BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!
Wrong answer.
Read backwards through the thread and try again.
(You can read, can’t you?)
Originally Posted by SnakeSpirit
Any scams hurt people. What about the stuff that’s not scams? Like investigation of the so-called paranormal?
Hey, you were the one that contended that scams hurt people. Changing your mind?
I don’t have any “precious shadows,” cause I don’t make assumptions. I’m talking about scientific investigation, not your daydreams.
Investigation doesn’t disappear in the light of day, but your precious ASSumptions do.
Now, do you have anything intelligent to say? Or are you just reading from “Martin Gardner’s Stupid Witicisms?”
Are you even able to say anything intelligent?
“It never happened.”
“Your precious shodows will reappear.”
Why do you bother? Your tripe just makes you look stupider and stupider.
Right moriah, but I’m laughing at you!
Don’t laugh, sir! Such stupidity deserves a special type of admiration.
Just think what forces must be at work to prevent this organization from meeting the doom that all others displaying such ignorance must eventually meet.
[/19th century period]
Oh? Like so-called ghost hunters who wander from room to room with oversensitive instruments convincing themselvesand the owners that a .2 degree difference in temperature is a haunting?
Or the lovely attempts to prove ESP and PK that were total fiascos, such as SRI and MacLab.
Remote viewing a la PSI-TECH. The so-called ‘remote viewer’ experimenters. Making grieving parents think their daughter is dead. Whooops! She isn’t!
PEAR, the so-called shining beacon of paranormal effects, gather twenty years of effects and finally admits they don’t have any evidence worth a damn.
Dr. Schwartz, who abandons and ignores all controls when testing ‘talk-to-the-dead’ types such as John Edward. After all, can’t get a good book on the market with negative results!
Dean Radin, who is held up is the ultimate researcher of the paranormal. Of course, when you look closely at his work, you find he sifts through data and selectively chooses what looks good.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and you are to be congratulated for packing so much absurdity into so few words. Did you know, for example, that you didn’t need a comma? Is your ignorance of English syntax a great enemy of your knowledge of English? Have you stated yet another platitudinous rule that you apply to others but not to yourself? Are you cringing right now? Does the very idea of being challenged and corrected by me raise your ire? I’ll bet your little mind has already begun to construct its retort, not even having heard the argument to be made.
Ignorance is no enemy of knowledge any more than a vase is an enemy of a flower. You’ve confused ignorance with stupidity, and that’s because you’re stupid. Ignorance is just the blank slate upon which knowledge is written. You and the OP have made the SDMB slogan into a religious mantra when it is actually a well conceived joke. You see, fighting ignorance is like shadow boxing — it’s tilting at windmills. The ever humorous Cecil understood this and underscored his comprehension with, “It’s taking longer than we thought.” You see? Get it? He didn’t know how long it would take. It’s the Jump to Conclusions Mat of Internet message boards.
Knowledge has many enemies. Arrogance (which I reckon you will attribute to me but not to yourself) is one. People like the OP — what was its name, Scumpup? — speak of “supernatural horseshit”, not even knowing what supernatural means. Ignorance is to him as fire is to Tatzlwyrm. Sloth is another enemy of knowledge. People like you and he learn just enough to convince yourselves of your superiority over others. Your knowledge of the supernatural is without context. It’s as though you know that a rug would be a good thing for a newly waxed hardwood floor, and so you drop a square of polyethylene and cannot figure out why there are so many broken backs.
One more enemy of knowlege is obstinance. You approach the supernatural with the same sort of one-way zeal for which its own ignorant proponents are so famous. You haven’t read anything by Augustine of Hippo, or Anselm of Canterbury, or William of Ockham. You haven’t even read the books by your own philosophical kin, like Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer, or Rand. You don’t read books; you read the Cliff Notes. Then you descend on people of faith and begin bashing with catcalls and flailing hoots.
You’ve got a lot of nerve claiming to carry the torch of knowledge. What you carry is a matchstick that long ago lost its last ember.
This thread is divided, like Gaul, into 3 parts–
Altogether, it lacks panache.
Hmmm, interesting. You seem to know what I think, what I understand, what I know and what I’ve read, Liberal. Did you use telepathy, remote viewing or was this a card reading? Have you thought of applying for the JREF Challenge? The amount of knowledge you think you know about me is simply astounding. What is also astounding(but totally expected) is that you considered my supposed misplacement of a comma the the most important thing to mention in a thread filled with juvenile name calling and “circle the psychic wagon” reasoning. I see, also, that you are making the same mistake as before-assuming that, if someone doesn’t agree with your reasoning, it is because they aren’t intelligent enough to understand it. I have read all the greats that you have mentioned(and much more) with deep thought, long study and much discussion with peers. On some points, I have come to different conclusions than you apparently have.
Deal with it.
Or waste time proudly pointing out supposed typos.
Burn level high.
If you’ve quite finished ridiculing her ridiculous hair, could I politely but firmly urge you and Aeschines to read this summary of her 10 years of psi research?
Note that this is from someone who started out strongly believing in psi. It proves precisely nothing, but how many people must have similar careers before we accept the null hypothesis?
“Fighting ignorance”, huh? I am pretty sure that pointing and laughing at someone else’s beliefs does not fall under the fighting ignorance category.
This is the first time that something here on the SD has really riled me up. Mainly because all the pointing and laughing in this thread is aimed at people who show an interest in the paranormal, myself being one of them.
Yes, I have an interest in the paranormal. So what?? Why should anyone else care? I’ve had what I honestly believe may be paranormal experiences. I absolutely do not consider myself a “woo-woo”. I was not swooped up in a UFO and abducted by aliens, I don’t collect crystals, I don’t examine people’s auras, and I don’t work on the Psychic chat line. My interests mainly lie in the area of ghosts and the afterlife. I personally have had experiences that lead me to believe, after ruling out the obvious causes, that both do indeed exist.
