SF Chronicle interview
I was interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle last week. Here’s a link to the article.
The comments after the article are entirely predictable.
The comments after the article are entirely predictable.
Feeling the future meta-analysis
Before Cornell University psychologist Daryl Bem published an article on precognition in the prominent Journal of Social and Personality Psychology, it had already (and ironically given the topic) evoked a response from the status quo. The New York Times was kind enough to prepare us to be outraged . It was called " craziness, pure craziness" by life-long critic Ray Hyman. Within days the news media was announcing that it was all just a big mistake . I wrote about the ensuing brouhaha in this blog . But the bottom line in science, and the key factor that trumps hysterical criticism, is whether the claimed effect can be repeated by independent investigators. If it can't then perhaps the original claim was mistaken or idiosyncratic. If it can, then the critics need to rethink their position. Now we have an answer to the question about replication. An article has been submitted to the Journal of Social and Personality Psychology and is available here . The key
Comments
What amazes me, Dean, is that your interview is so balanced and cautious, and anyone who spends 15 minutes reading your published work can see that you are a meticulous and appropriately skeptical researcher, yet one mention of psi and you're instantly lumped with Sylvia Browne and Uri Geller. I really think that the closed-mindedness of such individuals is so absolute that even if luminaries like Lawrence Krauss, Brian Greene and Stephen Hawking himself came out and said, "We were wrong, we think psi is absolutely supported by solid evidence," they pseudoskeptics would instantly dismiss them as having some sort of mental illness.
Keep on keeping on, Dean. Every story opens a few minds, even if they're not the most voluble commenters.
It's a wonder anybody decides to engage the skeptics at all, with all the fascinating research there is to be done...
I didn't see any comments - maybe the SF Chronicle webmaster got bored and deleted them?
I agree with book surgeon, Dean. with every book you publish, every interview, every public speaking appearance, if you just open a few more minds (even 1!) that is progress, and every minute you spend makes all your work worthwhile and valuable (even if many cannot see that now). The tide will eventually turn for the best.
You go, Dean! :-)
I have little impression of much of a reduction of this with new generations.
I don't know that it's anger or too much coffee or the like. I think being negative and nasty is a cheap way of feeling smart. Beats actually thinking.
I ought to know. I was just like that from my teens into my thirties...
We shouldn't care about pseudoskeptics' diatribe. Exposing them, showing their dishonesty, documenting their contradictions, lies, dogmatism and fallacies, is enough. (My blog is a modest contribution in that direction)
I think a low percentage of pseudoskeptics will reconsider their position, because some of them have been misinformed and fooled by pseudoskeptical propaganda. If they put pseudoskeptical literature under critical examination, they'll "cure" themselves. It's only a matter of time.
Other pseudoskeptics will change their minds when they experience some type of important paranormal event in their own life.
The rest of pseudoskeptics (the most radicals between them, the ideological propagandists of materialism, the professional debunker, etc.) are irreversible cases. They're fighting a holy and personal war, not searching the truth. They're the crusaders of official science and materialism.
As pseudoskeptics are few in numbers, psi scientists should focus their efforts in doing serious investigations, writting books and papers showing good and solid evidence for psi (like Dr.Radin's books and papers, Chris Carter's book, etc.) creating blogs and websites to present the evidence, and try to get most scientists interested in this field.
Also, psi reseachers should create POPULAR (but serious) journals and magazines (equivalent to the skeptical inquierer or skeptic magazine) to share the best information and evidence about psi with the general public. (Pseudoskeptics have been very clever in focus their propaganda towars the general public and the media, because their agenda isn't seek the truth but indoctrinate credulous or biased readers or debunk psi research in the eyes of most scientists, academics or "informed" people)
Dr.Radin, keep fighting. Many people support your efforts!
"Also, psi reseachers should create POPULAR (but serious) journals and magazines (equivalent to the skeptical inquierer or skeptic magazine) to share the best information and evidence about psi with the general public,"
is a good one. I like Annalisa Ventola and others' approach, and what IONS and other organizations are currently doing, but I think that outreach to the general public needs to be in a format that's accessible to a much wider audience. Why hasn't more of this been done? Is it a matter of money? Or, finding the right person/organization/group to do it?
There have been a number of popular attempts to do this (Psychic, Fate, Phenomena, etc.). Of such magazines only Fate (www.fatemag.com) is still alive as far as I know (please correct me if I'm wrong), and it survives because it is "the world's foremost monthly paranormal publication." I.e., paranormal and not psi. I draw the distinction because most things called paranormal are not experimentally verifiable, whereas most psi phenomena are. A magazine devoted to popular psi probably wouldn't work because the state of the art advances too slowly to fill up a monthly magazine with enticing features and tidbits.
