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If your view is a priori that psi effects are impossible all you will see in the studies that 'it must be invalid and flawed or faked'. Yes, this makes people d

by pknight 10y ago

If your view is a priori that psi effects are impossible all you will see in the studies that 'it must be invalid and flawed or faked'. Yes, this makes people doubt scientific practices in general. You will always feel you are winning that argument, no matter what criteria those scientists meet. But psi researchers these days jump through far more hoops, run far more replications, spend far more time looking for weaknesses and alternative explanations, garner far more scrutiny and second guessing. To call that a 'fake field of research' when it is more rigorous is disingenuous. Negative results do get published regularly. And more replications take place. It is quite hilarious really, because it makes people panic about what is wrong with the methods we apply across the board in science. Skeptics just raise the bar abritrarily and shift the goalposts as a means of sweeping things under the rug while calling it scientific rigour. We have also now gotten to the point that the fact that we commonly have failed replications (across all social science), it means the whole premise of a line of research must be completely flawed. But we should expect failed replications - for one, it's impossible to repeat a set of circumstances exactly. Many replications aren't true replications.

Dylan16807 10y ago
> But psi researchers these days jump through far more hoops, run far more replications, spend far more time looking for weaknesses and alternative explanations, garner far more scrutiny and second guessing. To call that a 'fake field of research' when it is more rigorous is disingenuous. So what's a good study you can point me at? The nice thing about psi testing is that you can get a result sample every few seconds. It should be easy to turn even a moderately small effect into a five sigma result that's immune to publication bias.
- pknight 10y ago
  Try: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/pe/pe/2016/00000029/00000001/art00004 http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/pe/pe/2016/00000029/00... "During 2013 and 2014, a total of 1479 people from 77 countries contributed 2985 test sessions. Over the same period, 5738 sessions were run as controls by a computer programmed to simulate human participants. The results showed that with human observers the fringe visibility at the center of the interference pattern deviated from a null effect by 5.72 sigma (p = 1.05 × 10−8), with the direction of the deviation conforming to the observers' intentions. The same analysis applied to the control data resulted in an overall deviation of −0.17 sigma." There are some presentations on Youtube that go into the details of the double-slit line of experiments.
tgb 10y ago
The point of the linked article is exactly that psi researchers go through far more rigorous methods than most researchers. The fact that they still come up with wrong results tells us just how far the goal posts need to be moved - but not just for psi, for all of psychology and other fields too.
- pknight 10y ago
  This hinges on the premise that any kind of psi-like-effect is impossible. And that comes from a belief rather than from evidence.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
> But psi researchers these days jump through far more hoops, run far more replications, spend far more time looking for weaknesses and alternative explanations, garner far more scrutiny and second guessing. To call that a 'fake field of research' when it is more rigorous is disingenuous. But that's the point of Scott's article. We have more than enough reasons to believe the whole field is bullshit (did you see a working practical application of that research?), but because it does all the moves and rituals of Real Science, it forms a perfect baseline for how many positive results we can expect with pure cargo-cult science.
- pknight 10y ago
  Explaining away thousands of studies that happen to study controversial effects with unknown mechanisms in one brush is not demonstrating intellectual rigour nor does it make you come across as upholding 'real science'. The explanation that psi-researchers are just good at finding the appearance of signal from noise, small as it may be, is fine, but then personally, I'd like to see the same vigour for explaining what the signal actually is. And people that have a firm belief that any 'psi'-explanation can't possibly true (and this a pretty arbitrary notion at that, as psi would just follow conventional physics and adhere to normal biological mechanisms) just aren't going to accept any other explanation. So they look for issues with the statistics used. The notition that the whole field is BS, as you put it, requires all the researchers in involved to be utterly mad, stupid or deceitful. That is a claim easily made by skeptics, a thing that they have no trouble agreeing to. That view is not born out of scientific honesty, it's just another form of cargo-cult thinking.
adrianratnapala 10y ago
Just to clear something up, Haushalter did not claim physchology was a a "fake field of research" -- he was saying that paranormal research was fake. In this way, paranomral reserach is a good "control group" for science because it uses methods similar to those of psychology and the social sciences.

by pknight 10y ago

Dylan16807 10y ago

> But psi researchers these days jump through far more hoops, run far more replications, spend far more time looking for weaknesses and alternative explanations, garner far more scrutiny and second guessing. To call that a 'fake field of research' when it is more rigorous is disingenuous. So what's a good study you can point me at? The nice thing about psi testing is that you can get a result sample every few seconds. It should be easy to turn even a moderately small effect into a five sigma result that's immune to publication bias.

pknight 10y ago
Try: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/pe/pe/2016/00000029/00000001/art00004 http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/pe/pe/2016/00000029/00... "During 2013 and 2014, a total of 1479 people from 77 countries contributed 2985 test sessions. Over the same period, 5738 sessions were run as controls by a computer programmed to simulate human participants. The results showed that with human observers the fringe visibility at the center of the interference pattern deviated from a null effect by 5.72 sigma (p = 1.05 × 10−8), with the direction of the deviation conforming to the observers' intentions. The same analysis applied to the control data resulted in an overall deviation of −0.17 sigma." There are some presentations on Youtube that go into the details of the double-slit line of experiments.

tgb 10y ago

The point of the linked article is exactly that psi researchers go through far more rigorous methods than most researchers. The fact that they still come up with wrong results tells us just how far the goal posts need to be moved - but not just for psi, for all of psychology and other fields too.

pknight 10y ago
This hinges on the premise that any kind of psi-like-effect is impossible. And that comes from a belief rather than from evidence.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

> But psi researchers these days jump through far more hoops, run far more replications, spend far more time looking for weaknesses and alternative explanations, garner far more scrutiny and second guessing. To call that a 'fake field of research' when it is more rigorous is disingenuous. But that's the point of Scott's article. We have more than enough reasons to believe the whole field is bullshit (did you see a working practical application of that research?), but because it does all the moves and rituals of Real Science, it forms a perfect baseline for how many positive results we can expect with pure cargo-cult science.

pknight 10y ago
Explaining away thousands of studies that happen to study controversial effects with unknown mechanisms in one brush is not demonstrating intellectual rigour nor does it make you come across as upholding 'real science'. The explanation that psi-researchers are just good at finding the appearance of signal from noise, small as it may be, is fine, but then personally, I'd like to see the same vigour for explaining what the signal actually is. And people that have a firm belief that any 'psi'-explanation can't possibly true (and this a pretty arbitrary notion at that, as psi would just follow conventional physics and adhere to normal biological mechanisms) just aren't going to accept any other explanation. So they look for issues with the statistics used. The notition that the whole field is BS, as you put it, requires all the researchers in involved to be utterly mad, stupid or deceitful. That is a claim easily made by skeptics, a thing that they have no trouble agreeing to. That view is not born out of scientific honesty, it's just another form of cargo-cult thinking.

adrianratnapala 10y ago

Just to clear something up, Haushalter did not claim physchology was a a "fake field of research" -- he was saying that paranormal research was fake. In this way, paranomral reserach is a good "control group" for science because it uses methods similar to those of psychology and the social sciences.