Evidence for Psychic Powers

[zenmaster]

You've basically watered down the whole concept of 'peer' in scientific peer review.

The 9 experiments article is posted in the "Journal of personality and social psychology" a journal of psychology, not a journal of parapsychology. Which means the available peers are more likely psychologists than parapsychologists. If a well reputed journal can consider psychologists peers to parapsychologists... Then why can't I?

So in psychology, just anyone can peer review someone's experiments? That's broken and goes against the concept of 'expert'. Perhaps they couldn't find any experts and that's why the paper passed got published in the first place?

I've read over some of the criticisms and am still reading over the paper: 9 experiments. Let's talk. Which experiment do you think was explained adequately? We'll look at that one.

What do you mean with "explained adequately?" Surely not that the mechanism underlying the measurements is adequately explained?

'Explained adequately', meaning an explanation of hypothesis, experiment, and results which has sufficient rigour. Offering an explanation of the underlying mechanism would be proposing a theory, which would also demand rigour. The theoretical base in not even necessary, but the explanation which adequately identifies, in a stringent manner, cause and effect from the hypothesis/claim and results is indeed essential. Otherwise, one is necessarily presenting selective or anecdotal evidence - that is the evidence can easily be shown to be biased or sparse, in comparison to what data and criteria were otherwise possible for identification and consideration.

Why don't you tell me what's wrong with them? The whole paper exists of 9 experiments. Judging the whole thing on one of them would not be right.

I disagree, it would be 'right'. This represents his presented evidence, after all.

Just as judging "Evidence of psychic powers" on one experiment alone is not really the proper thing to do.

Apples and oranges, no analogy holds. We're talking about Bem having properly demonstrated sufficient rigour in the explanation of (any and all) experiments of that last paper.

Also pick one field in science that you consider model science, what you would call: "proper well done science" we may use it as a reference point so that we can compare parapsychology to it in areas of dispute...

The field of mathematics. Also computer science.

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Absolutely anyone can try to replicate a scientific experiment. If your results are accepted and published by your peers, then you just did a peer review.

Simple as that, because in the end the whole process is very subjective.

Of course, nowadays without showing qualifications, your "peers" are not even going to look at you or your work. Which actually is IMHO a big problem of the contemporary scientific community.

But thankfully, that's not how the process is done. We're talking about getting published in the first place. Here, apparently they were not as stringent as they should have been. The field and basically society suffers as a result due to the lack of discernment and scrutiny, because standards are necessarily lowered.