I mean, there's a reason A&E and other channels run Ghost Hunter shows, not "Extreme Ganzfeld." Actually, I'd like to see that. Maybe the receiver would have to eat nightcrawlers or rappel down a cliff face while wearing the half ping-pong balls. Talk about a non-psi-conducive state!
All kidding aside (which is hard for me), I can heartily recommend subscribing to publications like Explore and Shift, the IONS magazine. There are also good journals online, and that might be a better medium ultimately for reaching the public at large because of lower costs.
Apropos, I developed the presentiment experiment as a way of studying the effects of emotional extremes on psi. It has turned out to be one of the more robust ways of demonstrating unconscious psi effects in the lab. In fact, I originally referred to the emotional condition as the extreme condition (as in in extremis), as that was closer to what I was looking for than just high emotion.
Heck, I drink too much coffee, I have adolescent insecurities, and I'm mean to people, but I'm not a pseudoskeptic.
The difference is I've had the advantage of training in logic and I have committed to putting all my words and thoughts through a due diligence process that guarantees my utterances will be as logical as I can make them.
If you want to wipe out pseudo-skepticism, don't bother re-inventing Fate (although the WWW is making similar resources available for free). If you want to wipe of pseudo-skepticism, teach people how to use logic and philosophy to restrain their own words. Then, when they examine their own words with due diligence, they'll speak more carefully.
I think I can see the value of fully moderating this blog - letting through reasoned skeptical argument while excluding arrogant rants. There are a couple of individuals over at Skeptiko that seem to think that skepticism is about being as rude and dismissive to their opponents as possible!
Wow - "crisis telepathy" sounds an interesting concept. Nowadays there are some VERY scary rides at theme parks. Maybe if you recorded someone's heart rate on an evening out at a funfair, and matched it against his mother sitting at home quietly. A horror movie might be equally effective.
one of the comments says: "Science is not up for discussion, publish your findings in Nature, or shut up. We don't need anymore witchdoctors pushing nonsense."
My question is: Why the parapsychologists don't try more to publish their articles in journals with high impact factor, like Nature? If the article will be rejected, it would be very interesting to see the reasons of this.
Nature, Science et al publish a tiny fraction of the output of mainstream science, and the competition to get in those journals is intense. Based on a simple numbers game, when you have millions of scientists in the mainstream, and perhaps 50 on the fringe, the likelihood that those journals will publish a psi-related paper is exceedingly small. There just aren't enough psi experiments being published to compete against hundreds of thousands of other studies.
When Nature did publish a psi paper in the 1970s, it was accompanied by an unprecedented editorial apology, and followed up by enough letters from outraged scientists to cause the big journals to not want to do that again.
This well known bias is a principle reason that the Society for Scientific Exploration was formed. Many academics, in many different disciplines, find it difficult to publish views that challenge mainstream ideas. The Journal of Scientific Exploration is one of a very few number of peer-reviewed academic journals providing a scholarly forum for discussion of unpopular ideas.
My comments about the very high impact general journals do not hold for high-impact discipline-specific journals. Psi studies with positive outcomes have been and continue to be published in top-ranked journals within disciplines.
I think I can see the value of fully moderating this blog - letting through reasoned skeptical argument while excluding arrogant rants. There are a couple of individuals over at Skeptiko that seem to think that skepticism is about being as rude and dismissive to their opponents as possible!
I've been watching things over at the Skeptiko forums. These people claim not to be rude and obnoxious, but that is exactly what they are. Trying to discuss things with them is just hopeless and a waste of time. Nothing constructive comes of it.
I moderate this blog because I've learned that the combination of anonymous plus unmoderated is dangerous. It predictably leads to astounding displays of preening, strutting, stupidity and anger. There's enough of that going on out there, so within my tiny online space I prefer to maintain civility.
A boy in my son's class is also a leap baby, so he turns "two" tomorrow. That reminded me of you.
The problem with the Journal of Scientific Exploration is that it has absolutly no impact factor in mainstream. Even the impact factor of the Journal of Parapsychology is near to zero, only 0,107 (JCR-2006)
I prefer a few articles published in mainstream than a lot which no one knows.
My husband (Matthew Cromer) pointed me here this morning when he saw that it's your birthday as well... I have been working on a novel for several years called "The Meaning of Isolated Objects," and last fall came onto a quote from your Entangled Minds book that fits perfectly in front. Once it gets to publication phase I will deal with permissions, etc. For now, it inspires me as I edit.
Hope your 14th is memorable!
"Mainstream" is discipline-specific. If you ask a physicist to name the highest impact journal in psychology, and vice versa, most won't be able to. This goes for all academic disciplines. Psi-oriented papers have been published in high impact journals in psychology, conventional medicine, and complementary and alternative medicine.