I bet a lot of social sciences and psychology research would crumble if subjected to this level of scrutiny and default-skepticism. The harder sciences would probably fare better but you’d still find a lot of wishful thinking, dodgy borderline effects, p hacking, and fraud. You’d probably winnow science down to a very solid core, which would be a good thing but would leave you with a lot of math, physics, chemistry, etc. and a lot less other stuff.
Yes - the fact is that with the same attitude it would be very hard to have *any* kind of science, because if the default answer is "it must be wrong because it's impossible. so did you control X and Y? no? you see, you are a fraud". If it was applied to Newton's law, I fear they would still be debating the weight and color of the famous apple.
(not taking a position on the contents here, just on the social process).
I personally find parapsychology very interesting - and it's worth reading about, worst case consider it well-build scientific SF. It asks a lot of interesting questions: how do you study something where the scientist is directly entangled? how do you study something where you may have an actively hostile field of research? see e.g. https://books.google.ch/books/about/The_Trickster_and_the_Pa... who was written by Hansen on leaving the field....
Decent counterpoint, and I am aware that there are some anomalous results in the field that do not appear to be fraud or just bad design.
There’s two reasons most people dismiss this stuff. Well three really but the third is less scientific.
(1) There does not seem to be a way to reliably isolate, repeat, or amplify the phenomenon. Something always at the edge of detection that can never be pinned down is often indicative of error or a hypothesis that’s off the mark.
(2) We cannot possibly imagine a natural mechanism that would explain this stuff without a lot of very soft SF hand waving. Entanglement does not transfer information. The brain only consumes an average of about 30-40 watts of power, so it’s not firing particle beams. The human body does not emit EM or RF to any meaningful degree and is pretty non-responsive to it. Some of the results are so weird that you’d have to posit actual magic or the universe being a simulation or some wholly absolutely unknown realm of physics.
The last less scientific reason is:
(3) There have been a lot of fakes in this field and historically it’s associated with cults, occult weirdos, religious nuts, etc. These are people scientists generally scoff at with some legitimate reason.
About (1), that's what Rhine did his whole life. Of course, it's all "debunked" - at the end you either trust what he did or think he was a fraud.
About (2), I don't think it is really relevant, as long as there is (1). My main doubt here is: if there is a way to obtain some advantage out of it, why isn't evolution using this extensively? life is usually pretty good at exploring all possible paths. But maybe it does, and once we "see" it, it is everywhere.
For point (3), someone suggests this is structural, and that liminality/trickster effects are the very thing we are talking about. Thence (1). If you are interested, I suggest checking out the book on Trickster - and also Jacques Vallee's "Messengers of deception".
Personally, I'm not sure what to make of all this, but it is very fascinating.
I think we should accept that there is room for science and then there is room for philosophy. For instance, I find it doubtful that the answer to the question "is racism okay?" involves the reasoning "empirically, there [are|aren't] factors of intelligence/behavior/ability that denote one race from another". We can't discover facts out of thin air or from orthogonal facts, and it only serves to delude us by not acknowledging that. Before good and bad, harm and benefit, something isn't science, by definition, if it crumbles under reproduction or basic skepticism. Moral discussions, including whether this alternate culture of thinking about science is good or not, are intertwined but separate.
Race isn't a good example because the science comes down pretty firmly on the side of race being a social construct, not biological fact, for which the physical traits that denote race are not particularly significant.
An argument that racism isn't okay because race doesn't even really exist seems perfectly valid, given that most modern arguments for racism are based on intentional misrepresentations of science.
I think we pretty much agree, but it's not a scientific result to say that race is a social construct and that racists leverage science incorrectly. Someone isn't acting in the role of a scientist by making those refutations. I want to make that distinction because otherwise, people have misconceptions about what it means for something to be scientifically validated. Not to say that scientists are trying to deceive people by involving science, but in some sense deception is the result, and I feel like (no strong evidence though) that leads to its own problems.
