[ExI] goats and gullibility

Damien Broderick thespike at satx.rr.com
Tue Jan 26 21:39:09 UTC 2010


On 1/26/2010 2:59 PM, BillK wrote:

> By the way I noticed that many of the so-called psychics at SRI were
> $cientologists that credited their psychic powers to $cientology
> training, so they had very much a vested interest in persuading people
> that they were getting good results. Personally I don't think I would
> ever believe anything that was credited to $cientology super-powers.

This is discussed in OUTSIDE THE GATES OF SCIENCE. May and Puthoff, in 
their younger days, were sucked into $ci, which I find depressing, but 
both left it many years ago and today May, an empiricist, is scathing 
about the woo-woo affiliations of many "psychics". But I suspect it's 
understandable when you start seeing the evidence for this stuff that 
you'll look for psi-friendly ideologies to provide social and 
quasi-intellectual support. If mainstream science were not so 
aggressively/defensively antagonistic to the phenomena and spent more 
effort trying to deal with it, instead of blindly ignoring it, 
psi-gifted people would have somewhere more rational to turn for 
support. (In other cultures psychics tend to be Buddhists or Catholics, 
etc, and while that's arguably just as silly it's not as conspicuously 
venomous as the $ci monstrosity.)

Damien Broderick



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