What’s the difference between Derek Jeter and preregistration?

> Pre-registration actually might have nipped him in the bud

Yup. It has almost nothing to do with research quality, as Ray Hyman figured out in the 1980s. Modern ESP studies are high quality studies. It's literally only the lack of preregistration, which leads to things like publication bias and optional stopping.

This article profoundly misses the mark.

I suspect the "ESP guy" is actually meant to refer to Daryl Bem?

https://slate.com/health-and-science/2017/06/daryl-bem-prove...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...

> scientifically verified

That's a bit of a strong statement, but not quite untrue. There was enough legitimate interest that there was funded parapsychology research at places like SRI into the eighties that was at least serious in intent if not in execution or outcome. I just checked and the academic Journal of Parapsychology is still published, and the AAAS has gracefully not kicked the Parapyschological Association out of affiliation yet.

Yeah, the big debunking bang never happened, but the research always had a particular smell about it: smaller and smaller effects every year with greater and greater statistical significance. Preregistration helps with the optional stopping problem, but it doesn't completely solve it, and meta-analysis actively hurts. From my brief time reading the parapsychological literature and its critics for fun, I still look at any meta-analysis with extreme skepticism.

> Not everyone knows/remembers that ESP was considered scientifically verified for a good couple 20th century decades, such that many people who considered themselves scientific thinkers felt they had to accept it's validity even though they had been suspicious.

In Alan Turing's most famous paper, it mentioned that human ESP could be a possible loophole in the Turing test. This was how I became aware of the history of ESP research.

Turing even considered True Random Number Generator manipulation via ESP, which, as I've learned later, also had a surprisingly long history of being a standard test in this field. His response to this loophole was a funny one: If ESP is used, it may increase the correct number of guesses in both the human mind and the computer TRNG...

> I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.

> This argument is to my mind quite a strong one. One can say in reply that many scientific theories seem to remain workable in practice, in spite of clashing with E.S.P.; that in fact one can get along very nicely if one forgets about it. This is rather cold comfort, and one fears that thinking is just the kind of phenomenon where E.S.P. may be especially relevant.

> A more specific argument based on E.S.P. might run as follows: “Let us play the imitation game, using as witnesses a man who is good as a telepathic receiver, and a digital computer. The interrogator can ask such questions as ‘What suit does the card in my right hand belong to?’ The man by telepathy or clairvoyance gives the right answer 130 times out of 400 cards. The machine can only guess at random, and perhaps gets 104 right, so the interrogator makes the right identification.” There is an interesting possibility which opens here. Suppose the digital computer contains a random number generator. Then it will be natural to use this to decide what answer to give. But then the random number generator will be subject to the psycho-kinetic powers of the interrogator. Perhaps this psycho-kinesis might cause the machine to guess right more often than would be expected on a probability calculation, so that the interrogator might still be unable to make the right identification. On the other hand, he might be able to guess right without any questioning, by clairvoyance. With E.S.P. anything may happen.

> If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up. The situation could be regarded as analogous to that which would occur if the interrogator were talking to himself and one of the competitors was listening with his ear to the wall. To put the competitors into a ‘telepathy- proof room’ would satisfy all requirements.

https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238

Nevertheless it's very very easy to argue that Jeter is overrated if you stop evaluating with your eyes and dive into the metrics. He's got the lowest defensive WAR (-9.4) of any shortstop in the modern era – the objective outcomes of him playing in that position are quite literally worse than average, and worse than any other shortstop who played under Steinbrenner or in that media market (Didi Gregorius gets far less attention, but is a far better SS).

People rate him highly based on watching his spectacular, dramatic diving catches – forgetting that those dives are the product of him being badly positioned on the hit, and that a correctly-positioned player would simply make an unremarkable routine catch on the same hit.

Jeter's the baseball equivalent of the programmer who an Org is in love with for constantly spending nights and weekends fighting fires, failing to notice that it's the same person who's accidentally starting all of the fires to begin with.

The article literally goes into this. Jeter was undoubtedly great, and also undoubtedly less great than his reputation when he was playing. The challenge is to be able to hold both of those thoughts in your head at once.