Entangled Minds

Here is an example of a presumably well-meaning but in reality a horrendously ironic example of how mainstream academia regards psi research. Horrendous because it is aimed at science educators and students, so one would hope that the information is correct (it isn't), and ironic because it does indeed reveal how science really works, as their tag line proclaims, but probably not in the way that they intended. The website "was produced by the UC Museum of Paleontology of the University of California at Berkeley, in collaboration with a diverse group of scientists and teachers, and was funded by the National Science Foundation. " It is not simply that the information is at least a half-century out of date, but to add insult to injury it cites a single article which is known to be flawed in support of its conclusion! The unintended educational point is that the way science aspires to work is not the way it actually works, but unfortunately anyone visiting that website ...

Continuing what may turn into a 12-round prize fight, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers was kind enough to send me a link to his team's response to the Bem, Utts & Johnson reply: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1018886/ClarificationsForBemUttsJohnson.pdf

Daryl Bem, Jessica Utts, and Wes Johnson have written a reply to the Wagenmakers et al Bayesian analysis of Bem's precognition experiments. You can download it from here . It explains why Wagenmakers et al's conclusion of a null effect is, well, just plain wrong. Utts and Johnson are statistics professors at U C Irvine. Both are authors of popular statistics textbooks, including one on Bayesian methods. In general, if Bayesian and frequentist methods lead to wildly different conclusions about the same underlying dataset, then something is out of whack. In most cases one likely reason is that the Bayesian enthusiast has selected impossibly low Bayesian priors. Bem, Utts and Johnson clearly show that this was the case for Wagenmaker's article, and that a more reasonable choice of priors leads to strong evidence in favor of precognition.

Rupert Sheldrake's telephone telepathy experiment is now available in the US at this website . I haven't tried it yet but I will be signing up shortly.

This is an excellent article . I think I've written previously about Jeff Kripal's book, Authors of the Impossible . I've thought for years that someone needed to write this book, and I was reluctantly beginning to think that I might have to do it because it didn't seem to be on the academic radar. Fortunately, Jeff beat me to it, and I'm very glad because he did a thoroughly masterful job and now I can tick this off my to-do list.

The Skeptical Inquirer (online version) has published a commentary on Daryl Bem's precognition research, written by dedicated skeptic James Alcock. The same story has also bubbled up to the attention of the mainstream media, including the New York Times and NPR . Some of the op-eds border on the hysterical. Others are more rational. An example of the hysterical type includes Alcock's article. I will not address his critique of Bem's procedure (Bem does that calmly and effectively, hurting Alcock's feelings in the process), but I will comment on his preamble, which I reproduce here in indented blue text. Parapsychology has long struggled unsuccessfully for acceptance in the halls of science. Could this article be the breakthrough? After all, it apparently provides evidence compelling enough to persuade the editors of that APA journal of its worthiness. However, this is hardly the first time that there has been media excitement about new "scientific" ev...

Image source: here I don't often cite articles, especially ones that are about religion, but this one I find fascinating. For those of us who pay attention to future possibilities, this could be a harbinger of a coming sea-change in the centuries-long tensions between science and religion. And in this scenario science doesn't win. This blog article caught my eye because if we were living in a rational world one might imagine that support for the scientific study of unusual human experiences, including psi and mystical epiphanies, would be strongest among secular humanists, whose faith is in science (sort of). Unfortunately this is not the case, at least not among those who most vigorously wave the banner of secular humanism and proudly call themselves as "skeptics." They tend to view parapsychology as an illegitimate use of science to support religious beliefs. This is not true and never has been. But that's what they believe. Religious people, by contrast, see...