[Larry Boy]

Originally Posted by Chris Noble

Hypothesis generation is a part of science. In real science results lead to new hypotheses which lead to experiments and new results etc.

You appear to think science is uniformly conducted whether it's physics or psychology or any other field. In physics, it's comparatively easy to generate new hypotheses because the phenomena occur at such a "basic" level and there aren't as many factors to consider as in the soft sciences. This makes it a lot easier to make mathematical models explaining the phenomena. I mean, compare particles to all the neural connections in the brain; which are more complex?

Now because of the complexity of the human mind, results in psychology are a lot less clear than in physics. This leads to the hypotheses and theories being vaguer technically. Therefore you aren't likely to see the same kind of rapid generation of new hypotheses and theories in psychology as in physics.

Subliminal perception was in the same boat as psi just a couple of decades ago: it had struggled to prove it's existence for almost a century. Is this not relevant to you?

Originally Posted by Chris Noble

In "psi" research the hypotheses come out of the same type of folk anthropological basis as witchcraft, dragons and faeries.

Fair enough. But remember chemistry came out of alchemy. Does that make it a pseudo-science?

Originally Posted by Chris Noble

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.

Often, reported phenomena reflect human psychology more than reality, but sometimes it is the reverse.

Originally Posted by Chris Noble

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.

The effect sizes are small, but the important thing is that over a large number of trials, the results are far better than what's happening in the control trials and is expected by chance. I find it strange to say that just because an effect is small, it's likely not to exist. We see similarly small effects in medicine, but those results are still seen as valid. Where's the difference? Theory? That's funny because I recall reading that there are cases in medicine where effects are stumbled upon by chance, verified experimentally, and not until after that explained theoretically.

Is it psi research's "unability to jibe with other sciences" that makes all the results worthless? Now why should that matter considering it's practically the same for all sciences in the initial stages? QM and relativity theory were seen as nutcrack theories by a large proportion of the scientific community when first proposed. And once again: subliminal perception was highly controversial for almost a century. Neither parapsychology's lack of accord with other sciences nor it's long history should be seen as decisive arguments against it in light of these facts.