Explaining away thousands of studies that happen to study controversial effects with unknown mechanisms in one brush is not demonstrating intellectual rigour no

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.