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Originally Posted by Chris Noble  This was not discovered by accident. Scientists had a good understanding of the pharmacological properties of aspirin and theorised that it could reduce the risks of heart attacks. They did trials with sufficient poer to demonstrate an effect.
The problem with small effect sizes with "psi" is that if the effect is close to that achievable by chance guessing then there is no possible way that somebody could have simply stumbled across it by trial and error. You don't have a sound scientific basis to guide the generation of hypotheses. There is no theory of "psi" let alone one that has been supported with experiments.
The question I always ask is how is it that you know what you think you know. You can either have something with a large effect size that you can find by trial and error or something with a small effect size and a sound scientific basis. |
Well, first of all, not having a scientific theory doesn't necessarily mean a phenomenon doesn't exist. We still have no sound scientific basis for a theory of consciousness, still we assume it exists (well most of us do). Second, parapsychologists do have some tentative hypotheses concerning psi, springing from the various reports that have been made of the phenomena during the centuries. Psi was
not discovered by accident.
You can't expect a science in it's infancy, with minimal resources, to be as well-developed as a field such as physics or medicine. You also have to remember that if psi phenomena do exist, a natural explanation may lie far far away in the future, just as an explanation for continental drift came a long long time after the phenomenon was discovered.
To summarize, science isn't complete yet, and you can't expect it to be able to give answers to everything at this point.