Posted: May 03, 2013 1:27 pm
Vinncent wrote:"mistakes and errors" is not a reasonable explanation, as already explained, -unless you can point out sources of mistakes and errors-. Simply stating "I bet there are mistakes and errors" is an illogical assumption that can be levied against literally every piece of scientific experiment ever. Certain experiments are prone to this, and seem typically thrown out in meta-analysis due to their poor procedure/controls.
I'll give you an example. One early and very successful ganzfeld researcher was Carl Sargent. One day his lab was visisted by Susan Blackmore who had little or no success. She wanted to find out how she should improve her experiments.
She noticed some suspicious events and decided to get to the bottom of things. She found inctrovertible evidence that Sargent had been manipulating the experiment and wrote a whistle-blowing report to the parapsychological association.
Sargent denied everything and his co-workers vouched for him.
So what should we make of that? Do Blackmore's observations tell us what went on at that lab? Do you dismiss her accusations as "unfalsifiable"? They certainly are.
The best hope would be examining the documentation from the lab. Unfortunately, when the PA demanded to see the records, Sargent refused to cooperate. He has left parapsychology and that is that.
To my knowledge, his papers were never retracted and are still incorporated in meta-analyses.
Of course, that is a very exceptional case. An outsider visited Sargent's lab, who was astute enough to become suspicious, persistent enough to follow up, and upstanding enough to blow the whistle. Usually, we would simply be settled with an inexplicable result.
The simple fact is, when dealing with unreplicable results, one will assume that something went wrong. You may call this "illogical", I call it Occam's razor. But yes, it is and explanation "levied against" all such results.