It has become clear to me that what I term "aggressive skeptics" are actually interested in enforcing dogma rather than maintaining an open and enquiring mind. There are many good illustrations of this, but this is a particularly good one from Sheldrake himself. He has been looking into the fact that people can apparently tell when they are being stared at. On the linked page he examines the arguments raised by the "skeptics" and disposes of them unceremoniously:
Marks (2000) and Marks & Colwell (2000) were faced with the problem of explaining why [their] findings replicated my own. They speculated that subjects might have learned implicitly to recognize patterns in the randomized sequences used in their trials. These particular counterbalanced sequences were downloaded from the New Scientist web site, and were the same as some of those I used in some of my own trials. They proposed that because these sequences deviated from "structureless" randomizations, subjects who were given feedback could have learned implicitly to detect patterns in the sequences, thus enabling them to guess at above-chance levels. They announced their hypothesis as if it were a fact in the title of their article in the Skeptical Inquirer : "The psychic staring effect: An artifact of pseudo randomization."
This Marks-Colwell hypothesis is fatally flawed for four reasons:
1. Marks (2000) and Marks and Colwell (2000) were apparently unaware that their implicit learning hypothesis had already been refuted by thousands of trials involving structureless randomizations (Sheldrake, 1998, 1999). where implicit learning would have been impossible. In addition, a computerized staring experiment has been running at the New Metropolis Science Museum in Amsterdam since 1996, and more than 18,500 subjects have taken part. A program in the computer provides structureless randomizations for the sequence of looking and not-looking trials. The results are positive and astronomically significant statistically.
2. The implicit learning hypothesis has been refuted by thousands of trials with no feedback, with the usual pattern of positive and highly significant results (Sheldrake, 2000a). Implicit learning depends on feedback, and hence cannot explain these results.
3. . If implicit learning led to positive scores in looking trials, then it should also have done so in not-looking trials. But it did not (Figure 1). Why not? Marks did not mention this problem; perhaps he hoped his readers would not notice it.
4. In Colwell et al.'s experiment, the same subjects took part in nine successive 20-trial sessions with feedback. There was a statistically significant learning effect in successive sessions, but only in the looking trials, not in the not-looking trials. This is consistent with the subjects learning to detect stares more effectively. But such learning would not have been possible in the trials I conducted. Each subject was tested only once, in a single 20-trial session, and hence the learning hypothesis cannot account for the experimental data shown in Figure 1A.
There's plenty more. But why should we think that some of these people are "mercenaries"? Let's have a look at some well-known skeptics. My source is
this page, and while using one page may seem like a cop-out, the inquisitive reader can use the site to find much corroborative evidence for the points I'm making here.
Martin Gardner
Mr. Gardner, a founder of CSICOP, was well-known to me in my youth and my chemistry teacher at school championed his works with evangelical enthusiasm. It is interesting to me that he seems to embody the concept of the turf war I was briefly elucidating in the previous thread:
Conjuring has been a life-long hobby and much of his criticism of psychical research focuses on possibilities of cheating. The style of his attacks is frequently bitter, derisive and personal. Yet, surprisingly, unlike most self-proclaimed skeptics, he is not an atheist. Gardner's motivation is religious. As he explains in his book The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, he believes in God, the power of prayer and life after death. In a penetrating study of Gardner's work, George Hansen, in his book The Trickster and the Paranormal (2001) , argues that Gardner's position can be traced back to his teenage Protestant fundamentalism and his belief that the realms of science and faith should be sharply separated. "[H]e vehemently opposes using science to empirically address religious issues. He is comfortable with CSICOP because it doesn't really do science. Instead it ridicules attempts to study the paranormal scientifically". Gardner serves as a border guard to keep the paranormal out of science and academe.
I think you can see that, from the language used, my metaphor of the turf war was far from overstating the case.
But of course, the Lord God King of skeptics is James Randi.
Carl Sagan, in his sympathetic introduction to Randi�s book The Faith Healers (1987) described him as an "angry man". His work as a debunker has attracted lavish funding and in 1986 he was the recipient of a $286,000 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In 1996 he established the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). He has an ambiguous attitude to scientific authority, deferring to it when it supports his beliefs, but rejecting it when it does not.
On his web site he asserts: "Authority does not rest with scientists, when emotion, need and desperation are involved. Scientists are human beings, too, and can be deceived and self-deceived". He is not afraid to attack scientists who take an interest in subjects like telepathy, like Brian Josephson, Professor of Physics at Cambridge University. In 2001, on a BBC Radio program about Josephson's interest in possible connections between quantum physics and consciousness, Randi said, "I think it is the refuge of scoundrels in many aspects for them to turn to something like quantum physics." Josephson has a Nobel Prize in quantum physics. Randi has no scientific credentials.
Josephson also has a legacy of his work that Randi will never achieve - he's had the "Josephson junction" - an electronic circuit based on principles of quantum tunnelling, for the discovery of which he won the Nobel prize at 22 - named after him.
For Randi to call this man a scoundrel is the acme of hypocrisy, given Randi's dishonest claims and propensity to play fast and loose with facts to bolster his arguments.
But the thing is, as we have seen, Randi is very well financed. Why should this pay so well?
We will return to this question.
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