| > but all the past evidence points strongly towards a combination of "this researcher is incompetent" and "these statistical methods are useless". Your arguments seem to be based in unfamiliarity with the paper. Bem is an extremely well-regarded researcher in social psychology, he has hundreds of papers, several of which are seminal in the field and boast thousands of citations (this paper in particular has a citation score of 700+). Moreover this is a meta-analysis, not his own study. While there has been some chatter about the statistical methods in those 700 citations, the fact is the methods are a lot better than the average social psychology paper (and this paper has attracted extraordinary scrutiny for the obvious reason). So if there is a problem in the paper (and of course there must be) there is a much larger problem in the standard practices in the field. > pay-to-play journal like F1000Research The original paper was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vd-Z7x...) but their website is down > every single time somebody purported to have evidence for ESP, it turned that the typically tiny effect was a flaw in the experimental design, be that due to fraud or incompetence. This is incorrect for the simple reason that it is much easier to make claims than it is to investigate them, and therefore, not all claims can be investigated. Perhaps you meant to say that of the proper subset of things we investigated turned out to be methodologically flawed, but then we have situations like the present paper, which somehow got through peer review. Of course we can continue to poke at it until we find what is wrong since we "know" it "has to to be there", but if science only produces the correct answer when we make it match the answer in the back of the textbook, it doesn't seem a good method for finding anything out. |