Does DCP want a discussion?

[Physics Guy]

I don't remember anyone here posting about not reading about ESP and whatnot. I at least have read a fair amount about dowsing, out-of-body experiences, remote viewing, precognition, and telekinesis. I don't know why Peterson assumes that our negative views must be based upon ignorance.

It is Peterson, in contrast, who seems to have read little and to be unwilling to read more. He has cited some decades-old work without indicating any efforts to look for follow-up studies or replication attempts. He mentioned the Wikipedia article on J.B. Rhine only to describe it as "negative": a bizarre response to the article in question, if not a damning one.

The Wikipedia article is an accurate summary of all that I've read elsewhere about Rhine. It notes that several earnest attempts to replicate Rhine's most important experiments have all failed, and that Rhine's own published articles consistently fail to include enough detail about control procedures to support any confidence that Rhine really knew what he was doing. A sensible reaction to that kind of negative information would be a lot more than just noting that it was negative. It would be thinking something like, "Dang, this really makes Rhine's work all seem utterly worthless, and he's still cited by paranormal boosters as an authority, so this is a huge point against the whole field. I'd better go read some of those failed replications and critiques of Rhine, and maybe talk about him with the most competent experimental psychologist I can find, before I go on posting anything more about extraordinary perception."

Parapsychology isn't physics. Electrons don't cheat either consciously or unconsciously. You can't do parapsychology taking only the kind of care about conditions that would be sufficient for good 19th century physics. You don't get to do only that, and claim that what you're doing is fine because those are the standards of science, because the standards of science aren't just whatever worked for Faraday and his wires: the standards of science are whatever it takes to find the actual truth.

To find the truth about electromagnets doesn't require controls to stop the magnets from seeing the wires. To find the truth about dowsing is much harder because the ideomotor effect makes a precariously held wire or forked stick swing wildly in unconscious response to things the subject can see or even smell; ground water often shows visible signs even if they are subtle; and anyway there is water in most places if you dig deep enough. So to test dowsing you need to do things like run re-arrangeable hoses under platforms—and then you discover that its results are nothing but chance.

This is the kind of thing that Peterson needs to read, if he's serious. There's a lot of serious scientific literature about all of his recent paranormal subjects. Yes, it's all negative: not because of prejudice against paranormal reality, but on the contrary, because of absence of prejudice in favour of paranormal reality. When you take precautions that would not prevent a real paranormal effect, but would prevent conscious or unconscious cheating, the paranormal effects go away. This has been seen—not assumed but observed—many times, many times.

Most often the effects disappear when the form of cheating that is prevented is something childishly trivial, like peeking down the nose under a blindfold. You don't have to be a genius to think of all the things you need to control to stop conscious or unconscious cheating. You just need to take the possibility of cheating seriously and work through what it would take to make really sure that it doesn't happen—like putting subjects in whole-head opaque helmets instead of relying on cloth blindfolds that never really fit tightly over the bridge of the nose, or testing whether anyone in the subject room can overhear what you say in the control room, or using a double-blind protocol so that nobody knows what was supposed to happen until afterwards.

When you're hoping for positive results, you don't think in that way, though, even though it's not hard, because you can feel in your heart how even thinking seriously about cheating makes the possibility of positive results seem less likely. So your mind veers away from worrying about the blindfolds or the patches of greener grass in the field, or whatever, and seizes firmly instead on how many PhDs your team holds and how many neat columns of figures you have in your notebook. You tell yourself that of course you're doing rigorous science—why, it all looks like physics.

Yeah, it looks like physics the way a cargo cult radar dish looks like a radar dish despite being made of bamboo. Whenever people have done real science on paranormal subjects—not just cargo-cult aping of scientific procedures but genuine hard-nosed carefulness about conscious or unconscious cheating—the positive effects have evaporated.