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Originally Posted by Phronk  I agree that the "unnoticed gorilla" phenomena has little to do with "blindness" in scientific inquiry. If you sent these videos through a peer review process as proof that there are no gorillas at basketball games, I think someone would catch it pretty quick.
But I think this is true of both "skeptics" and parapsychologists. So I wouldn't go so far as to turn this around and say that parapsychologists are immune to this blindness, then accuse Wiseman of being prone to it.
The fact is that we're dealing with noisy, ambiguous data here. Preexisting biases can determine how it's interpreted. I think the best thing to do is to design more experiments that produce less and less ambiguous data. That's one of the awesome aspects about this "Dogs That Know" thing you're doing - hopefully it can produce such data. Make that gorilla so big and obnoxious that nobody can miss it.  |
Of course your'e right. Preexisting bias does cut both ways.
The main point I was trying to make is how insulting it is to hear Skeptics suggest these cognitive biases can explain things like 'cold readings'... they can only as long as you don't know what the game is, then the blindspot goes away.