Monday, September 23, 2019

Hate Mail - Tearing Down Science For Science Lying For It Too

The only things about parapsychology I've ever addressed* are the controlled, rigorous scientific experiments in it, the things that generations of OUTSIDE reviewers and critics have looked at honestly and, especially, further experiments that took the critiques of method and analysis into account in how those were conducted.  THAT, dopey, IS the scientific method as prescribed and practiced.  

And as I said, the psychologists who teach standard psychology, especially those who have participated in that outside critique but who, no matter how many times the researchers meet and exceed their demands, refuse to acknowledge the validity of what they have demonstrated, not only once but in repeated experiments.  Ray Hyman is the quintessential example of that, who not only will never admit that there is something that has been demonstrated, even in those experiments and analyses he has not been able to demonstrate any problems with but who, on at least one occasion stooped to suppressing evidence in the analysis he conducted on behalf of the CIA program that he killed, doing, himself, one of the things that the scientific researchers have been accused of WITHOUT EVIDENCE OF THEM EVER HAVING DONE IT.

If virtually every part of psychology which doesn't deal with a physically demonstrable aspect of physiology were subjected to Ray Hyman's, James Alcock's ,etc. requirements for parapsychological research the field would evaporate, immediately.  If even physics were subjected to the wider demands placed on that research, it would probably suffer enormous damage.  The standards of distrust placed on the scientific research of parapsychology are those of climate change denial, the anti-vaccine movement and the Republican-fascist cries of "fake news". 

The scientific rejection of the science conducted by researchers going back at least, in my knowledge, to J. B. Rhine has been some of the lowest, dirtiest and most dishonest of such rejection done by scientists.  In every case I've seen conducted out of said scientific liars by atheist-materialists in support of their atheist-materialism.   John Archibald Wheeler's infamous 1980s lie about Rhine is matched by similar lies told by another eminent physicist, Irving Langmuir in the 1940s, those and similar long ago debunked lies are repeated by atheist-materialists today.  In this area a lie by an atheist, once told, will be relied by atheists, over and over again.**   That phenomenon was one of the reasons I have come to the conclusion that for at least the most dedicated of the materialist atheists, their disbelief in sin  has a real life effect in that they figure that as long as they can get away with it, a lie, in service to their atheist-materialist ideology is better than the truth which won't benefit it.   And I have never, once, read another, less dishonest atheist-materialist address that consequence of their ideology so I have to conclude, it's pretty much OK with most of them.

I really do believe that their atheism is the most important thing to such as will lie for it like that, even their claimed rigorous upholding of scientific method and even their scientistic materialism is secondary to that prime directive.  It is certain that their claimed belief in scientific method comes in well down the list of such directives as science requires rigorous honesty and facing the logical consequences of demonstrated phenomena that they don't like and which doesn't fit into their previous and preferred pictures of reality.  I didn't accept that these phenomena had been demonstrated to exist UNTIL I READ THE PUBLISHED SCIENCE THAT DEMONSTRATES THAT.  But I was not an atheist or a materialist with a personal and emotional investment in those ideologies when I read them.  I rejected materialism for the same reason, I read the literature of the atheists and I looked critically at that sect of materialism I'd had some rather stupid and immoral hopes in, Marxism as it really is but, also, as Marx and Engels presented it.  Since doing that every time I dip into the literature of materialism and the real life results of it, there is an opposite effect.

Not only has the most rigorous critical analysis of the most rigorous experimental design done within any science which allegedly deals with human minds failed to make the demonstrated effects disappear, as I mentioned, the parapsychologists practice some of the most rigorous statistical and probabilistic analysis of the data their experiments have come up with.  That is something that has been looked into since Rhine pioneered the sophisticated use of statistics in any field related to human minds, as was said by Burton Camp, President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in the 1930s.

Dr. Rhine's investigations have two aspects: experimental and statistical. On the experimental side mathematicians of course have nothing to say. On the statistical side, however, recent mathematical work has established the fact that, assuming the experiments have been properly performed, the statistical analysis is essentially valid. If the Rhine investigation is to be fairly attacked, it must be on other than mathematical grounds.

Something which is still pointed out today by Jessica Utts, president of the American Statistical Association, and a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical statistics.   As she said in that video I posted last week, she was convinced by reading the research with the intellectual background to really understand it.  This 1995 paper by her might be the one that made me admit that there were more than adequately demonstrated effects.

*  That is the science of parapsychology.  I have also said that people who have experiences have a right to understand those experiences on their own terms, absent any damage to the rights of other People and living beings resulting from their conclusion.  A person is the only expert on what it is they experience, no one else can observe or judge their experience.  

**  I could probably come up with even more examples of scientists blatantly lying about Rupert Sheldrake, especially those in science whose CV in standard scientific topics can't begin to match his.  

Outside of Republican politics and conservatives, I think the "skepticism" industry is about the most dishonest current cultural phenomena of any mistaken repute.  Their elevation of James Randi is just part of the evidence of their real character. 

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