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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Would you have a view on if the general approach to psi research varies between countries / cultures or if this should be seen purely as a personal view?
I am aware that France seems to have historically taken a rather more objective view on some other matters, not relevant here, than most of the English speaking world, but I'm not well up enough on this field yet to know if the same thing applies for psi research or if this is purely a personal view by the highly respected presenter.
So he mentioned Bayesian analysis - that's something which I have more fully understood recently. That's quite an achievement as my mathematical knowledge probably wouldn't pass a final year high school test. But anyway, I have not been able to see the values that various people have used to get their result. This includes experimenters as well as skeptics.
Some skeptics claim that despite being "very generous" with priors, their results have been negative. I call BS on that. But still, I suppose there is a legitimate problem. Here is how I see it:
Parapsychologists claim that psi is inherent in most persons, just as most persons can walk, see, touch, run, walk etc. If you asked me to pitch a baseball, I would perform well below the threshold of what makes a major league player. But I still can pitch. So this human ability really isn't new, it has always been there. (Just as the ability to pitch a baseball existed before baseball was invented.)
Skeptics, if I am understanding correctly, are seeing the problem as novel: like television, radioactivity, photography or space flight. So from this angle, of course the prior probability is going to be low. (This reminds me of an alleged report by British visitors to the West Indies, who told the locals about how water could get so hard that you could walk on it. The locals did not believe it at first.)
As for extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence (which Bayes' Theorem is built for), the extraordinary evidence is the experimental results themselves. Even though psi is not supposed to be extraordinary if it has always existed.
Let me repeat: I do not see psi as extraordinary. But even if it were, the evidence is extraordinary in proportion to the claim.
Some folks might think that you can't establish a prior value with confidence, because we can't apparently know whether psi is 'ordinary' until we've proven it, and we can't prove it until we determine whether or not it's 'ordinary'! I don't think such a circular argument is more than superficial, but I can sympathise with those who do think so.