica.

  // // A meta analysis ignores the details of methodology which would be vital in determining the difference between a genuine replication of the same procedure by different researchers and a pair of similar but non-identical experiment.
  // I would be grateful if you could go and explain this to those who like to cite metastudies in opposition to evidence of the efficacy of acupuncture!
  That would be a very long post. Let me see what I can do in five sentences. Replication of a study by a new team may reveal methodological flaws that were not apparent to the original team. But a meta-analysis simply bundles results together as if they were all part of one big study. Since different studies might or might not have subtly different protocols, by the time all the bundling-up and arithmetic is done, the details of these protocols have been hidden from view. Before you cite meta-analyses to show that the evidence for the efficacy of acupuncture is weak-to-non-existant, take great care that the meta-analysis itself was properly conducted with clear a prior criteria for the inclusion and exclusion of studies. A meta-analysis can be a useful tool but often a survey of the body of literature as a whole will give you more information. My complaint wasn’t that meta-analyses are useless it’s just that the best and most rigorous meta-analysis in the world is functionally incapable of refuting Randi’s claim – Radin picked the wrong tool for the job.

  // //Where did you get it from?
  // Probably here: http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/Examskeptics/Concessions_debunkers.html
  // (Hostage to fortune #122…)
  Quite. It’s at best unwise to offer quotes which other people have taken out of context for you. At worst it’s flagrantly dishonest.

  // There is no transmitter in the photon that allows it to communicate with its entangled partner…
  You’re forgetting the bit where I said that every experiment so far has demonstrated that these weird (to us) quantum effects have no reality on the macro scale. So of what possible relevance are they?

  // In this context, precognition is a pretty neutral suggestion
  On the contrary, the “arrow of time” (which I think is Stephen Hawking’s phrase) is at the heart of thermodynamics which itself is the bedrock of all physics. The confirmed existence of precognition would violate the arrow of time, and therefore pretty much everything we know about the physical universe.

  // It re-establishes that we know very little about what the universe, time, space or consciousness actually are;
  This sounds to me exactly like “using scientific uncertainty as cover for baseless claims”, sorry.

  // //And yet every experiment ever done has confirmed that quantum effects cannot be replicated at the macro scale.
  // I’m not sure I agree with this. Do you mean “replicated” in a specific way? Aren’t lasers, for example, reliant on the operation of quantum effects at the macro-scale? e.g. http://www.rp-photonics.com/quantum_optics.html
  In a trivial way, every macro phenomenon is reliant on quantum phenomena. But what we tend to regard as “weird” about quantum mechanics has no equivalent “weirdness” in the macro world. That an electron can seemingly exist simultaneously in multiple locations does not imply that a bus can.

  // If it were shown that psi phenomena inexplicable under our current model do occur, and we had to alter our model to a more complicated one to take account of it, this would similarly not be a violation of Occam’s razor.
  Right. But, if all psi phenomena are adequately explained by noise in the data, then Occam’s razor tells us we should probably wait for more compelling evidence.

  // As I understand it, how it works is:
  – Some anomalous data appears (in this case, of course, there is a controversy about whether there is even any real anomalous data in the first place).
  – Scientists hypothesise various alterations to their models that might take account of it….
  And yet no-one in the psi community has ever done this, as far as I know. This *is* that mechanism I was asking for.
  ***

  // //NONE OF THESE THINGS WORK… When someone can show that in fact they do, we’ll all know about it.
  // Or none of these things work in a strong, reliable or replicable way.
  Which for a small enough effect size is the same thing.

  // //The reason that the army doesn’t have crack teams of mind readers
  // I assume you mean “the reason that the army doesn’t have crack teams of mind readers ANY MORE.”
  Yes – I told you that this had been taken very seriously some time ago but abandoned because the results were all negative, which is why it’s okay for bored scientists not to want to look again at something which has already been ruled out to their satisfaction.

  // But, in the absence of any physical reason to consider it unlikely,
  As I’ve indicated, there are dozens if not scores of physical reasons to consider psi very very unlikely indeed. Maybe if you return to your revision you will find some! 😉

  // it is reasonable to consult social consensus.
  No, it is far more reasonable to consult SCIENTIFIC consensus. The scientific process provides a mechanism by which individual passions and biases may be cancelled out. The community works on who shouts the loudest.

  Still having fun. Sure you don’t want to move this to the blog proper?

• Tom Salinsky

  Interesting article from a skeptical perspective, touching on a number of the issues raised.

  http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-value-of-replication/

  Highlights:

  Extraordinary claims etc.

  “Eric-Jan Wagenmakers and others questioned the p-value approach to statistical analysis, arguing that it tends to over-call a positive result. They argue for a Bayesian analysis, and in their re-analysis of the Bem data they found the evidence for psi to be “weak to non-existent.” This is essentially the same approach to the data that we support as science-based medicine, and the Bem studies is a good example of why. If the standard techniques are finding evidence for the impossible, then it is more likely that the techniques are flawed rather than the entire body of physical science is wrong.”

  Skeptics also have trouble getting results published sometimes

  “There have already been several attempts to replicate Bem’s research, with negative results: Galak and Nelson, Hadlaczky, and Circee, for example. Others, such as psychologist Richard Wiseman, have also replicated Bem’s research with negative results, but are running into trouble getting their studies published – and this is the crux of the new debate.”

• Tom Salinsky » Blog Archive » The nature of belief or Have we been visited by aliens from space?

  […] of Facebook comments which spun-off the interaction I had on Quora with one Zoletta Cherrystone (which you can see archived here). I copy-and-pasted the Facebook interaction at the time with the intent of putting it up here, but […]

• Zoletta Cherrystone

  Hahahaa…I just Googled myself and saw this! Sooo funny! I forgot all about this ‘debate’ from years ago!! Well, Tom, I haven’t had any new ‘ghost’ experiences since…and you know what? After talking with you, I went on to explore all your reasons for not believing in such things, and I learned quite a lot about optical illusions and self-delusions. So now, all this time later, I can say to you…’I ain’t afraid of no ghost!’ 😀

• Tom Salinsky

  That’s great to hear. Thanks for getting back in touch. Cheers. Tom.

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