Psychic Science

[Sophus]

By now you've probably heard the fuss about a respected psychology journal publishing a study that concludes there is evidence for ESP. I like this group's response to the paper.

Peer review is usually an anonymous process, with authors and reviewers unknown to one another. But all four reviewers of this paper were social psychologists, and all would have known whose work they were checking and would have been responsive to the way it was reasoned.

Perhaps more important, none were topflight statisticians. “The problem was that this paper was treated like any other,” said an editor at the journal, Laura King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri. “And it wasn’t.” . .

. . . So far, at least three efforts to replicate the experiments have failed. But more are in the works, Dr. Bem said, adding, “I have received hundreds of requests for the materials” to conduct studies.

What do you think? What does it and its publisher's fate hold? Should this paper have been published? To me, it's just an embarrassment and bad science, although it has been noted that publication alone is of course not meant to be proof of the pudding.

[ablprop]

"So far, at least three efforts to replicate the experiments have failed. But more are in the works, Dr. Bem said"

To me, that's all that needed to be said. It isn't that the efforts to replicate failed. It's that the effect is disappearing upon further scrutiny. Richard Feynman talked about this very thing in "The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist."

There he talks about an ESP researcher who found a remarkable amount of ESP. Critics pointed out problems with his technique, so he improved his technique. The effect got smaller. More criticism, more refinement, the effect got smaller still. Feynman makes the point that a real effect wouldn't get smaller, but would still be there as the technique improved.

"the reason that I do not believe that the researchers in mental telepathy have led to a demonstration of its existence is that as the techniques were improved, the phenomenon got weaker. In short, the later experiments in every case disproved all the results of the former experiments. If remembered that way, then you can appreciate the situation. "

The wonderful thing about science, of course, is that we can find out. If it were just some philosopher or theologian making some outrageous and untestable claim, it might stick around for, oh, 2010 years or so!