Of course the whole factual answer needs to point out that it is research that is very underwhelming.
If you like, but that is also subjective. Someone hoping to see evidence suggesting their hypothesis is correct will get really excited about some .005% variance in a statistic they are tracking and call it overwhelming. Someone convinced it’s a waste of time will consider the same result underwhelming. It isn’t particularly useful information, but having access to all available data so one can draw their own conclusions is.
So give us his best one, in your opinion. Is that really too much to ask for, if you’re going to complain that that we are only pointing at the bad parts of his work?
Show us the good part.
Give you his best one? Why? If someone wanted to know what scientific work has been done in the area of primates and I linked to a body of work by Jane Goodall that some primatologist maintains on his website, would you insist that I tell you what I think was her ‘best one’ before honoring it with your approval as a valid answer to the question? Or defend any arguments you might have with her conclusions?
You seem to be mistaking my participation in the thread to be from some wish to debate people about the merits of this research. It isn’t. It is to send the OP a link to a body of work in ESP and such. You also seem to be mistaking the link to be some collection of Radin’s own work, it isn’t. It’s a huge collection of links to psi research spanning decades that he finds interesting or relevant or otherwise chooses to keep on his site. So me linking to it really isn’t a justification for you to ask me to show an example of his work.
But when sucked in by various arguments, I made the mistake of adding to that factual answer that IMO Radin is qualified to do such work and appears to me to be doing it using proper scientific protocol. That too, does not imply I think he was always right, sometimes right, or never right, just that the way he conducts research and documents his protocols and invites peer review is about as good as it’s going to get for the OP in terms of any hope of finding credible research data on the subject. But even if you don’t agree with that or can outright prove it wrong, it doesn’t make the reference to his work less relevant to the thread.
But to answer your question, I already did provide one such example. It is irrelevant to the thread, and your opinion of its credibility matters not in the context of this thread so I’m not sure why you’re asking, but if you read it you can find it.
I don’t think that brains that emit EM radiation would be completely unaffected by EM radiation of comparable wavelength.
From 1979-2007 the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab investigated ESP. They found very small but statistically significant abilities of their test subjects to influence a hardware random number generator. Across millions of trials they got a change of about one tenth of a percent.
Interesting if true. According to the wiki article, half of the significant effect appears to have been associated with one test subject who is suspected to have been affiliated with the laboratory. Uh oh. There have been problems with reproducability. And of course, the investigators were pretty vague about the nature of the physics underlying effect, IIRC. Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab - Wikipedia
Arguably the above constituted real science. It wasn’t very persuasive science. It wasn’t very good science. But it beats most of the crowd that Randi encountered during the first leg of his one million dollar challenge.
That said, I’d like to see someone take another stab at the “Stare at a person’s back and watch them turn around” phenomenon. I’ve wondered about that. I’ve read here that it was falsified in the early 1900s, but maybe there’s some clever work that could be done with it. Something having to do with the science of learning and cognition.
But it was validated on Hollywood Squares! They wouldn’t have said it was true if it weren’t really!
Heck-a-mile, I’m happy with people taking a shot at any of this (within reasonable financial limits.) At worst, it’s a waste of time; at best, it might be revolutionary. One of the side-stream benefits is an increase in rigor in experimental protocols. We’ve learned a lot of ways people can cheat at ESP tests.
Won’t be revolutionary. But I’ve observed the effect first hand and wondered what’s going on. I can imagine a number of non-woo explanations and trust some of them apply. I have a college undergraduate project in mind: a couple of observers and video cameras along with a handful of volunteers could form the basis of a decent senior thesis.
To be clear, it would be like any number of psychological experiments which purport to do one thing (in this case testing for ESP) while actually doing another (seeing how people draw inferences from a given experience).
Our friend Radin is on the case. Here’s another meta-analysis of a study and protocolalso found on that psi research collection I linked earlier. With 33,000 some odd trials it has about a 54% chance of being correct when a person “feels they are being started at”. That is only about 1 correct answer per trial better than random chance. Radin maintains that over so many trials a consistent rate of 54% is significantly better than chance. If anyone finds those results interesting enough to warrant further study, I say go for it. I hate that feeling when someone’s staring at me. 
