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Originally Posted by David Bailey  Multiple ad hoc explanations for a phenomenon are always less convincing  |
A single blanket ad hoc explanation, "psi", that explains everything and nothing isn't very convincing.
The patterns in Jaytee's and Kane's behaviour were quite different and it would be unwise to assume that the same explanation holds for both cases.
I've seen dogs hear a car before I do. We already know that dogs can judge the time of day and pick up on routine. We already know that dogs can pick up on subtle inadvertent cues. We already know that people are prone to conformation bias. These are all known effects.
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My 'theory' does not contain a mechanism, but it is enough to get round the notion that ? experiments are just about searching for anomalies - as is sometimes said. Arbitrary correlations - such as dog gets excited whenever a cabbage is dug up in an arbitrary allotment - would definitely not count!
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Information leaking from one individual to another through non-physical means = anomaly.
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You have to take earthquakes and volcanoes as they come, though you can make interesting seismic readings, and I don't doubt that various brain scanning techniques may be useful in exploring ?. Every area of science has its own limitations regarding experimentation.
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But no science is as completely untestable as "psi".
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A lot of scientists are enthusiastic about their experiments - imagine you had just put together and debugged a gravity wave detector, wouldn't you be enthusiastic to see your first gravity wave? This would not mean that you would be any less rigorous at looking for possible stray vibrations. There is a real danger that parapsychologists are criticised for behaving exactly like most other scientists! |
If a scientist claimed to have detected a gravity wave without decent evidence they would be criticised. If they did this via a press conference or a youtube video they would be pilloried or worse.