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by childintime 2937 days ago
Thanks very much for your recommendation.

If you look at the Wikipedia entries for ESP, telepathy, etc, the field is called out harshly for being "pseudo-science", because of bad methodology. Surely methodology would have been better if "money" had shown an interest. I need good methodology and that surely has costs.

1 comments

I listened to a podcast from Kristen Truempy with Jeffrey (103). He reaches similar conclusions, notably the benefit for society and the blind eye of big-S-science.

He gets emotional when dealing with blatant denial of "150 years of documented empirical evidence" (as he should). He mentions that polls suggest 2/3rd of the population recognizes the existence of some form of ESP.

Jeffrey also mentioned (but not recommend) the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. Indeed its setup resembles a freak show, not science.

I didn't know of any of the competitions in TV-shows, nor of the $100.000 reward by the Australian Skeptics (seemingly discontinued), which "is open to any contender who can state exactly what their paranormal claim is, and the claim can give a definite yes or no result".

In my view, in psychology, a definite yes or no result, doesn't exist, and no one should be asked to provide one. Not even climate scientists can convince 100% of the population of climate change despite overwhelming evidence. Nor can an advertiser force all clients to buy the intended products. Yet advertising definitely works.

Note that, as should be obvious, I have no prior at all in parapsychology. Even when I was writing down my original post, I felt the need for a reality check (and repeated the experiment).