Virus wrote:Correction, people claim they've had paranormal experiences and nobody can prove these events even happened. That's just the beginning of what's wrong with testimonial evidence. You can't control for suggestion, bias, the need to please researchers, poor memory, exaggerated memory and a slew of other limitations. Go and ask 1000 people if they've ever seen a ghost of a dead relative and all you'll have is an opinion poll. This stuff is skepticism 101. You talk about how you're all "scientific" and "not like those other woo-woos" but your claims are no different.
Did you read the article at all? It very clearly stated that it looked at how many people had a specific experience within 12 hours of a relative's death, and compared that to what is expected by chance. And yes, you can control for those variables, that's the whole point of the scientific method, is separating effects caused by what you are looking for, from all other effects. Parapsychologists are probably some of the best when it comes to dealing with issues of anomalistic psychology, since, you know, they study it constantly and use it as a wide-arcing null hypothesis for everything they do.
And again, laboratory studies of ESP are not opinion polls. You know, an experiment? Where you control for variables, then calculate a statistical value for the ratio of systematic over unsystematic variance, in order to estimate the odds of that happening by chance?
And skepticism 101 is exactly what I talked about before in that we don't just go probing stuff with EMF detectors and cameras and declare spooks are about, we try to debunk all the mundane things first.
Do you actually read anything anything we write? Or have you already passed judgment and therefore think you can get away with just making up what you think we said, cause you think we're too stupid to notice?
"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. "
"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."
-Carl Sagan
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