linuxmafia.com 2016/linuxmafia.com.tar/linuxmafia.com/pub/skeptic/files-to-classify/ganzfeld.txt

Internet Message Format | 1996-02-19 | 4KB

From: Jet Wimp <[e-mail]>
Subject:      ganzfeld experiments
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date:         Fri, 23 Jul 1993 20:36:22 EDT

     York Dobyns has reacted to my recent posting about the renewed interest in
the ganzfeld experiments with much posturing and asperity.  Clearly, he has a
vested interest in the consideration in which the scientific community holds
these experiments.  He condemns my "ad hominem" comments by wafting a few ad
hominem comments of his own, and his willful misreading of what I wrote does
not, to quote him, "seem entirely consonant with disinterested scholarly
evaluation of evidence."  For instance, I expressed regret that such research
efforts exploited the talent of young, perhaps married,  researchers, whose
chances for tenure and promotion were certain to suffer because of the
difficulty--- I would say, impossibility--- of obtaining dramatic confirming
evidence for parapsychology.  Dobyns trumpets that Honorton was neither young
nor married.  However, since I was discussing tenure and promotion, it was clear
my comments were aimed at research facilities in an academic setting, not
private, in fact, shadowy, efforts such as Honorton's.
      I'm afraid that not all Dobyn's piety nor wit can lure a circumspect
person to take these experiments seriously.  He points out my "lamentable
ignorance" about experimentation with human subjects.  He says there could
hardly have been more than five experiments a week at Honorton's facility, while
I estimated 40.  Very well, five experiments a week means that the 190
experiments took 38 weeks to complete.  The experiments were "drawn from"
(ominous expression, that) a seven year period.  Where is the data from the
other 6 1/3 years?  It could be argued that other research was being conducted
in this time period.  I argue that it is extremely unlikely that this could have
been the case, for the researchers, if we can believe their data,  would have
been certain immediately to appraise the results as a rare confirming instance,
and would have assigned the highest possibly priority to the ganzfeld research.

     Dobyn finds my suggestion that the data was consciously or unconsciously
selected by Honorton "outrageous and infuriating."  "Were Honorton not deceased
I would be demanding that this 'Jet Wimp' character, whatever his or her real
name, should be tendering a formal written apology and retraction."  Not likely.
I have nothing against pro forma, even posthumous, apologies.  However, my
principles do not permit me to apologize to the deluded, particularly when their
expensive and time-consuming frivolities muddy scientific discourse.
     For, to tell the truth, I'm angry and outraged, too.  If manpower and
resources were unlimited, researchers could be hooking microphones and
sophisticated waveform analyzers to oaks in an attempt to discern the secret
language of trees, and I wouldn't care.  But manpower and resources are limited.
 Every dollar spent on parapsychology has to come from somewhere, and that
somewhere is the reserve of assets that can improve the quality of our lives and
the compass of our  intellects.
     In the past dozen years amazing discoveries have been made in all fields of
science: chemistry, physics, medicine, biology.  In my discipline, mathematics,
we have recently seen the four color theorem proved, the Bieberbach conjecture
established, and Fermat's last theorem proved.  These astonishing feats of the
human intellect have cause some to call the twentieth century the golden age of
mathematics.  Where is parapsychology's four color theorem, its dna cloning, its
buckyballs, its Josephson junctions, its monoclinal antibodies?  What has
parapsychology given us in terms of results that are consistently reproducible
by independent investigators?  Nothing, only excuses, and the promise of more
"experiments."
      If it weren't for the money pumped into this harlequinade by wifty
anti-rationalists such as Koestler, whose most egregious foray into non-fiction
was a ludicrous attempt to resuscitate the failed doctrines of Lysenkoism, I
suspect parapsychology by this time would have atrophied.
     I and other scientists are tired of the excuses, the posturing, the data
that is missing, the experiments that go nowhere.  Parapsychology has been in a
public lavatory with the door locked for forty years.  Excuse me if I'm tired of
waiting.