[ExI] Sigh

[Damien Broderick]

On 7/28/2011 5:16 PM, john clark wrote:

> To give you an idea of the quality of the "Peer reviewed journals" where
> this crap is "shown to them" (them?) get a load of this:
>
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20447-journal-rejects-studies-contradicting-precognition.html

What's your point?

<In contrast to Bem's results, Wiseman, French and Ritchie failed to 
find that the subsequent typing facilitated the volunteers' earlier 
recall. But Eliot Smith of Indiana University in Bloomington, the 
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology editor who handled the 
submitted paper, declined to send it out to review. "This journal does 
not publish replication studies, whether successful or unsuccessful," he 
wrote.

Smith defends the decision, noting that **he made the same ruling on 
another paper that, by contrast, supported Bem's findings.** "We don't 
want to be the Journal of Bem Replication," he says, pointing out that 
other high-profile journals have similar policies of publishing only the 
best original research.>

I'm certainly hoping to see all the details of all these attempted 
replications. Parapsychology journals, curiously enough (unlike the 
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a mainstream journal) *do* 
as a matter of established principle publish papers reporting null results.

Wiseman, btw, is notorious for his trickery, evasiveness and BULLSHIT, 
and I gather that his own "replication" of Bem had serious but typical 
shortcomings, rather as if someone tried to repeat an experiment that 
used laser beams (or as you would put it, LASER Beams) by using 
flashlights instead.

Damien Broderick