anomalies and science (was: Re: [extropy-chat] Origin of The Sourcebook Project [Part 1 of 2])

[Damien Broderick]

At 11:27 AM 12/28/2004 +1100, Brett wrote:
>Hal Finney wrote:
>
>>Rejecting scientific consensus on the basis of personal investigation
>>of the facts and evidence is likely to fail, paradoxical as it may seem.
>>That's just how the world works.
>
>But this statement is a truism. Of course the scientific consensus is
>going to be right more often than not and so rejecting it is more
>likely to result in failure than accepting it.
>
>Yet all progress in science depends on some scientists being willing
>to take the opposite view.

Not the *opposite* view, necessarily, but often one at an odd angle (which, 
I suppose, ends by opposing key elements of the old view, although rarely 
by an A/not-A contrast).

My problem with Hal's formulation is that it seems to imply that a 
`scientific consensus' is the same as a `consensus of recognized or 
certificated scientists', which is often the case but fails when an 
audacious or moldy hypothesis is rejected in a kneejerk fashion by many who 
haven't bothered to do their due diligence.

In the case of psi, a few like Ray Hyman have put in the work, and while 
declaring the claims of psi highly improbably still say it's worth 
continuing with rigorous attempts to get the protocols as near perfect as 
possible.

Some like Richard Wiseman and Sue Blakemore did a lot of research and 
decided it was a tangle of errors and wishful thinking.

Other academics like Utts and Ertel have done the same spadework and 
concluded that the claims are effectively proved.

Meanwhile, enormous numbers of psychologists, physicists, food 
technologists and proctologists feel sure that psi flies in the face of 
everything they learned at school, and that only an idiot would waste time 
actually *assessing the best evidence to date*.

On the other hand, there *are* research programs in non-Mickey Mouse 
universities when these claims are still taken seriously and investigated, 
in the UK, the USA and various European countries. This is not the case, I 
think, in respect of UFOlogy, iridology, astrology and a lot of other 
dodgyologies. FWIW.

Damien Broderick