Quote:
Originally Posted by alextsakiris  |
It's amazing that neither "side" here can keep from personal insults and childish tangents. I wish I could see a nice debate that talks only about the experiment's methods and data, leaving out any mention of the names of the researchers or their critics.
I wanted to believe that Sheldrake's study was deeply flawed, because hell, parrots reading my thoughts? That's scary. But Carroll really failed to poke any major holes in it. He seems obsessed with suggesting
different studies to perform with the parrot. That's all well and good, but he fails to discredit the study that was actually done. Who cares if he threw out trials where the parrot didn't say any key words? The fact that, out of trials in which he
did say key words, they lined up with what his owner was looking at in a different room, is incredible. That alone is evidence for telepathy, if the methodology was sound. You could include all the parrot's babbling, but that seems like a sloppier test of the hypothesis to me.
It's like if I claimed to be able to ring a bell whenever my mom is about to phone, and a skeptic said "well, what about all the times when you honked a horn?" We're not talking about horns here.
I also have to point out this quote that Carroll picked out:
"provide a forum where research on paranormal phenomena can be presented to other scientists without obstruction or derision."
He mentions it without comment, as if this discredits the journal it was published in. What? Does he
want journals to obstruct and deride research? If we replaced "paranormal phenomenon" with "chemistry", would he still have a problem with it?