FWD [fort] A Field Guide to Skepticism (2 of 3)

From: Terry W. Colvin (fortean1@mindspring.com)
Date: Sun Jun 01 2003 - 15:05:05 MDT

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    SKEPTICISM TODAY

    The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the
    false appearance of things present and which mislead into error, not
    directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived
    opinion, by prejudice. Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher
    (1788–1860)

    In 1993, the late parapsychologist Charles Honorton from the
    University of Edinburgh considered what skeptics of psi experiments
    used to claim, and what they no longer claimed. He demonstrated that
    virtually all of the skeptical arguments used to explain away psi
    over the years had been resolved through design of new experiments.
    This does not mean the experiments conducted today are "perfect,"
    because there is nothing perfect in the empirical sciences. But it
    does mean that the methods available today satisfy the most rigorous
    skeptical requirements for providing "exceptional evidence." As
    we've seen, such experiments have been conducted, with successful
    results.

    WHAT SKEPTICS USED TO CLAIM

    Honorton pointed out that for many decades the standard skeptical
    assertion was that psi was impossible because it violated some ill-
    specified physical laws, or because the effects were not repeatable.
    It was also easy to claim that any successful experiments were
    really due to chance or fraud. Today, informed skeptics no longer
    claim that the outcomes of psi experiments are due to mere chance
    because we know that some parapsychological effects are, to use
    skeptical psychologist Ray Hyman's words, "astronomically
    significant." This is a key concession because it shifts the focus
    of the debate away from the mere existence of interesting effects to
    their proper interpretation.

    The concession also drops the decades-long skeptical questions over
    the legitimacy of parapsychology as a science. It states, quite
    clearly, that skeptics who continue to repeat the same old
    assertions that parapsychology is a pseudoscience, or that there are
    no repeatable experiments, are not only uninformed about the state
    of parapsychology, they are also uninformed about the current state
    of skepticism!

    Honorton then pointed out that skeptics no longer claim that there
    are any meaningful relationships between design flaws and
    experimental outcomes. This criticism was again based on the premise
    that psi did not exist, thus any psi effects observed in experiments
    must have been due to sloppy experimenters, flawed techniques or
    poor measurements. The assertion implied that if a scientist
    performed the proper, "perfect" psi experiment, that all claims for
    psi effects would disappear. The basic argument is flawed, of
    course, because all measurements contain some error. Nevertheless,
    the assertion is testable by comparing experimental outcomes with
    assessments of experimental quality. As we've seen, the meta-
    analyses described earlier have shown that design flaws cannot
    account for the cumulative success rates in psi experiments.

    The skeptics are not eager to advertise their recent concessions.
    Over the past few decades Ray Hyman and other "professional"
    skeptics have tried with great creativity and diligence to explain
    away psi. They tried to show that the experiments were not really
    all that interesting, and that all of the apparently successful
    studies were due to one or another design flaws. Having failed on
    both counts, informed skeptics have been forced to admit that they
    have simply run out of plausible explanations.

    It is not easy to change life-long, strongly held beliefs, even when
    there is strong evidence that the belief is wrong, so the publicly
    proclaimed skeptics are not likely to ever admit that psi per se is
    genuine. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that the focus
    of today's controversy has significantly shifted from the flat
    dismissals of the past.

    WHAT SKEPTICS NOW CLAIM

    Because no plausible explanations remain for the experimental
    results, today the few remaining hard-core skeptics rehash the same
    old polemical arguments used in past decades. The core assertion is
    the tired claim that after 100 years of research, parapsychology has
    failed to provide convincing evidence for psi phenomena.

    This argument follows a certain logic. Skeptics refuse to believe
    that psi experiments, which they admit are successfully
    demonstrating something, are in fact actually demonstrating psi
    itself. By stubbornly insisting that the results are real and
    unexplainable on the one hand, but those results could not possibly
    be due to psi on the other, then of course they can claim that
    parapsychology is a failure. This is like a skeptic who refuses to
    call a group of nine players who win the World Series a "baseball
    team." In that case, the skeptic can simply smile, shrug and
    doggedly claim that yes, people do apparently go running after balls
    that other people occasionally hit with a bat. But still, after 100
    years there is no solid evidence that anything called a baseball
    team actually exists.

