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Originally Posted by Chris Noble  Becoming a believer because the skeptics are mean is hardly a good reason.
Given that the criteria for identifying the 'signal' were only discovered after the trials were done I am not as impressed as you. Wait and see if it is reproducible and remains when the controls are tightened. That is assuming that Alex permits the controls to be tightened.
Most scientists would not think that there is anything extraordinary to be explained.
One thing that is certain is that if there is a conventional explanation then Alex will never find it because he is not interested in pursuing conventional explanations. |
If you begin to suspect - with evidence - that a great deal of good parapsychological evidence has been distorted, that is a valid reason to at least doubt the orthodox position - not least, because if parapsychology experiments could be debunked by fair methods, critics would do it that way.
Clearly given any of these dog experiments, you have to establish what the dog does when it is waiting. If this were one isolated video, or if the dog always did something different when it was waiting, your criticism would have great force, as it is, it doesn't.
Unlike you, I don't think Alex wants to obtain a false result by not tightening the controls. However, as he has pointed out, as in any experiment, you have to tighten the controls in an intelligent way so as not to simply eliminate the signal real or false.
As I keep pointing out to you, whatever the mechanism may be, there is a real effect here - large numbers of dog and cat owners have observed this, sometimes fortuitously in way that are very hard to explain in conventional ways. I think that is why we approach these results in such different ways - you really assume they are some sort of fluke - I am pretty sure there is something real (and interesting) to explain.
David