It is clear in this interview those 2 police detectives understand every bit as much as Ben the potential problems with trusting eyewitness testimonies, hardly surprising any experienced detective has encountered these problems in their work.... there is no good reason to question those detectives as good witnesses.
If you were on a jury, which version would you choose?
- Two detectives, who have well matching accounts, who didn't change their accounts, very aware of Ben's false memory theory due to their job and most importantly were actually there.
OR
Ben, who is arguing the false memory / confabulation theory but who wasn't there.
Ben lost debate IMHO. He was a good sport for even agreeing. There could be only one reason to prefer Ben's opinion, a firm a-priori belief that any claim of psychic phenomena must be false and any imaginary explanation is better than trusting what our society places faith in - police detective testimony.
In the history of organized skepticism, often there is little more than skeptics supporting an isolated witness who claimed to have witnessed fraud ...often there seems to be a sheer lack of questioning whether such a witness might have imagined fraud, misremembered information or just invented it due to bias that it was impossible anyway. ... the very arguments aimed at claimants reports/memories should apply to debunkers too.
Last edited by Open Mind; 04-19-2009 at 07:42 AM.
|