[barendt]

My vote is probably not. The plausibility of these things is pretty important. With the aspirin heart attack prevention example mentioned in the text, we have a plausible biological mechanism to give us reason to expect an effect, so we can be satisfied with more equivocal data. I'm not aware of a plausible mechanism for precognition - in fact, it seems like precognition would probably require a bunch of other things we think true to be false to work - so I'll need much stronger evidence than this to accept it.

Also, a thought - if precognition is possible, why don't we see more of it? Being able to improve recall of words is nifty and all, but it seems like it'd give you a huge advantage catching prey or evading predators so I'd expect to see evidence of it all over the place.

[gregable]

The easiest argument against your second point is precisely because we don't expect to find it. Frequently if findings disagree very strongly with our preconceptions (as one like this would), we are likely to dismiss them, not notice them, and/or chalk it up to some kind of error.

Not to say that I believe these results will hold up, I'm pretty sure they won't.