Posted: Oct 20, 2010 8:19 pm
Well since (good) parapsychologists don't really care what the truth is, and they just want to find out what it is, then I imagine mainstream science taking an interest in it would be a welcomed event - even if it means their conclusions are disproved.
Anyway, Jerome, I had a few more questions:
- Why is it assumed that everyone has psi abilities? If some people are better at it than others, then it's possible that they could achieve much higher rates of success if they weeded out the people who weren't good at it and just tested the ones that were.
- If psi is just a regular behavioral event, then why don't they train people to be better at it? Using Bem's procedure above it should be relatively simple to use a rewarded discrimination task to improve their scores. And even if they simply had feedback on whether they were right or wrong we should see a steady increase in accuracy from the first block of trials and the last block.
- If everyone has psi abilities, then why study large groups of people? Single-subject designs would give us a much more accurate view of whether people actually do have psi abilities or not, in my opinion. If people you test consistently get non-significant results then you could chalk up the large scale designs as some kind of statistical anomaly, or you could rule out the "everyone has psi" assumption.
I think the real problem I have with Bem's study is that it took massive amounts of trials and averaging across numerous participants just to demonstrate a result that is just 1% or so above chance. Now, I know that the absolute difference is irrelevant as long as it's significant, but you have to ask what the point of it is..