The effects he recorded were small but statistically significant. And this, ladies and gentlebeings, is why you should be very wary of ever believing studies w

The effects he recorded were small but statistically significant. And this, ladies and gentlebeings, is why you should be very wary of ever believing studies with small but statistically significant effects. Psi is the control group for modern science: they use the same methods in a case where no actual phenomena exists, and yet it looks like a regular field of scientific study, dealing with "small but statistically significant effects", and the larger the sample size, the smaller the effect, but it remains "statistically significant". And not only that, if a psi study finds that someone can guess which cards someone else has drawn from a deck, using telepathy, you will next find that someone can predict cards before they are taken from the deck, using precognition, and then that subjects can influence which cards are taken from the deck, using telekinesis, and then you will discover that they can influence which cards are taken from the deck, two weeks later going backward in time. With small effect sizes that are statistically significant, of course. Not because people can actually control which cards are taken from the deck two weeks after the fact. But because bad statistics are symmetrical in the directions of time and causation, and it makes no difference to bad statistics whether the temporal distance is two seconds or two weeks.