Quote:
Originally Posted by Rudism  Sure, you can make that claim. It may even be true. But if it is, then parapsychological research needs to shift its focus to figuring out what condition X is if they want to start getting more compelling and consistent results that will actually be taken seriously. Postulating the existence of mystery condition X without actually identifying it achieves exactly the opposite result. It comes off as a desperate excuse. |
Except that this happens all the time in ordinary science. How many times have you heard someone say his experiment isn't working? Writing up the negative result is the very last option - first you look for any number of complicating factors.
Many years ago, when I did experiments, I had an experiment that failed sometimes on a very random basis. It turned out that it went wrong when someone turned on some welding gear in another room - the electrical interference messed up the data recording!
If a chemical fails to crystallise, chemists sometimes attribute this to the lack of a suitable piece of dust, or try to scratch the side of the vessel to encourage crystals to form!
In the early days of transistor research - when fabrication methods were barely up to the job - does anyone believe that every experiment worked!
I do wish sceptics would get real about the nature of normal scientific research! In at least some cases, the problem is that they have never done any!
David