I loved it when you said the title of the episode was
"Bashing the skeptics 2 - The sequel" 
. It was great.
What I think also is cool know is that you don't
pretend to be neutral in the dicussion, and you are open with the fact that you are pro-parapsychology.
I hate when psi-believers pretend to be
"neutral" or
"above the debate". I find that really annoying. Nobody is neutral, nobogy is above the debate...
A lot to say about this episode also of course.
At first Steve Novella (and I must said I also) understood your first claim as
"Skepics don't read the litterature". Of course that was a huge claim. Maybe you didn't really met that but it was the way "we" (I say "we" as the skeptic community) understood it.
Well know you are narrowing it (or I should say
backing away from your first formulation of it) and claim:
=> some skeptics (or not all skeptcs) don't read every single one parapsychological papers carefully.
Waaaaaw. I mean, it's just like saying:
=> Some scientists (or not all scientists) don't read every single paper in there field of interrest carefully. That's hardly a big knews!!! Everyone who has ever done scientific reasearch knows (and when I listen to you're podcast it's pretty obvious that you never did any researchs in an academic environnement) that today there is so many publications out there that it's impossible to keep track of everything published in your field of interrest.
Especially because skeptics have many field of interrests. My main topic of interrest is French ufology. And even I would never claim that I can read every single paper writen in French about the ufo phenomena. It's impossible! There is too many of them. And of top of my interrest fo French ufology, I tend to read English publications about ufology, and on top of that I try to read papers about parapsychology, Intelligent Design, cryptozoology and so on...
So come on, what claim is that???
So you're picking one anecdotal evidence from Ray Hyman.
But what's really funny is that in your last podcast, you agree know that you don't find Dean Radin research so compelling anymore.
You said that's not the point. That the point is about Ray Hyman.
Well I say: sorry, the important point is not Ray Hyman. It's Dean Radin. Is Dean Radin research scientifically compelling or not? Know you're saying it's not so compelling because "it's not your stuff" (or something like that, I quote you from memories). OK. We have an agreement here: it's not comprelling. Next case please...
About Ray Hyman, by the way, how old is he? 79 years old... I mean, you should deal with is book like
The Elusive Quarry: A Scientific Appraisal of Psychical Research, not taking quote from something he said in a podcast when he was way over his 70ies. I mean, for my point of view (and I remember Hyman himself writing about this), we should (the skeptical mouvement should) have a new, younger "Ray Hyman", dealing with the current parapsychological research. Well Wiseman, Blackmore and Alckock are a little bit like that, but they like to do a lot of research on other fields as well, so we need a guy who do parapsychological criticizing full-time (and not a little bit of part-time).
About skeptics don't supporting research on those topics, it's just plain false. We support good scientific researchs on those topics, not bad one. That's the main difference. For exemple, the papers published by Olaf Blanke, showing that you can induce out-of-body experiences by stimulating some area of the brain is awsome. It points to neurological explanations for OBE and for some aspects of NDE.
- BLANKE, Olaf et al; Neuropsychology: Stimulating Illusory own-body perceptions; NATURE; Nature Publishing Group; N. 419; p. 269-270; 19 September 2002.
- BLANKE, Olaf et al; Out-of-body experience and autoscopy of neurological origin; BRAIN; Vol. 127; N. 2; p. 243-258; February 2004.
Skeptics are all for that kind of good reserachs about those phenomena!
With that kind of researchs going on, I really can follow you when you start to talk about NDEs like if it was compelling evidence for dualism. It's really not the case, since good scientists are more and more explaining how the brain is generating those anomalous experiences.
Well, that's a few of my thinking about your last episode...
