[yters]

The SRI at Stanford claims psi is very prevalent in the human population, but operates at low levels that require a large number of sensitive experiments to detect. Not saying they are right, but that could explain why these people were persuaded of paranormal activity, but it never popped out at you as a really obvious capability.

[at_a_remove]

That reminds me a bit of PEAR, which also held that the "level" is so weak that it requires massive samples to detect. If I recall, in The Demon-Haunted World Sagan mentioned it as one of the three "psychic phenomenon" concepts he thought that it was worth examining further, not because he believed in them, but because the usual mechanisms of science had not yet completely removed all of the confounding factors to reduce the results to mere noise.

[yters]

I read a similar article by Scott Alexander, about the fact some psi researchers could generate a reliable signal with their studies, but since he a priori ruled out the possibility of psi, he is convinced there is something wrong with the scientific process.

[BrandoElFollito]

SRI International (no affiliation with Stanford since 1970) is a private company that does research for the US government and, later, private companies.

One of their activities was to look for paranormal activity. It all failed - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology_research_at_SRI

It was abandoned in the 90's as there were no tangible results.