It is not your job to convince me otherwise, just as it is not my job to convince you that ghosts exist. Just because I have interests that differ from yours is not a valid excuse to launch such a vehement and nasty attack on me and people like me.
I fail to see how being derisive and calling names like a bunch of school kids out on the playground is in any way, shape or form “fighting ignorance”. On the contrary, I’d say it’s a good example of spreading ignorance.
Looks like I win the bet.
Hard to say. Perhaps we’re all just scratching at it the wrong way — like people clinging to Aristotlean models of matter and the universe. As you say, countless failures prove nothing. It takes only one Copernicus to break through, and you never know when (or if) he’ll be born.
I know about Susan; I’ve read about Susan. I gotta look at that picture of her hair, though.
Well, no null hypothesis for me. I’ve seen too and read too much to accept it. You’ll have to expend that proselytizing energy on the fence-sitters.
Threads like this do actually fight some ignorance - that of not knowing where some of your fellow posters stand and what their mental stability and capabilities appear to be. This thread has been enlightening from that respect, and disappointing in others. I’m glad that one person in particular who speciously flamed me in the past has shown themselves to be a dribbling idiot, as I no longer have to care about or read anything they ever say again.
Oh yeah…on topic. The paranormal is fun and often very interesting, and hard to disprove (like anything is hard to disprove from a logical standpoint), but I do not in general believe in it. I think a large part of the scorn for those who do believe is a result of a concern over slippery-slope behaviour. That is - the hypothesis is that a person that can believe in many unsubstantiated and questionable theories with no real logic, evidence, or proof is a person who might treat other aspects of their life in the same manner.
A person who believes that ghosts are real based solely on the testimony of their uncles’ dentists’ nurses’ sister-in-law might very well believe that their child does not need insulin based on the testimony of the transient that hangs out at the bin behind the car wash. However, in practice I think most all “true believers” of what is termed the “paranormal” aren’t really true believers. Just like I imagine only a very small percentage of Christians would believe that prayers alone will cure diabetes in their child, so I imagine a similar very small percentage of paranormal believers will truly believe that crystal energy will do the same. Or it doesn’t even have to have a spiritual component to it at all - the person that notes that it “seems to rain every time they wash their car” is really in the same category, unless they have gone through the scientific process and developed a sound hypothesis and experimental method for determining that it is in fact true. Yet, all the same, I doubt that any person really, upon looking at a lawn full of dying bluegrass, goes out to wash their car in a sort of automotive rain-dance.
The point is Halloween is mostly harmless, and can be quite fun. And many belief systems not based in science can be said, by a non-believing scientist, to be the same. However, when Important Decisions need to made, that is where the difference comes into play, and that’s where the battle lines are drawn. So I’ll join in and be a “witch” for Halloween, and listen to ghost stories and feel a chill when the wind rattles the shutters, and read texts on mythology and look for the deeper meaning of the allegory, parable, or whatever - because it’s fun and mostly harmless - but I won’t buy a microwave or treat a headache or tell a client how to run their power plant based on what my anklet tells me or by the aura put out by my cat.
Would you trust Susan to investigate those things you’ve seen and read rigorously and fairly? (If you tell us what they are, you might find she has already - what were they?)
But this implies that the null hypothesis is accepted, to be later discarded if and when Copernicus turns up, agreed?
I just read a chunk of the article–maybe 60% or so. It somewhat bogs down in the middle.
I see where Susan is coming from. She did the experiments and got negative results. She recognizes that others did not. Her attempts at synthesizing this contradiction is where it bogs down. This is where I see her falling into the vortex of “can’t tolerate the ambiguity–it must be resolved.” She got negative results, she knows that she’s not an idiot, and thus she knows that her experiments were good.
It all makes sense, she makes sense, but then we get ([url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Blackmore]page):
Nope, don’t quite follow the logic here. “All those negative results”? But she also concedes that others got positive results, etc. etc.
I believe in psi because of my own experiences and the experimental evidence: the whole of it, including the dud experiments as well. I believe in the Afterlife because I find the evidence from NDEs and mediums compelling (esp. the former). I find the evidence of ghosts compelling. Others look at the evidence and say “no.” We disagree.
Do you believe that she tried her very best to recreate those experiments exactly? Again, we must ask which is more likely: that her experiment was flawed, or those other people’s were.
Again, the question is why did she get negative results if she was trying really really hard to get positive ones? And, again, the alternatives are that she made some tiny flaw (and I mean absolutely miniscule, such that if it really did prevent these things appearing then it’s a wonder they exist at all) or those others made pretty basic mistakes such as unconsciously applying a [chance baseline shift.
As I asked lekatt, do you propose any reason why they simply cannot be psychological in nature? That [url=http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/si91nde.html]NDE’s](http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/BJP%201985.htm) simply cannot be explained by reference synchronicity in the temporal lobe, that some mediums cannot be explained by cold-reading, that some ghosts cannot be dreams or mistakes?
Sorry, rubbish coding: Why did she get negative results if she was trying really really hard to get positive ones? Again, the alternatives are that she made some tiny flaw (and I mean absolutely miniscule, such that if it really did prevent these things appearing then it’s a wonder they exist at all) or that those others made pretty basic mistakes such as unconsciously applying achance baseline shift.
Like I asked lekatt, is there any reason, other than that you found them convincing, that these things cannot be psychological rather than paranormal phenomena? That NDE’s cannot be explained by reference to synchronicity in the temporal lobe? That mediumship cannot be explained by statistics and various temperatures of reading? That some ghosts cannot be dreams or mistakes?