    Remember that most parapsychologists do not claim to understand
    what "psi" is. Instead, they design experiments designed to test
    experiences that people have reported throughout history. If
    rigorous tests for what we have called "telepathy" results in
    effects that look like, sound like, and feel like the experiences
    reported in real life, then call it what you will, but the
    experiments confirm that this common experience is not an illusion.

    Another way to demonstrate the purely rhetorical nature of
    the "century of failure" argument is to see if the same argument
    also applies to conventional academic psychology. After a hundred
    years and thousands of experiments, there are still vigorous
    controversies over such elementary phenomena as conscious awareness,
    memory, learning, and perception. After a hundred years, psychology
    has not produced even the crudest model of how processes in the
    brain are transformed into conscious experience. If we adopt the
    skeptics' reasoning, many of whom are psychologists, then
    conventional psychology is also a dismal failure.

    AN UNUSUAL CONTROVERSY

    After deftly exposing and dissolving the skeptical position,
    Honorton then pointed out an important difference between the
    controversy over psi and debates in more conventional disciplines.
    Most scientific debates occur within groups of researchers who test
    hypotheses, develop and critique other researchers' methods, and
    collect data to test their hypotheses. This is standard operating
    procedure, as witnessed by persistent debates over dozens of hot
    topics in all scientific disciplines. The same sort of vigorous
    debating is evident in the journals and at the annual meetings of
    the Parapsychological Association, the professional society of
    scientists and scholars interested in psi phenomena.

    However, the psi controversy is different in one important respect.
    The vast majority of skeptics often write about the plausibility of
    various alternative hypotheses, but they almost never test their
    ideas. This "armchair quarterbacking" is especially true of the
    current generation of psi skeptics, the vast majority of whom have
    made no original research contributions to this topic.

    Their reasoning is simple: If you start from the position that an
    effect cannot exist, then why bother going to all the time and
    expense to actually study it? It makes more sense to use every
    rhetorical trick in the book to convince others that your opinion is
    correct, and that all the evidence to the contrary is somehow
    flawed. This may seem like a perfectly reasonable strategy, but it
    is not science. It is much closer to an argument based on faith,
    like a religious position.

    The fact that most skeptics do not conduct counter-studies to prove
    their claims is not well known. For example, in 1983 the well known
    skeptic Martin Gardner wrote the following:

    How can the public know that for fifty years skeptical psychologists
    have been trying their best to replicate classic psi experiments,
    and with notable unsuccess [sic]? It is this fact more than any
    other that has led to parapsychology's perpetual stagnation.
    Positive evidence keeps coming from a tiny group of enthusiasts,
    while negative evidence keeps coming from a much larger group of
    skeptics. As Honorton points out, "Gardner does not attempt to
    document this assertion, nor could he. It is pure fiction. Look for
    the skeptics' experiments and see what you find." In addition,
    there is no "larger group of skeptics." There are perhaps 10 to 15
    skeptics who have accounted for the vast bulk of the published
    criticisms.

    Beyond the "century of failure" argument, some skeptics still
    stubbornly insist that parapsychology is not a "real science." As
    Ray Hyman wrote,

    Every science except parapsychology builds upon its previous data.
    The data base continually expands with each new generation but the
    original investigations are still included. In parapsychology, the
    data base expands very little because previous experiments are
    continually discarded and new ones take their place.

    This isn't true, because otherwise the meta-analyses described in
    this book wouldn't exist. As we've seen, the early tests on
    thought-transference gave rise to picture-drawing telepathy tests.
    They spawned telepathy experiments in the dream state, which later
    led to the ganzfeld experiments. The dice tests begat RNG
    experiments. All of these experimental variations evolved as
    researchers took stock of previous experimental outcomes and
    criticisms and refined their test designs and theories.

    Of course, some skeptics have made important contributions to the
    development of progressively stronger evidence by systematically
    ferreting out design loop-holes, and by insisting upon stronger and
    stronger empirical evidence. But because skeptics today can no
    longer demonstrate plausible alternative explanations, all that
    remains is rhetoric and defense of a priori beliefs. Persisting in
    this stance in the face of overwhelming evidence has produced some
    excellent examples of minds struggling with logical contradictions.
    Honorton summarized his view of the state of skepticism as follows:

    There is a danger for science in encouraging self-appointed
    protectors who engage in polemical campaigns that distort and
    misrepresent serious research efforts. Such campaigns are not only
    counterproductive, they threaten to corrupt the spirit and function
    of science and raise doubts about its credibility. The distorted
    history, logical contradictions, and factual omissions exhibited in
    the arguments of the … critics represent neither scholarly
    criticism nor skepticism, but rather counteradvocacy masquerading as
    skepticism.

