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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

Have you read the article? It's basically all along this problem...

tl;dr: Yes, that is intellectually dishonest, which is a huge problem. Scientists have two options: (1) accept parapsychology as real, or (2) accept that the "scientific method" (in social "sciences", at least) is insufficient. The problem seems to be that Bem (the author of the study) did almost everything "right", and if we increase the bar of scientific proof so that his study is excluded, so are many others...

The reason why parapsychology is excluded: the real world doesn't support it (noone is earning huge amounts of money on the stock market using psi). However, the real world often doesn't support very small effects (e.g. Einstein's relativity). Fortunately for physics, they can afford to make their scientific methods much more rigorous, so they can study large effects as well as exceptionally tiny effects. Social studies can't, for the time being.

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Okay, but that's not actually an answer to my question. My question basically comes down to this:

> Yes, that is intellectually dishonest, which is a huge problem. Scientists have two options: (1) accept parapsychology as real, or (2) accept that the "scientific method" (in social "sciences", at least) is insufficient.

I don't get why the whole thing is such a huge problem. The entire problem rests on needing parapsychology effects to not be real. If that need did not exist, we could just go "Okay, interesting, seems likely that there's something to it then. Let's do more research!" because, you know, we take that approach everywhere else. So my question remains: what is it about parapsychology that makes option two even valid to consider? All I can see is people just not liking that that may be how things work.

Parapsychology is physically impossible, and the evidentiary standards in physics are much higher, so we have much more confidence in our physics results than in these experiments - enough that we can reasonably say that physics is true and parapsychology is false.

(But these experiments are as good as many in psychology / social science - suggesting that many "proven" results in psychology / social science could be false)

> Parapsychology is physically impossible, and the evidentiary standards in physics are much higher, so we have much more confidence in our physics results than in these experiments

Conflicting results don't mean one set is impossible (cf., the long-standing apparent conflict between QM and relativity within physics). Apparently conflicting results without a methodological error in either imply that the explanatory model that appears to be supported by at least one of the results (if not both) is, while useful within its own domain, in some way incorrect.

The whole idea that the models validated by scientific experimentation are binarily true of false is, well, missing the point badly. While over time we hope they approach truth with them, what they are is useful (that is, they have predictive power) to a greater or lesser extent. And quite often the models with the greatest predictive power in two different domains conflict when either or both are extend outside of their own domain.

EDIT: The real problem with parapsychology is that there's little in the way of explanatory models being tested anywhere in the field. There's a lot of hypotheses without models and some experiments testing them, which (concerns about methodology aside, for the moment) might raise interesting questions and serve as inspiration for developing and then testing theoretical models to explain the effects, but very little has been done there -- which makes "parapsychology" more a collection of potentially unexplained phenomena more than a branch of science that provides an explanatory model for some set of phenomena.

Which is very different from most of the social sciences.

> Apparently conflicting results without a methodological error in either imply that the explanatory model that appears to be supported by at least one of the results (if not both) is, while useful within its own domain, in some way incorrect.

When scientist thought they found particles travellig faster than light speed they checked the results, then the equipment, and then they assumed they had made a mistake and asked other people to check the numbers and the experiment. They realised that they had an extraordinary result and they wanted very high degree of rigour.

Some parapsychologists appear to rush to publish weak results and to claim success for flawed experiments.

Possibly true, but I think beside the point. You are holding parapsychologists to a much higher standard than the rest of science (except physics.) That's what the entire article is about really.

Yes, that's the point - the fact that parapsychology passes these criteria throws the rest of science into doubt.

You mean, except physics, chemistry and biology, i.e. sciences that are based on numerous, replicable, measurable, non-subjective experiments. In contrast, economics, psychology, sociology, and even medicine (at least the parts that are not performed in a lab, such as biomedicine or molecular biology) are not really sciences, but merely studies.

> When scientist thought they found particles travellig faster than light speed they checked the results, then the equipment, and then they assumed they had made a mistake and asked other people to check the numbers and the experiment.

And as it turns out, it was a mistake after all. Physics is solid to a satisfying number of digits after the comma.

> Some parapsychologists appear to rush to publish weak results and to claim success for flawed experiments.

So do some sciences in the supposedly "better" fields [1].

I think the fact of human nature at issue here isn't specific to any particular field of study.

[1] For a particularly well-known example, consider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Fleischmann.E2.80.9...

I'm reminded of the history of the measured charge of an electron. The first experiment to measure it was Millikan's oil drop experiment, which got a value smaller than current measurements. As other scientists made their own measurements (with different experiments), the measured value slowly increased. What is interesting in this is that we would not expect to see a gradual increase in the observed value. The explanation for this is that when people find a value that was "to high" they would look harder for sources of error that would increase the value, causing a systemic bias to under-report the charge.

Similarly, with the faster than light neutrino, we spent far more effort looking for mistakes that would make our answer bigger than it should have been, which introduces the same systematic bias.

The solution to this is to realize that science is a time consuming process, and it is okay to take a while to arrive at the right answer. But, if we are aware of these problems, we can get there faster.

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