Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> Then Eli wrote:
>
> >I'd read a couple of "science fact"
> >articles from people I later found out were lunatics, but they were very
> >plausibly written. No exclamation points, just the reporting of
> >experimental results and personal experiences.
>
> I don't doubt it. I've visited several parapsychological research centers
> in the USA and found more lurking loons than I'd wanted to see. But which
> names would you cite in support of your own contention, Eliezer? You have
> evidence that, say, Prof Jessica Utts is a lunatic? Other than, circularly,
> her peer-reviewed-published conviction that psi is effectively proved by
> her meta-analyses of `good' experimental results?
Actually, I was thinking of the guy who wrote a perfectly reasonable-sounding article on psychic healing in a compendium called "Science Fiction, Science Fact". Later I found a book about Uri Geller, written by the same guy, in which he claimed that Uri Geller was owned and operated by nine orbiting alien supercomputers. This cast a somewhat different complexion on the psychic-healing article. I don't recall the name of the author, though.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way