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Originally Posted by Chris Noble  I suggest that the only comparison with psi is that both psi proponents and HIV skeptics complain that the "orthodoxy" is suppressing their alternative explanations and that the orthodox paradigm is about to fail. |
I don't know about HIV, you may be right about that. However, I think you're making a false analogy between psi researchers and HIV skeptics. In the case of parapsychology, it's the "outsiders" that are doing the research and the mainstream scientists that are rejecting it, whereas in the case of HIV research, it's the mainstream scientists that are doing the research, and the "outsiders" that are rejecting it. HIV skeptics, creationists and other "doubters" are thus very different from parapsychologists, in that their focus is not on conducting experiments, but rather rejecting specific theories. Parapsychologists don't reject mainstream fields of research and theories. They may have different interpretations of some of them (QM, for instance), but that doesn't mean they deny the experimental results that support the truth of the observations that have been done so far. Individual parapsychologists may do, but that's irrelevant since the field of parapsychology as such has nothing to do with those theories (evolution, for instance), just as QM has nothing to do with, say, botanics.