[lsedgwick]

Reminds me of Alan Turing's wildly undernoted remarks about ESP in his seminal essay "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"

> I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in.

(This is from a paragraph dealing with ESP's implications are for the existence of thinking machines.)

https://redirect.cs.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf

[guntars]

The scientists would love nothing more than to discover a whole new area of study, alas ESP doesn’t lend itself to study despite the overwhelming statistical evidence (?) because it’s made up.

[krapp]

To be fair, it does lend itself to study, and governments and scientists have studied it (which is how we know it's made up.)

Unfortunately, the existence of such studies alone will convince conspiracy theorists that the CIA has psychic spies and remote viewers everywhere.

[ballenf]

It's kind of ironic how quantum physics discoveries have given these proponents new language to cloak their claims in. When you have quantum effects that depend on observation, it can be quite convincing to a lay person that an ESP ability could just as easily do the same.

I have given up on the idea that science or scientific discoveries will ever soundly banish the ideas of non-materialist claims.