What gorilla?
I've posted a commentary on Reality Sandwich.
Skeptic agrees that remote viewing is proven
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
I increasingly feel that people only really got converted to science because it created powerful technologies - a powerful Ψ-based technology would change everything.
The technology could not be military, otherwise it would simply be kept secret, and would have to do something that people need. Map-dowsing for oil or missing persons would do the trick if it could be made sufficiently robust, I guess.
I wonder, Dean, if you have any ideas for a technology that might do the trick!
Hope to hear from you.
Peter Terry
I am in Calif. for another ten days.
Also, your article is very good, because it shows (one more time) how skeptics distortion the evidence. I believe most people realize that most skeptics aren't open minded.
I've noted that most scientists are open mind to psi research. And when they read your books, they change their misinformed skeptical view on it, and accept there's something interesting in it. (Philosophers tend to be more closed mind about it, maybe because their philosophical prejudices)
I hope you can write more scientific books on psi research. They mark a real difference between the real science of psi research and some non-scientific approach to the topic.
Have you (or any other psi researcher) investigued the effects of psi in sports?
For example, I suppose that, in basketball, when a player is shooting a free throw, the intense focus of fans could affect the effectivity of the shoot (specially, influencing the ball trajectory or direction).
Of course, in case of great players like Larry Bird (whose free throw percent was, in some cases, above 90%), the influence if psi seems to be almost null (I mean, he negative influence of fans against the celtics) because it's nullified by the extraordinary skills of the player.
Most basketball players are very constant and consistent in their porcentage of free throws (at the opposite side of Bird, Shaquille O'neill is consistently a bad free throw shooter)
I suppose in other sports psi could have some influence; but it seems that in basketball the influence could be tested with more precision.
By the way, and from a philosophical point a view, recently I read a paper written by a philsopher about the "Hot hands" in sports:
http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articles/hothand.html
I thoroughly enjoyed listening to you and the others on L.King Live.
I'm tired of all the skeptics jerking us around on this subject. I agree that they should be held accountable for their unfounded findings.
I wonder if you would lead me to a sight on how to develop ones own understanding of intuition/ESP. I just recently was thinking about the recent crane collapses in NYC, and later that day yet another crane collapsed. This sort of thing happens to me frequently, and I want to recognize the premonition before it happens, not after.
Perhaps you would consider posting some tips/hints on the subject in your blogs.
I truly hope to see another appearance from you very soon. I will be watching your schedule.
Thanks, Belle
I reject about 1 in 25 comments submitted to this blog. Most of the rejections are because the message is essentially an email request to me. On rare occasions I reject a comment because it is inconsiderate, irrelevant, or just plain stupid.
Do you know of any skeptics who have gone from not being able to see the gorilla to being able to see the gorilla?
Or any links to opinions of skeptics, methodologists and statisticians, giving some sort of praise or any other sort of positive appraisal on some parapsychological study(ies)?
Thanks!
I count myself in that category. It took many years before I was convinced by my own experiments before I was able to see the gorilla. Likewise, I would say that most of my colleagues are far more skeptical about these things than most people think. Scientists tend not to believe in psi like a theist might have faith in gods. Rather, we are temperamentally skeptical, but curious. So we put our skepticism to the test.
People who start out as strong, "true believers" in psi, and then put their faith to the test in scientific experiments -- often breathless in anticipation of witnessing a miracle -- can easily end up disillusioned. Experiments are good at providing a controlled context for investigation, but they don't capture the real-world motivations and emotions often associated with strong psi effects. So experimental results, while real and statistically repeatable, tend to be weak. For some true believers, the contrast between their (unrealistic) expectations and the effects actually observed in experiments shatters their faith in psi. Such people can end up flip-flopping their faith and bitterly rejecting all claims of psi.
We see the same type of behavior in children who are strictly raised in a smothering religious faith, then as teenagers for one reason or another they learn that their faith was based on nothing (or worse), causing them to become virulent atheists.
Only a few skeptics who have made a career out of being skeptical put their beliefs to the test.
Jessica Utts, Robert Rosenthal and Daryl Bem are three people who come to mind as mainstreamers (statistician and psychologists) who have said favorable things about the methodologies used in psi research.