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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Note the implicit (and, to most, justified) a priori convinction that psychic phenomena cannot exist, even if they have evidence to the contrary with similar confidence as other ("coventional") study subjects.

Isn't this an "isolated demand for rigor"? [1]

Doesn't this prove that science as practiced is not just the empirical process and some raw axioms that guide it (which these "psychic research" both follows), which scientists pretend to ascribe to, but also part blind faith/prejudice?

I'm not saying physic phenomena are real. I'm saying if tests are conducted with the same principles as those about physical phenomena, and results are equally carefully collected, and they have the same condidence, science in principle shouldn't treat them any differently than results about "regular" subjects.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...

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>science in principle shouldn't treat them any differently than results about "regular" subjects.

That's the whole problem, as I understand it. If we are going to treat ESP research the same as research in other fields, we either accept ESP as real, or reject both ESP and other fields as deeply flawed.

Personally, I'm leaning heavily toward the second option. The methods in ESP are identical to methods in psychology, social sciences, etc, but not physics or chemistry. I'm just wondering where to draw the line. Maybe the whole method of statistical inference needs to be flushed? Maybe it cannot be saved by preregistration, publishing all the data, transparency and other bells and whistles.

>That's the whole problem, as I understand it. If we are going to treat ESP research the same as research in other fields, we either accept ESP as real, or reject both ESP and other fields as deeply flawed.

That's my point them. "If we are going to treat ESP research the same as research in other fields", according to the principles science pays lip service to this shouldn't be a question to begin with, because science shouldn't have a priori ideas about what can be treated "the same as other fields" and what shouldn't.

Research (results) should determine that (which means: if there are results in its favor, and we can't see a problem with the research that other - non ESP - accepted research doesn't have, we should accept it, as much as we accept in other such - non ESP - results).

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. (This isn't just some folk saying: it's a direct consequence of Bayes' theorem.) It's right to be more skeptical of a study that finds a result that doesn't have any known mechanism, doesn't match up with the rest of what we know, and isn't reproducible.

>Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

That's an a priori assumption though. Who arrived at the conclusion it was "extraordinary" and with what scientific methods? Not based on research, for one, because that's what we're evaluating here: research results positive to that claim. We could say: "We have a bias against it being true", but the "extraordinary claim" part is BS within the context of the scientific method.

As for applying Bayes, the "prior" (in fields where it's not mathematically determined, like e.g. judging whether a coin is fair), is just another name for "at will bias".

In this case, it was reproducible, though. And we'd have to reject many things in the history of physics if the criteria were "doesn't have any known mechanism"!

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