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Yes - the fact is that with the same attitude it would be very hard to have *any* kind of science, because if the default answer is "it must be wrong because it's impossible. so did you control X and Y? no? you see, you are a fraud". If it was applied to Newton's law, I fear they would still be debating the weight and color of the famous apple.

(not taking a position on the contents here, just on the social process).

I personally find parapsychology very interesting - and it's worth reading about, worst case consider it well-build scientific SF. It asks a lot of interesting questions: how do you study something where the scientist is directly entangled? how do you study something where you may have an actively hostile field of research? see e.g. https://books.google.ch/books/about/The_Trickster_and_the_Pa... who was written by Hansen on leaving the field....

1 comments

Decent counterpoint, and I am aware that there are some anomalous results in the field that do not appear to be fraud or just bad design.

There’s two reasons most people dismiss this stuff. Well three really but the third is less scientific.

(1) There does not seem to be a way to reliably isolate, repeat, or amplify the phenomenon. Something always at the edge of detection that can never be pinned down is often indicative of error or a hypothesis that’s off the mark.

(2) We cannot possibly imagine a natural mechanism that would explain this stuff without a lot of very soft SF hand waving. Entanglement does not transfer information. The brain only consumes an average of about 30-40 watts of power, so it’s not firing particle beams. The human body does not emit EM or RF to any meaningful degree and is pretty non-responsive to it. Some of the results are so weird that you’d have to posit actual magic or the universe being a simulation or some wholly absolutely unknown realm of physics.

The last less scientific reason is:

(3) There have been a lot of fakes in this field and historically it’s associated with cults, occult weirdos, religious nuts, etc. These are people scientists generally scoff at with some legitimate reason.

About (1), that's what Rhine did his whole life. Of course, it's all "debunked" - at the end you either trust what he did or think he was a fraud.

About (2), I don't think it is really relevant, as long as there is (1). My main doubt here is: if there is a way to obtain some advantage out of it, why isn't evolution using this extensively? life is usually pretty good at exploring all possible paths. But maybe it does, and once we "see" it, it is everywhere.

For point (3), someone suggests this is structural, and that liminality/trickster effects are the very thing we are talking about. Thence (1). If you are interested, I suggest checking out the book on Trickster - and also Jacques Vallee's "Messengers of deception".

Personally, I'm not sure what to make of all this, but it is very fascinating.