Psychic Ability Claim Doesn't Hold Up In New Scientific Experiments

cold fjord writes with some stunning news from the world of science, excerpting: "A new study has failed to find evidence that psychic ability is real. Skeptics may scoff at the finding as obvious, but the research is important because it refutes a study published in a psychological journal last year that claimed to find evidence of extrasensory perception. That research, conducted by Daryl Bem of Cornell University, triggered outrage in the psychological community when the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology announced in 2010 that the paper had been accepted for publication." Here's a link to the academic paper.

Comments

Re:The Original Psychic Study was Good Science

[rgbatduke]

Compare this to something like climate science where both the data and the models are private. Kind of scary when a pseudo-science is practicing better science that "real" science.

I generally agree, but bear in mind that this is strongly dependent on agency supporting the research. NASA, for example, requires the publication of both methods and data. Hence if you want to replicate GISS, you can, or you can write your own alternative from the same data. HADCRUT, OTOH, has notoriously failed to provide full access to its source data and methodology. GISS is NASA, HADCRUT is whatever the hell supports climate research over in England. Different rules.

As I noted above, there is a lot of top-level pressure being exerted to change this (I've participated very briefly in some of the discussions) not just in climate science but in e.g. medical research where the costs of junk science and non-reproducible results or overt fraud are lost lives and billions of dollars. The problem is the journals -- they are not publicly funded, and have their own rules about publishing stuff on the side of the actual articles, plus the eternal paywall problem (where we the people pay for the research, but somehow have to pay again on an individual basis in order to read the publication of the results). The solutions to this sort of problem are all at least as bad as the problem itself -- I mean we don't really want the government in charge of the journals, do we? And yet neither is it reasonable for us to pay twice for the work they publish. And nobody has a good funding model that keeps the journals running independently without having individuals or institutions pay, even if a lot of what they use to pay with is (in the end) government grant money plus overhead galore. It's not a simple problem, although I think that we could solve it a lot of different ways if we really tried.

So yes, climate policies e.g. the "Carbon Tax" are enormously expensive, catastrophically expensive -- we're talking hundreds of billions of dollars a year, even more if they were fully implemented on a global basis -- so expensive that it actually becomes difficult to see how any plausible climate catastrophe hypothesized and projected to occur in 80 or 90 years could possibly compare to the catastrophic costs of the measures being taken to avoid it. The science projecting "catastrophe" is far from "settled" or universally accepted, in part because it is difficult -- the Earth's climate system is described by the coupled Navier-Stokes equation from hell, and is where Chaos theory was discovered -- and yet we find ourselves paying far more in the state of California alone to cut down on CO_2 emissions than it would cost to completely rebuild after a dozen catastrophic hurricanes. Common sense is lost in the circus of Chicken Little, with its "overheated" rhetoric. But this is just one manifestation of a far more general problem with the current science funding model, the constraints of the ivory tower (University system) and the journals.

rgb