    SKEPTICAL TACTICS

    Extreme skeptics who believe that all psi experiments are flawed
    have used an effective bag of rhetorical tactics to try to convince
    others to dismiss the evidence. These include accusations that even
    if real, psi effects are so weak that they are trivial or
    uninteresting, statements of frank prejudice, long lists of common
    but scientifically invalid criticisms, and severely distorted
    descriptions of psi experiments which make psi researchers appear to
    be incompetent. Let's examine how some these tactics have been
    used.

    ACCUSATIONS OF TRIVIALITY

    Some skeptics have reluctantly accepted that psi effects may be
    genuine. But then they attempted to reduce their discomfort by
    claiming that psi is simply too weak to be interesting. For example,
    the psychologist E. G. Boring wrote that ESP data were merely "an
    empty correlation," and psychologist S. S. Stevens asserted
    that "the signal-to-noise ratio for ESP is simply too low to be
    interesting."

    More recently, the skeptical British psychologist Susan Blackmore
    wrote "What if my doubt is displaced and there really is
    extrasensory perception after all? What would this tell us about
    consciousness?" To answer this question, Blackmore took a giant step
    backwards to the 1950s psychological fad of behaviorism, and
    concluded that consciousness doesn't have any meaning at all,
    that it is merely an illusion. Not surprisingly then, she also
    concluded that psi, even if genuine, would tell us nothing at all
    about the nature of consciousness. This is a perplexing position
    that hardly anyone accepts anymore, not even other hard-nosed
    skeptics.

    In another example of trivializing psi, mathematician A. J. Ayer
    wrote in Scientific American,

    The only thing that is remarkable about the subject who is credited
    with extra-sensory perception is that he is consistently rather
    better at guessing cards than the ordinary run of people have shown
    themselves to be. The fact that he also does "better than chance"
    proves nothing in itself.

    Such an assertion is confused, because any form of genuine psi, weak
    or strong, carries revolutionary potential for our understanding of
    the natural world. In addition, effects that are originally observed
    as weak may be turned into extremely strong effects after they are
    better understood. Consider, for example, what was known about
    harnessing the weak, erratic trickles of electricity 150 years ago,
    and compare that to the trillion-watt networks that run today's
    power-hungry world.

    PREJUDICE

    Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge; it
    is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so
    positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by
    science. Charles Darwin, Introduction, The Descent of Man (1871).
    Prejudice – holding an opinion without knowledge or examination
    of the facts – is deeply embedded within human nature. It is much
    easier to follow the natural impulse to form a quick judgment and
    stick with it, rather than take the time and trouble to study the
    actual evidence. Prejudice continues to haunt psi researchers.
    Sometimes it is acknowledged as such, and sometimes it is not.

    Philip Anderson, a prominent theoretical physicist at Princeton
    University, assumed that psi was incompatible with physics, and so
    in an 1990 editorial in Physics Today, he wrote,

    If such results are correct, we might as well turn the National
    Institute of Standards and Technology into a casino and our physics
    classes into seances, and give back all those Nobel Prizes…. It
    is for this kind of reason that physicists, quite properly, do not
    take such experiments seriously until they can be (1) reproduced (2)
    by independent, skeptical researchers (3) under maximum security
    conditions and (4) with totally incontrovertible statistics. Oddly
    enough, the parapsychologists who claim positive results invariably
    reject these conditions.

    It is clear that Anderson was simply ignorant of the evidence, and
    yet he still felt quite confident about his opinion. We can only
    imagine what Anderson thinks of well-regarded physicists who do take
    such experiments seriously.

    Some critics have acknowledged that they simply do not wish to
    believe the evidence. For example, in 1951, the psychologist Donald
    O. Hebb wrote: "Why do we not accept ESP as a psychological fact?
    Rhine has offered us enough evidence to have convinced us on almost
    any other issue..... I cannot see what other basis my colleagues
    have for rejecting it..... My own rejection of [Rhine's] views is
    in a literal sense prejudice."

