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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or perhaps Bem believed there were problems with methodology and used ESP to demonstrate the problem. The title seems warranted given the nature of the attack on methodology.
Daryl did the science perfectly at a standard beyond what most studies do. Well beyond the accepted rigor and burden of proof, he demonstrated that ESP is real. Therefore, the accepted burden of proof is broken.
While you accuse the title of clickbaiting, you seem to agree entirely with it.
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.
> Blatant sexism and rasicm against white males might be okay to idiot millennials
This breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to introduce classic flamewar topics. This sort of ideological ranting is never interesting, never goes anywhere good, and is plainly off-topic here.
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.
I did, and it was interesting to see that its author coined such a term 'white fragility'- it is almost as if they were deliberately working to provoke reactions that would reinforce the fundamental thesis of the paper.
There are a lot of assumptions in this paper, and it makes statements based on those assumptions as if they are simply obviously true. It's not terribly well put-together or convincing if you don't initially agree with the statement the author is making, and it feels like it was written solely for the consumption of people who already possess the proper mindset and beliefs.
For example, they take the sourced statement that 'good neighborhood' is coded language for 'white' and then apply that to all things. (Also, I looked into the source for that and it's much more complicated than this paper makes it appear, and does not in fact only mean 'white.')
>The quality of white space being in large part measured via the absence of people of color (and Blacks in particular) is a profound message indeed, one that is deeply internalized and reinforced daily through normalized discourses about good schools and neighborhoods.
I don't agree that this is a daily or normalized discourse. Do you often find yourself talking in veiled terms about how good the schools are in your area?
I also noticed that it was extremely class-biased, effectively linking wealth and race so that they appear to work hand in hand and yet also displaying fundamental misconceptions about what 'normal' is, at least in the US. For example, the author seemed to assume that all white men go to college, when in reality it's closer to 30%.
Because details are interesting. Bem being Jewish adds some color. That all the people probing for issues were white men is a really interesting remark. Why would that be the case? Are white men particularly skeptical, or more willing to rock the boat? These are legitimate, interesting questions that we'd lose out on if they had omitted that description.
If they are legitimate and interesting questions, why aren't they probed further? They're throwaways.
In the article, describing Bem as a 'gentle Jewish kid from Denver who didn't care for sports' plays on a racial archetype in order to flesh out a character for the reader, but what does it have to do with his potentially fudging his data and changing the replication requirement in social sciences?
We could remove every bit of detail that doesn't directly relate to the conclusion of the article, but that would completely change its character. You seem to be applying newspaper standards to an article that doesn't even attempt to conform to those standards.
It is completely out of place in this article and blatantly stereotyping. Just because some situation happens to fit a trendy topic like "mansplaining white males" doesn't mean it has to be explicitly pointed out.
Which requires there to be some set image or type for the person to match. It would be stereotyping if the article was implying that white men are usually mansplaining skeptics or something of that nature. But merely stating the fact that this particularly group was actually all white men isn't stereotyping.
that's actually exactly what stereotyping is. so if you agree with the statement in the article then you must agree with all the other stereotypes out there.
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.”
> 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.
Basically, a gentleman appears to have shown high quality scientific studies showing some effect implying the existence of ESP. So either ESP is a real thing, or our metric for scientific reliability is not effective at weeding out fraudulent claims.
However.... it's really quite an enjoyable article to read if you have the time.
Basically the guy has very sound and rigorous methodology, and has achieved higher-than-random-chance results (to the tune of a mere 53% correct guessing based on variables in one experiment involving hidden erotic pictures.)
I suppose claiming ESP is real is like claiming cold fusion is real. You better have some damn good proof because there have been a lot of shoddy claims that didn't hold up in practice. So has this been replicated by outsiders based on his paper?
I personally am extremely skeptical. If we did discover something like ESP is possible, it would be the biggest discovery so far this century. It would open up possible consideration of religion, and all those people who claim to astral travel, could any of that stuff be real? It would be cool and scary. But naw, it's got to be bullshit :-)
No, he has a methodology that is facially sound but fundamentally unserious: his team explores a gigantic space of possible experiments that would demonstrate an effect and reports only on those that support his claim. As a result, his results don't reliably replicate. He's using heavily biased statistics, just on a higher order.
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.