Resuscitating this blog

 After receiving a note from Blogger that this blog was going to disappear soon, so I've resuscitated it for the time being. 

I'm working on a new book and at some point may use this blog to discuss it.




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Skeptic agrees that remote viewing is proven

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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 ...
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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 Psycho...
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Show me the evidence

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Critics are fond of saying that there is no scientific evidence for psi. They wave their fist in the air and shout, "Show me the evidence!" Then they turn red and have a coughing fit. In less dramatic cases a student  might be genuinely curious and open-minded, but unsure where to begin to find reliable evidence about psi. Google knows all and sees all, but it doesn't know how to interpret or evaluate what it knows (at least not yet). In the past, my response to the "show me" challenge has been to give the titles of a few books to read, point to the bibliographies in those books, and advise the person to do their homework. I still think that this is the best approach for a beginner tackling a complex topic. But given the growing expectation that information on  virtually any topic ought to be available online within 60 seconds, traditional methods of scholarship are disappearing fast. So I've created a SHOW ME  page with downloadable articles on psi a...
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