    In 1955, psychologist G. R. Price suggested that because psi was
    clearly impossible, fraud was the best, and really the only
    remaining explanation for psi effects. In a lead article in the
    important journal, Science, Price began sensibly:

    Believers in psychic phenomena ... appear to have won a decisive
    victory and virtually silenced opposition.... This victory is the
    result of an impressive amount of careful experimentation and
    intelligent argumentation.... Against all this evidence, almost the
    only defense remaining to the skeptical scientist is ignorance,
    ignorance concerning the work itself and concerning its
    implications. The typical scientist contents himself with
    retaining ... some criticism that at most applies to a small
    fraction of the published studies. But these findings (which
    challenge our very concepts of space and time) are - if valid - of
    enormous importance ... so they ought not to be ignored.

    Price then flatly asserted that because ESP was "incompatible with
    current scientific theory," it was more reasonable to believe that
    parapsychologists cheated than that ESP might be real. Price based
    his argument on a famous essay on the nature of miracles by
    philosopher David Hume. Hume argued that since we know that people
    sometimes lie, but we have no independent evidence of miracles, then
    it is more reasonable to believe that claims of miracles are based
    on lies than that miracles actually occurred. Based on this
    reasoning, Price concluded,

    My opinion concerning the findings of the parapsychologists is that
    many of them are dependent on clerical and statistical errors and
    unintentional use of sensory clues, and that all extrachance results
    not so explicable are dependent on deliberate fraud or mildly
    abnormal mental conditions.

    Another critic of the same era was skeptical British psychologist
    Mark Hansel, from the University of Wales. Like Price, Hansel wrote,

    If the result could have been through a trick, the experiment must
    be considered unsatisfactory proof of ESP, whether or not it is
    finally decided that such a trick was, in fact, used (p. 21).
    [Therefore,] it is wise to adopt initially the assumption that ESP
    is impossible, since there is a great weight of knowledge supporting
    this point of view.

    Such opinions – that existing scientific knowledge is complete
    and that psi necessarily conflicts with it – has motivated
    skeptics to imagine all sorts of good reasons to make the psi "go
    away." A prime example of the power of this motivation is
    illustrated by a 1987 report on parapsychology issued by the
    National Research Council.

    NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL REPORT

    In the mid-1980s, the U. S. Army recruitment slogan was "Be all that
    you can be." The slogan reflected the Army's desire to train
    soldiers to achieve enhanced performance. These highly trained
    warriors would be fearless and cunning, fight without fatigue, and
    employ a variety of enhanced, exotic, or possibly even psychic
    skills.

    In 1984, the U. S. Army Research Institute asked the premier
    scientific body in the United States, the National Academy of
    Sciences, to evaluate a variety of training techniques and claims
    about enhanced human performance. These techniques included sleep
    learning, accelerated learning, biofeedback, neurolinguistic
    programming, and parapsychology. The National Academy of Sciences
    responded to the Army's request by directing its principal
    operating agency, the National Research Council (NRC), to form a
    committee to examine the scientific evidence in these areas. Because
    the NRC is often asked to investigate leading-edge and controversial
    topics, it maintains an explicit policy of assembling balanced
    scientific committees. In fact, the policy requires members of its
    committees to affirm that they have no conflicts of interest either
    for or against the objects of study. This helps ensure that the
    scientific reviews are fair.

    On December 3, 1987, the NRC convened a well-attended press
    conference in Washington, DC, to announce its conclusions. John A.
    Swets, Chairman of the NRC Committee, said, "Perhaps our strongest
    conclusions are in the area of parapsychology." The bottom
    line: "The Committee finds no scientific justification from research
    conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of
    parapsychological phenomena."

    Whoops. Where did this come from? To help understand the disparity
    between the actual data and the NRC's conclusion, the Board of
    Directors of the Parapsychological Association (PA) selected three
    senior members of the PA to study the report in detail and respond
    to it. The three members were John Palmer, a psychologist at the
    Rhine Research Center, Durham, North Carolina, Charles Honorton, who
    at the time was Director of the Psychophysical Research Laboratories
    in Princeton, New Jersey, and Jessica Utts, professor of statistics
    at the University of California, Davis.

    After some study, the PA committee issued its report, with three
    main findings. First, the two principal evaluators of psi research
    for the NRC Committee, psychologists Ray Hyman and James Alcock,
    both had long histories of skeptical publications accusing
    parapsychology of not even being a legitimate science. In contrast,
    there were no active psi researchers on the Committee. This violated
    the NRC's policy of assigning members to committees "with regard
    to appropriate balance."

