
Daryl Bem and the Replication Crisis - wellpast
https://redux.slate.com/cover-stories/2017/05/daryl-bem-proved-esp-is-real-showed-science-is-broken.html
======
eth0up
Please also see and consider:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_LeShan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_LeShan)

A particularly excellent work by Dr LeShan is: The Medium, the Mystic, and the
Physicist: Toward a General Theory of the Paranormal (1974) - The appendix is
excellent, if the unabridged version.

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erikj
Not "science" but "a science", psychology, which is notoriously problematic
with regards to reproducibility.

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gremlinsinc
Perhaps ESP is actually proof that we live in a simulation/hologram. Seeing
the future, is somehow tapping into the simulation and being able to on a
subconscious level guess at what comes next.

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captn3m0
branch prediction, you mean.

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Kinnard
Why was this flagged?

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dang
Users flagged it. Hard to say why, but it might be because they don't think HN
is able to sustain a high-quality discussion about this topic.

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tptacek
Users in this case were probably wrong; this is a straightforward article
about the replication crisis, not a story about ESP.

Unfortunately, the title is so bad that the thread is swamped with people
who'd rather discuss ESP.

A better title, synthesized from the last graf of the introduction, might be
"Daryl Bem, ESP, and the Replication Crisis".

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dang
I agree completely but IMO the topic is still too triggery for HN to discuss
it without losing it, and a title change may not be enough. We can send the
submitter a repost invite, though, with a different title, and see if starting
from scratch would help.

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Kinnard
Would it be a good idea for people to have to state a short rationale for
flagging? Just clicking a flag button is too cheap . . . I've even done it
accidentally a number of times.

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DanBC
It's a toggle, so you can unflag submissions.

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xKingfisher
The Slate Star Codex has a good article on the same topic.

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-
ou...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-
control/)

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m00s3
Has anyone called James Randi yet?

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eth0up
Before invoking that guy, have a glance at this first:
[http://www.human.cornell.edu/hd/upload/CIWS-
module_ESP.pdf](http://www.human.cornell.edu/hd/upload/CIWS-module_ESP.pdf)

The above is something I quickly found - one of many examples. It doesn't have
any hallmarks of quackery that stand out to me. I've always wished Mr Randi
would graduate to confronting more formidable scientists in the field, rather
than picking on spoon benders[1] and other lunatics. He is a powerful thinker
and has some great work behind him, but he's missed some important
opportunities to challenge himself.

1\. Uri Geller

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smt88
The title is clickbait. Bem didn't prove ESP is real. He (unknowingly)
manipulated his data.

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tptacek
The article doesn't believe he did either: in fact, the whole premise of the
story is the reality of ESP is a nonsense result. This is probably a case
where the editors rewrote the title; it's mostly a story about how lack of
rigor is sabotaging the social sciences.

~~~
smt88
If the article agreed with the title, I'd just say it's an uninformed article.
In my opinion, the clickbait distinction requires the discrepancy.

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tptacek
The article itself is clearly _not_ clickbait --- it's long-form (more than
5000 words) _reported_ narrative journalism. It's an uncharacteristically deep
piece for Slate.

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smt88
That's why I said the title is clickbait.

Also, it's a misleading title. It has a false statement in it. The false
statement is intended to get you to click something.

The quality of the article isn't relevant to my point. My point is just that
people will click this link expecting a defense of ESP.

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tptacek
Oh, sorry! Yeah, we agree.

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notliketherest
Stopped reading at the line: "A few students—all of them white guys, Wu
remembers—would hang around to ask about the research and to probe for flaws
in its design. Wu still didn’t believe in ESP, but she found herself defending
the experiments to these mansplaining guinea pigs."

Blatant sexism and rasicm against white males might be okay to idiot
millennials but to me it's not okay. This is what a constant focus on "white
injustice against minoritys everywhere!!" has done to our society. Casual
sexism and racism is totally okay, as long as it's directed against the
perpetrators of sexism and racism? Slate / Huffington Post / other outlets are
full of this garbage.

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Kinnard
I recommend this read, "White Fragility":
[http://www.overcomingracism.org/resources/White-
Fragility.pd...](http://www.overcomingracism.org/resources/White-
Fragility.pdf)

~~~
crowbahr
I don't think it's fragility to fight against the slightest racist comments. I
think it's the way every race should be. Nobody should have to 'endure' racist
speech in the news articles they read, that's the goal any race should be
striving to achieve. Just because it's not as bad as other hate speech doesn't
mean it's not racist.

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sedeki
Anyone care to give a tl;dr version?

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frgtpsswrdlame
It's about the replication crisis and it's well written so I'd consider
reading the whole thing when/if you have the time. Here's a few of the most
important parts.

 _Having served for a time as an associate editor of JPSP, Bem knew his
methods would be up to snuff. With about 100 subjects in each experiment, his
sample sizes were large. He’d used only the most conventional statistical
analyses. He’d double- and triple-checked to make sure there were no glitches
in the randomization of his stimuli.

Even with all that extra care, Bem would not have dared to send in such a
controversial finding had he not been able to replicate the results in his
lab, and replicate them again, and then replicate them five more times. His
finished paper lists nine separate ministudies of ESP. Eight of those returned
the same effect. _

...

 _But for most observers, at least the mainstream ones, the paper posed a very
difficult dilemma. It was both methodologically sound and logically insane.
Daryl Bem had seemed to prove that time can flow in two directions—that ESP is
real. If you bought into those results, you’d be admitting that much of what
you understood about the universe was wrong. If you rejected them, you’d be
admitting something almost as momentous: that the standard methods of
psychology cannot be trusted, and that much of what gets published in the
field—and thus, much of what we think we understand about the mind—could be
total bunk._

...

 _These dodgy methods were clearly rife in academic science. A 2011 survey of
more than 2,000 university psychologists had found that more than half of
those researchers admitted using them. But how badly could they really screw
things up? By running 15,000 simulations, Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn
showed that a researcher could almost double her false-positive rate (often
treated as if it were 5 percent) with just a single, seemingly innocuous
manipulation. And if a researcher combined several questionable (but common)
research practices—fiddling with the sample size and choosing among dependent
variables after the fact, for instance—the false-positive rate might soar to
more than 60 percent._

...

 _That’s more or less Bem’s position. “The critics said that I put
psychologists in an uncomfortable position and that they’d have to revise
their views of the physical world or their views on research practice,” he
told me. “I think both are true. I still believe in psi, but I also think that
methods in the field need to be cleaned up.”_

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toyg
_> If you rejected them, you’d be admitting something almost as momentous:
that the standard methods of psychology cannot be trusted, and that much of
what gets published in the field—and thus, much of what we think we understand
about the mind—could be total bunk._

That's... not really difficult to admit.

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frgtpsswrdlame
It is if you've dedicated your life to academic psychology.

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tome
This is a great article. Why is it flagged?

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yorwba
Clickbaity headline, takes too long to take up speed ...

Also, why can't I vouch for it like with flagged comments?

