Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry Boy  What's your basis for this claim? The effect is larger than in many other scientific studies. And why are you talking about coming up with the idea of telepathic communication on the basis of an experiment? It's the other way round: parapsychologists are testing a phenomenon that has been reported over and over again throughout culture and history. |
Hypothesis generation is a part of science. In real science results lead to new hypotheses which lead to experiments and new results etc. In "psi" research the hypotheses come out of the same type of folk anthropological basis as witchcraft, dragons and faeries. The fact that these things have been reported thoughout culture and history does not mean that they are likely to be real. They reflect more on human psychology than reality.
Quote:
|
What's your point? Not having predicted an effect through careful mathematical consideration means it can't exist? There are mountains of cases where the discovery of an effect preceded the theoretical work on it. The whole of science started that way, for God's sake.
|
In these cases the effect size is large enough to be stumbled across.
The phenomenon of humans flying or levitating or being able to move large objects with their mind has been reported across cultures and throughout history.
This has lead to "psi" experiments involving telekinesis. Instead of levitating, which would win the MDC, "psi" researchers have focussed on subtle effects like influencing the role of a die or a random number generator. The effects reported are almost always extremely small and do not deviate far from chance.