Again we see Radin completely ignoring the possibility there is no effect at all and null effects being under-reported. We now have very good evidence this is the case in regular psychology, and it’s always been a major accusation against parapsychology, and yet Radin does not suggest any measures to prevent it in future research, such as pre-registration of trials.
What has in fact happened since then, as linked from Radin’s list of evidence, is that a collaboration between a believer and sceptic have failed to replicate the effects found in the believer’s part of an earlier study on this “effect”: http://deanradin.com/evidence/Wiseman2006.pdf
So Radin collaborated with a skeptic of the work as a control to close up any possible holes in the previous trials and lessen the possible effects of bias, and he found that in that case they were not able to reproduce the results, and he published this finding, and you’re saying that none of this qualifies as an example of actual scientific research that has gone on in the area of ESP?
Your personal opinion about some personality defect you think a researcher has that doesn’t allow him to accept failure is irrelevant to whether or not the work was or was not a series of studies about a hypothesis related to ESP, an experiment and protocol, and an analysis of the results of multiple trials of that experiment which was then opened up to peer review. I’m pretty sure that qualifies as scientific research that has been done in ESP, whether or not you agree with the conclusions or like the researcher’s attitude.
No I’m not. I’ve never claimed there’s no actual scientific research going on. I’ve said it’s fringe at best and I’m saying that an unbiased analysis of the actual scientific research on the area of ESP shows that any positive results can be wholly explained by various flaws in the research itself and the self-selection of publishing positive results as the result of stricter controls and pre-registering is invariably null results.
That an actual scientist, Radin, neither accepts this or takes it into consideration when suggesting future research in the field shows that he’s a shoddy scientist.
You’ve limited your quest to defend your introducing Radin in the post by picking a small part of the OP and ignoring the overall gist of it. The OP asked “Where does it stand now in modern science? Is it at all in the mainstream? Or is it relegated to the fringe of science? And could there be any validity to its claims?”
Radin is at the fringe of science, steadfastly ignoring the most obvious causes of ESP-results diminishing in the face of stricter controls. And so I stand by my first answer in the thread. Other than the “there are no final answers in science, ever” there is not and can’t be validity to the claims of ESP.
Name that logical fallacy.
There were reports that the Soviet Union had a project to investigate ESP (remote viewing)
In response the USA researched ESP from 1978 - 1995, spending $20 million.
They found nothing.
Not sure of your point but mine was that if I leave the thread for even 12 hours there are already 25 things to reply to and it isn’t how i want to spend my time on the boards.
It is kind of telling about the relevance of that cite that ten minutes after this tiresome hijack appeared to have finally ended, someone posted they would like to see more research about the ‘feeling of being stared at effect’ and, in fact, Radin and others have done extensive work on it and details were contained in my link. The same actually applied to another mention of random number generator tests too.
The first two things that popped up in general discussion of the topic sans hijacks were already addressed by my link 50 posts ago. Whether or not those or any hypothesis panned out, or may pan out with further research, or never will pan out, doesn’t matter. The research they are doing addresses questions that they and many people want to continue researching. It may or may not provide answers. And if it does, those answers might completely disprove any link to some kind of ESP or psychic phenomena, and instead might indicate some new branch of research into other directions.
I agree with Trinopus’ sentiment above - “I’m happy with people taking a shot at any of this (within reasonable financial limits.) At worst, it’s a waste of time; at best, it might be revolutionary.”
Yes it does matter-that’s the whole point of the OP. Is there anything to this ESP stuff? At some point you’ve got to quit digging through the humongous pile of equine crap and just admit that there’s no pony, and your pointing to even more of it doesn’t increase the chances of there being a pony unless your new pile lets out a whinny or two. I do find it interesting that you refer to any responses to your pushing of Radin’s work as “hijacking”.
Did you read my link? The USA spent 17 years and $20 million (nearer $50 million on today’s money value) and found nothing of value.
I expect that dwarfs the research Radin has done.
After 17 years and $50 million, we can see which it is.
Are we supposed to keep looking for it until we find it…even if it doesn’t exist?
SomeWHERE over the rainbow,
Way up HIGH,
There’s a phenom’non I heard of,
once in Rad’n’s laborat’RYE!
I hesitate to even mention it at this point but since you clearly aren’t aware of it Radin was employed by SRI International during those years and participated in most of those tests.