On 12/10/04 4:38 AM, "Ray Saintonge" saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Mark Richards wrote:
This becomes more and more difficult in controversial subjects, like water floridization (sp?) for example, or ESP. Who are the 'experts' on the subject?
It's "fluoridation".
I don't really see what the difficulty is. I'm not trying to be dense here, but to me this is quite simple.
Our current article on Extra-Sensory Perception, for example, is quite bad. And the reason is precisely the lack of _credible_ sources. These exist, but the current article appears to be written by people who would prefer for these not to be named.
I agree that that article is dreadful. To begin with it is sprinkled throughout with with words like "supposed" or "alleged" which if repeated tend to bias the commentary, and certainly detract from the flow of the text. Expressions like "ESP's critics, a group that includes most mainstream scientists," is a gratuitous reference to the authority of scientists. I think that it would be closer to the truth to say that most scientists have never paid any serious attention to ESP, so that the basis which that majority criticizes ESP is its own lack of knowledge. That to me is not very reassuring.
Actually, no. Most scientists believed in some form of ESP in the 1950s as initial studies (I believe some of the most prominent coming out of Berkeley) indicated evidence for it.[1]
All such studies were found to be unrepeatable, investigatorial bias and subconscious coaching were found to be causing the results, and the myth of ESP was laid to rest.
[1] See A.M. Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind, October 1950 (aka the Turing Test paper):
"I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.
This argument is to my mind quite a strong one. One can say in reply that many scientific theories seem to remain workable in practice, in spite of clashing with E.S.P.; that in fact one can get along very nicely if one forgets about it. This is rather cold comfort, and one fears that thinking is just the kind of phenomenon where E.S.P. may be especially relevant."