    Second, the NRC's report avoided mentioning studies favorable to
    psi research but quoted liberally from two background papers that
    supported the Committee's position. As if this were not enough,
    the Chairman of the NRC Committee phoned one of the authors of a
    third commissioned background paper, Robert Rosenthal from Harvard
    University, and asked him to withdraw his conclusions because they
    were favorable to parapsychology.

    And third, the NRC report was self-contradictory. The Committee
    widely advertised its conclusion that there was no evidence for psi
    phenomena, yet the report itself admits that the Committee members
    could offer no plausible alternatives to the research it surveyed.
    The Committee failed to mention in the press conference that they
    recommended that the Army continue to monitor psi research in the
    United States and the former Soviet Union. They even recommended
    that the Army propose specific experiments to be conducted. The
    contrast between the NRC's advertised position and their actual
    position suggests that there were conflicts between reporting a fair
    evaluation of the data and what was politically expedient to report.

    This was clearly revealed later when a newspaper reporter for The
    Chronicle of Higher Education asked the NRC Committee Chairman, John
    Swets, why he asked Rosenthal to withdraw his favorable conclusions.
    Swets replied: "We thought the quality of our analysis was better,
    and we didn't see much point in putting out mixed signals". Swets
    explained, "I didn't feel we were obliged to represent every
    point of view." This meant the NRC Committee in effect had created
    a "filedrawer" of ignored positive studies that they didn't wish
    to talk about. Apparently, the only acceptable views about psi for
    this committee were negative ones. Given the true nature of the
    evidence, this was bound to lead to some major contradictions.

    And it did. The NRC Committee commissioned ten background papers by
    experts in a variety of fields. One of these papers, by Dale Griffin
    of Stanford University, explained how difficult it is to objectively
    evaluate evidence when one is already publicly committed to a
    particular belief. According to Griffin,

    Probably the most powerful force motivating our desire to protect
    our beliefs – from others' attacks, from our own questioning,
    and from the challenge of new evidence – is commitment .... This
    drive to avoid dissonance is especially strong when the belief has
    led to public commitment.

    The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
    Paranormal (CSICOP) is an organization well-known for its
    impassioned commitment against parapsychology. Ray Hyman was one of
    the original "Fellows" of CSICOP, and he was an active member of its
    Executive Council at the same time he was evaluating psi research
    for the NRC. So the source of many contradictions in the NRC report
    is clear: Hyman's publicly committed position as a psychic
    debunker.

    For example, at the NRC press conference, Hyman confirmed his public
    stance by announcing that the "poor quality of psi research was
    `a surprise to us all – we believed the work would be of much
    higher quality than it turned out to be.' " Yet, in contrast to
    this public statement, the report itself actually says, "… the
    best
    research [in parapsychology] is of higher quality than many critics
    assume …."

    Furthermore, in contrast to the NRC's public assertions about
    "poor quality research," and "no scientific justification," was the
    actual paper commissioned by the NRC to review psi experiments and
    other studies of performance-enhancing techniques. Authored by
    psychologists Monica Harris and Robert Rosenthal of Harvard
    University, the report concluded that,

    The situation for the ganzfeld domain seems reasonably clear. We
    feel it would be implausible to entertain the null [hypothesis]
    given the combined [probability] from these 28 studies.... When the
    accuracy rate expected under the null [hypothesis] is 1/4, we
    estimate the obtained accuracy rate to be about 1/3.

    In non-technical language, Harris and Rosenthal concluded that there
    was persuasive evidence for something very interesting going on in
    the ganzfeld experiments because they found an average hit rate of
    about 33% rather than the 25% expected by chance (as we discussed in
    Chapter 6). They also compared the quality of the ganzfeld
    experiments to experiments in four other, non-parapsychological
    research areas and concluded that "only the ganzfeld ESP studies
    regularly meet the basic requirements of sound experimental design."

    Without belaboring the point, it is clear that abject prejudice
    exists in science as it does in all human endeavors. It was detected
    fairly easily in the case of the NRC Report by comparing the public
    pronouncements with what the report actually says. Sometimes it is
    not so easy to detect, because we usually do not stop to think that
    some skeptical criticisms are simply invalid.

    -- 
    Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@mindspring.com >
         Alternate: < fortean1@msn.com >
    Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html >
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