Response to Skeptics' Guide Host, Dr. Steven Novella (Podcast)

[Larry Boy]

Originally Posted by Open Mind

This research failed to be replicated in a ‘double blind’ controlled trials by Swedish team lead by Pehr Granqvist who found no discernable effects. (If you put a device on people’s head and they are half expecting to experience something weird, many will report it. If the researcher believes in the effect of what they are reporting they can misintepret information).

Even if one assumes the effects claimed by Blanke, Persinger, etc. was correct, it still does rule out the brain is a filter of consciousness, such effects could equally be viewed as disruption of the brain filtering.

Exactly.

This is where many skeptics fail to apply skepticism - which you'd assume would be their main area of expertise - toward claims made by other critics and skeptics. It doesn't seem to matter just how crappy the methodology of an experiment is, so long as the conclusions support the skeptics' preconceived notions about reality. It's a shame, really. I mean, gosh, where's the god damn skepticism in all of this?

[Ersby]

Originally Posted by Open Mind

Berger did an meta-analysis of Blackmore's parapsychological work actually shows a weak effect, so Blackmore then dismissed her own work as inconclusive.

Blackmore's statement that her work into psi was not enough to draw a conclusion pre-dates Berger's meta-analysis. It is misleading to suggest otherwise.

Have you read Blackmore's response to Berger?

[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by Ersby

Blackmore's statement that her work into psi was not enough to draw a conclusion pre-dates Berger's meta-analysis. It is misleading to suggest otherwise.

Have you read Blackmore's response to Berger?

Yes I have Andrew, not recently though. I do notice skeptics tend to quote her 10 years of failure to find psi as evidence of no psi, so it is good she at least acknowledges that her own work is inconclusive in either direction.

[Open Mind]

I just want to correct a typo .....the word 'not' is missing

Originally Posted by Open Mind

Even if one assumes the effects claimed by Blanke, Persinger, etc. are correct, it still does [not] rule out the brain is a filter of consciousness, such effects could equally be viewed as disruption of the brain filtering.

[Ersby]

Originally Posted by Open Mind

Yes I have, not recently though. I do notice skeptics tend to quote her 10 years of failure to find psi as evidence of no psi, so it is good she at least acknowledges that her own work is inconclusive in either direction.

Well, it's always a good idea in parapsychology to go to the source material. People tend to quote according to their needs. Including you. To suggest Blackmore's conclusion was based on Berger's paper is simply untrue.

What source are you using when you quote this, btw?

[David Bailey]

Open Mind,

I think it might be an idea if you started a new thread about the idea of the brain as a filter - then we could discuss it without it getting lost in a mass of other ideas!

David

[Topher Cooper]

In critiquing research there is a great temptation to look for magic shortcuts -- easily found things that are not, in fact, flaws but which allow one to declare "this is crap" without having to actually do the work of finding anything wrong with the work in question. For example, look up Langmuir's "Pathological Science" in the October, 1989 Physics Today (also check out the letters in reply, including mine, a few months later -- I don't have the date off hand).

Such red flags are in fact useful -- but only in directing you where to look for evidence, not for deciding whether or not the evidence in question is valid. It is one thing to say that you aren't going to bother looking at an experimental study on the effectiveness of a drug where the researcher involved had a financial interest in the outcome, but a very different (and invalid) thing to conclude that the experiment was badly done because of such financial interest.

The whole "small effect size" is one of these short cuts and is worthless as a criticism.

When an effect size is large it is pretty easy to design an experiment. One needs only eliminate confounding factors that are also large. Small problems in randomization or leakage or whatever are, by definition small, and will only produce small effects. Any large effect cannot be confused with them.

When an effect size is small, however, one must be careful to exclude other things that would be expected to have a small effect size. You need to keep the "noise" low, because the signal is faint. A valid criticism in such a case is to show that the experimenters' design left room for such a small effect.

What is not a valid criticism is to say that you are unable to find any problem with the experiment's design or conduct but the effect size is small and there must be some error in it. That is not criticism -- that is just stating ones prior belief without any sign of supporting evidence.

Of course, you are welcome to feel that science is capable only of detecting things that have large effects -- forget most of modern physics (where the effect sizes are generally much, much smaller than in parapsychology), for example. You are welcome to feel that it is a waste of your time to examine evidence for subtle phenomena. Langmuir's "pathological science" criteria similarly excluded virtually all "cutting edge research" (to him, science was about filling in the details of what was already understood -- and he did that brilliantly in several fields).

But you cannot pretend to rationality and yet equate small effect sizes with experimental error without bothering to actually demonstrate the error.

[David Bailey]

When I encounter posts that say "this is crap", or an equivalent, I always take this to refer to the post itself!

It is just not helpful to discuss serious research in this way.

David

[Venom]

Originally Posted by Larry Boy

This is where many skeptics fail to apply skepticism - which you'd assume would be their main area of expertise - toward claims made by other critics and skeptics. It doesn't seem to matter just how crappy the methodology of an experiment is, so long as the conclusions support the skeptics' preconceived notions about reality. It's a shame, really. I mean, gosh, where's the god damn skepticism in all of this?

It's because "Extraordinary claim needs extraordinary evidence".

If someone claims to have found a way to replicate the OBE experience by stimulating some area of the brain, it's consistent with what we know today in neuropsychology. If someone says that there is something dualistic going on, with "something" that of course we can't detect is influencing the brain, and during the NDE are working even if the brain is dead, that's an extraordinary claim.

About the Blanke & co. experiment, I've read also about that failed replication. But anyway, what matters is that more work has to be done in that direction, in ordre to find how the brains generate those experiments. That was my point.

If there is something outside the brain, you should focus on ways to detect it. If you can detect the activity of counsciousness outside the brain with some kind of equipement, that would be really interresting.

Same thing for the Psi. If Psi do exists, you should try to find a way to detect the "medium" by wich the anoumalous transfer of informations is going on, and also try to find by wich biological mecanism the brain (or any other area of the body) can detect that "field" and how it extracts informations from it.

That would be much more convincing that showing us some small effect size.

Like about the dogs-who-knows: can you detect with an instrument the field is using for knowing that, and can you show me wich part of the brain is used in order to that, and explain to me how that part of the brain is extracting informations from that "field"?

Would be much more convincing that speculating about Sheldrake's and others statistical results.

Specultaing is fun in philosophy, but it's not good science.

[Larry Boy]

Originally Posted by Venom

It's because "Extraordinary claim needs extraordinary evidence".

I wasn't talking about parapsychological research. I was talking about mainstream science. I find it kind of weird that skeptics generally are way less skeptical when a study is done that supports their world view than when it is not. Brain imaging studies are a good example of this. They don't prove that certain states of mind are generated in certain areas of the brain. They just show that they're correlated. Furthermore, a lot of studies in this area seem to be flawed in one or another way (See Irreducible Mind by Kelly & Kelly et al for more on this). And I'm not saying this because I'm denying the link between certain brain states and certain states of mind, because I'm not denying that, I say this simply as a way of demonstrating that skeptics aren't as skeptical when it comes to mainstream science as when where talking fridge science.