Excerpt from a January 2008 item in the UK's The Daily Mail newspaper: In 1995, the US Congress asked two independent scientists to assess whether the $20 million that the government had spent on psychic research had produced anything of value. And the conclusions proved to be somewhat unexpected. Professor Jessica Utts, a statistician from the University of California, discovered that remote viewers were correct 34 per cent of the time, a figure way beyond what chance guessing would allow. She says: "Using the standards applied to any other area of science, you have to conclude that certain psychic phenomena, such as remote viewing, have been well established. "The results are not due to chance or flaws in the experiments." Of course, this doesn't wash with sceptical scientists. Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, refuses to believe in remote viewing. He says: "I agree that by the standards of any other area ...
Comments
Briefly, effect size declines occur in many research domains. In psi research the declines are likely due to shifts from proof-oriented to process-oriented research. The former studies are designed to optimize effect sizes, while the latter studies are designed to investigate parameters that modulate psi ability.
Experimenter expectancy effects are pervasive throughout science. They are especially noticable in the behavior, social and medical sciences, but they also occur in the so-called hard sciences, including physics. See, e.g. this article.
In general, armchair skeptics usually offer weak critiques that fail to pass the double-standard test. That is, if the criticism applies equally to conventional scientific domains, then the criticism aimed at psi research is invalid.
Those who hold a strong view that current scientific knowledge is more or less complete take this as evidence that psi does not exist, and that any evidence presented for psi is either flawed or an illusion.
Those who hold a more moderate (and humble) view, that science is a very recent invention in historical terms, take it as evidence that our understanding of the fabric of reality is not sufficiently comprehensive to fully explain these (and many other) natural phenomena.
My opinion is that psi will one day be explanable in rational, scientific terms. It's difficult to guess when this might occur, but given current accelerating trends in knowledge, I'd estimate that by 2020 we will have reliable demonstrations of some psi effects. To achieve this will require, among other things, some changes in current scientific epistemology.
What science has over say, religious dogma, is at least the promise of flexibility. One hopes that with sufficient creativity and curiosity that we can evolve towards increasingly comprehensive ways of understanding Nature.
Like Putnam, at heart I'm a pragmatist - what works best is as close to the "truth" as we're likely to know. Of course, words like "works" and "best" carry their own complexities, so even pragmatism is not as simple as it seems. But I think you get the gist.
I imagine some day highly advanced aliens might land on Earth and tell us the "truth" about Nature, as they understand it. These creatures will have evolved a refined science a million years beyond ours. Not a single word of their simplest explanations will be translatable into terms we can understand. Like trying to explain quantum theory to hamsters, the aliens will become frustrated by our compulsion to "know," so they'll resort to telling us fantasies that will make us feel good, and give us exercise wheels to give us the sense that we're actively engaged in important work.
Come to think of it, with all the fantasies one sees on the nightly news, and with the vast variety of exercise wheels constantly sold on TV, perhaps the aliens are already among us.