BboysGF,
It seems that when proving this skill there is no room for error which is ludicrous. Not even an olympic althete can run his winning time every run. In weightlifting you sometimes can lift alot more than other days. In iceskating you can't perform a triple lutes perfectly every time. Infact most times they don't. But if I don't do some test correctly many people will write off my abilities as fiction. Just cause the ice skater can't land her lutes on a particular day doesn't mean she can't ever do it. I feel it is an unfare standard.
This is not how science works. I can’t speak to James Randi’s million-dollar prize – I haven’t read the details, but I can speak to how scientific experiments work. There is not a 100% accuracy requirement in these tests. There just needs to be a degree of accuracy that is significantly above chance. This accuracy has to be reproducible. The experiments span over many trials, so having one or two bad days should not skew the results.
I think it’s fair to categorize psi claims with a physical test of skill. A skater can either skate or not, but there are degrees off skill. We should see the same thing in people who claim to have psi powers. They should either be able to do it or not – at least having accuracy better than chance. Some may do much better than that.
It’s interesting that some of the scientific studies we’ve discussed before have had only people who claim they have psi abilities a subjects. It’s not as if there was just a random sampling of people off the street and most of them could not perform the skill. The people who participated really believed they had a special skill. Probably their friends and family did too. But when the analysis was in, the accuracy was not significantly better than chance and in many cases was worse! This only bolsters the theory that this is a psychological phenomenon and not a psi one.
I can't understand how people(noone in perticular) can have blind faith in something that serves the self like religion but something that can't be proven to help you is disregarded as 'trickery''superstition' and a darned many other explenations that would be better served being applied to ones spiritual beleifs rather than something that I have proven to many people.
Most of the world claims god exhists in one form or another yet i have found no such extraordinary evidence to back IT up. And all i do is see things in a book where a piece of paper is drawn. Religion is what many based their entire lived and morals and principals on. you'd think THAT should require more evidence than my skills do yet i have experienced way more people willing to believe in mythical beings than something i can prove right infront of them. Now god...there's an amusing anecdote.
I couldn’t have said it any better myself. I wholeheartedly agree with you. I’m not sure if you were ever a JW, but after I left the JW religion I made a pact with myself that I would no longer believe in things that are not supported by evidence. I had to re-examine everything I once believed in. After reading many books – and I’m still reading - I’ve found no evidence for a global flood, special creation, god(s), paranormal claims, ufo sightings, Bigfoot/Lochness monster sightings, crop circles by aliens, alien abductions, cold fusion, perpetual motion machines, most OT history, ghosts, Satan, life after death, etc. I now require positive evidence for a claim before I believe it – or at least I try to, especially for extraordinary claims.
I don’t believe this has made life boring or killed all of the mysteries of life at all. There are still many questions, but just believing stuff without evidence has gotten many people in trouble – like my parents who joined the JW’s and sucked me into it. I believe that is the essence of superstition and can only harm us – just as religion (which I believe to be organized superstition) has divided and controlled mankind for ages. There are very many things that we still don’t understand in this world – bboy has alluded to some with Quantum Mechanics. Now that stuff weirds me out! But the fact is that those weird QM things are observed and reproducible phenomenon. I accept that they do happen even though I don’t understand it. It is an extraordinary claim that has the extraordinary evidence to back it.
I didn’t see the Sony story as evidence. I alluded to the story about cold-fusion that was very similar. Have you ever read about it? Is it really evidence when a private party does experiments and claims they have proved a phenomenon, but they are not willing to share their protocols and data? Independent claims are not evidence. Reproducible claims are. Corporations are hardly honest anyway. If you’ve ever worked for one (I do) you would know how much dishonesty and corruption there is all for the sake of money. Sony does what is best for its shareholders, hardly an unbiased source for research. They could have claimed that cold-fusion has been proved for all I care. I don’t buy it.
I remeber learning things in school that the same scientist now say aren't true after all. Scientist know very little they are fumbling around in the dark too. There are medical methods that have been proven to work for centuries that they will not embrace because they can't understand how it works so they say it doesn't work. They can't understand what we have been discusing so to them it doesn't exhist. How can anyone learn anything if they are so quick to dismiss anything they can't understand. It's science or nothing. It's arrogant to beleive that science is the only truth when we honestly as a speices know very little about the world we live in, our own bodies and minds.
If you really thought about history, you probably wouldn’t make such disparaging remarks about science. Science is probably the only reason you are alive today. You probably would have died from your stroke or from a nasty disease or starvation as a little child if it weren’t for science and western medicine. People forget how bad things really were before western medicine and science.
True we don’t know everything, but please give the human race recognition for what we do know – in the name of science. We probably know a lot more than you realize, which is amazing since the scientific method is a relatively new invention in human history (think about the quality of life before science). Science is self-correcting. Scientists rarely make 100% certain claims about anything, but when scientific information gets filtered down to the media, such as newspapers and magazines, much caution is thrown to the wind. They make it sound as if scientists are saying things which they aren’t. Thus when there are corrections down the road, it looks like scientists were dogmatic about their prior stance. In reality it is usually the media who is responsible for this reputation.
I don’t think it’s true that scientists brush aside things that they don’t understand. They flock to such things. QM is a case in point – now that is weird stuff, but it is real science. Even relativity and evolution were not fully accepted immediately, but in the face of evidence, you’ll be hard pressed to see scientists brush an intriguing theory or finding aside. Most scientists keep an open mind about things, but they have a high standard for what constitutes evidence - a standard that may be higher than what you and I are used to.
If such ancient medical methods work, then that is well and good, but if they don’t, then there should be no reason not to criticize them. There are things that are generally accepted as having benefit, even though we don’t know exactly how it works. An example is acupuncture. Most scientists hold judgment on such things until there is evidence for and against. In the beginning, there was no positive evidence, but now it seems that is changing. It seems that there may be evidence (albeit inconclusive at the moment) that acupuncture has benefits. Before scientists and doctors can give it a wholesale recommendation, though, more work will have to be done – but I can hardly understand how people can think the scientific community is so closed minded.
I think challenging beliefs and claims is a good thing – not a bad thing. Otherwise, we would never really know what is true and false, good and bad. We would just be at the whims of whoever speaks the loudest. That is why I require evidence before I believe.
rem
"Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so."
..........Bertrand Russell