Peterson, Priestcraft, Profits and the Paranormal

[drumdude]

DCP and his friends are careful to minimize the effect. For them, the magnitude of the effect can be infinitesimally small. It just has to exist to help them make the realm of Mormon magic plausible.

It’s like telling you I can move a cup of water with telekenesis, but only by the width of an atom. And under lab conditions, it’s impossible to replicate.

Okay, then! Believe what you wish!

[Moksha]

Arm yourself with a seer stone and a dowsing rod and concentrate on the peer review of the next Interpreter Journal's article selection process.

[drumdude]

If there's no feeling, then I can't do it!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_contin ... D7OgAdCObs

[Physics Guy]

No-one has ever produced smoking-gun evidence for remote viewing, like having an unbiased or even hostile third party secretly place a series of bizarre objects in places where they can’t be perceived normally and having remote viewers consistently identify all the weird objects precisely with no false guesses. All the evidence that has been claimed for remote viewing has been statistical and subjective.

“Statistical and subjective” should normally be an oxymoron, but that’s the thing. Studies that claim to support remote viewing rely on subjective judgements about how well a viewer’s sketch or description matches the target. Probabilities that the success rates obtained by these standards could appear by chance are then computed with childish incompetence in accounting for the fuzziness of this kind of subjective scoring.

Parapsychology is an old field by now. Its most consistently observed effect is that degree of apparent support for paranormal phenomena varies inversely with the rigor and competence of the study. Everything always goes away when looked at carefully. That’s the conclusion after decades of effort.

[Doctor Scratch]

No-one has ever produced smoking-gun evidence for remote viewing, like having an unbiased or even hostile third party secretly place a series of bizarre objects in places where they can’t be perceived normally and having remote viewers consistently identify all the weird objects precisely with no false guesses. All the evidence that has been claimed for remote viewing has been statistical and subjective.

“Statistical and subjective” should normally be an oxymoron, but that’s the thing. Studies that claim to support remote viewing rely on subjective judgements about how well a viewer’s sketch or description matches the target. Probabilities that the success rates obtained by these standards could appear by chance are then computed with childish incompetence in accounting for the fuzziness of this kind of subjective scoring.

Parapsychology is an old field by now. Its most consistently observed effect is that degree of apparent support for paranormal phenomena varies inversely with the rigor and competence of the study. Everything always goes away when looked at carefully. That’s the conclusion after decades of effort.

Some very fair points here, Physics Guy. And just to make sure you are aware: Dr. Peterson has "thrown down the gauntlet" and challenged you to start up an email exchange with Dr. Paul Smith:

Paul was in attendance at the 2025 FAIR Conference yesterday and today and we had a chance for conversation. I showed him something that had been posted about him by the pseudonymous “Physics Guy,” a non-LDS academic who sometimes participates over at the Obsession Board — a comment that, to my disappointment, is much more vitriolic than is typical of “Physics Guy.” Eloquently representing the accepted current consensus-paradigm, “Physics Guy” described remote viewing as “ludicrous nonsense” “without a shred of reality,” “utterly idiotic,” and “prime-grade pseudoscience” that comes from “over-promoted morons,” “shysters and hacks.” I long ago gave up the quixotic idea of trying to defend myself or speak for myself or even participate on the Obsession Board, but Paul tells me that he would be more than happy to correspond with “Physics Guy” and he accepted my offer to mention his willingness here. So I offer a publicly available email address that, I assume, will reach Paul: info2@rviewer.com. I hope that such a conversation will ensue. I myself would be very interested in it.

I'm sure you already know how this set-up works--i.e., if you decline to start up the email correspondence, Peterson will repeatedly dismiss you as a "dogmatically closed-minded atheist" who refuses to look at the evidence, etc. Of course, one could equally (reasonably) ask that the best evidence in favor of remote viewing be posted to "SeN." I mean, why not let the readership of the blog see for themselves? Who knows, maybe they would find it so persuasive that they would pony up the 12 G's to take the course, right? Except that that's not how Mopologetics works.

[Physics Guy]

No, I’m not going to discuss remote viewing with a proponent. If this guy has anything which could be worth my time, he has no business wasting his time discussing with me. He should be writing up his paper for Nature and planning what to do with his Nobel prize money. Whatever he’s got, that he thinks might impress me, it is my duty to science to urge him to submit it for publication as quickly as possible.

For that matter: this guy has apparently been doing remote viewing for quite a while now. Why is he offering to discuss with me instead of just getting Peterson to post links to all the papers that he has already published?

It’s the nature of his subject, that even very small effects would—if the effects were solid rather than worthless delusion—be huge scientific discoveries. So all it takes to get published in a real journal, get your results replicated, and launch a revolution … is to have actually solid results and not garbage.

Pseudoscientists love to claim that the only thing keeping them out of prestigious journals is orthodox bias. That’s not true at all. Publication in a good journal is a long way from scientific acceptance. It’s just the first step in a long process of replication and confirmation. So orthodox bias is perfectly happy to let something unorthodox get published, as long as it isn’t obvious trash. If it is obvious trash, then it does get rejected quite quickly. The crackpots don’t understand what’s wrong with their work and tell themselves they’ve been rejected from bias.

If this guy admits that after all his experience he hasn’t been able to get past peer review in experimental psychology, then no matter what else he may want to say, he’s admitting that he has nothing worth my time.

[drumdude]

No, I’m not going to discuss remote viewing with a proponent. If this guy has anything which could be worth my time, he has no business wasting his time discussing with me. He should be writing up his paper for Nature and planning what to do with his Nobel prize money. Whatever he’s got, that he thinks might impress me, it is my duty to science to urge him to submit it for publication as quickly as possible.

That’s the nature of his subject. Even indications of very small effects would—if the indications were solid rather than worthless delusion—be huge scientific discoveries. So all it takes to get published in a real journal, get your results replicated, and launch a revolution … is to have actually solid results and not garbage.

Pseudoscientists love to claim that the only thing keeping them out of prestigious journals is orthodox bias. That’s not true at all. Publication in a good journal is a long way from scientific acceptance. It’s just the first step in a long process of replication and confirmation. So orthodox bias is perfectly happy to let something unorthodox get published, as long as it isn’t obvious trash. If it is obvious trash, then it does get rejected quite quickly. The crackpots don’t understand what’s wrong with their work and tell themselves they’ve been rejected from bias.

If this guy admits that he isn’t going to be able to get past peer review in experimental psychology, then no matter what else he may want to say, he’s admitting that he has nothing worth my time.

This runs contrary to the DCP method of determining truth. You have to meet the person, look into their eyes, and judge their character.

If he looks sincere, then you should accept that he's telling the truth and remote viewing is real. It's roughly analogous to Moroni's Promise, and with equal efficacy..

[Physics Guy]

On the other hand, I can confirm that quartz crystals really do hold a lot of vibrational energy. Why, if you just cool the crystal by one degree Celsius (a difference in temperature that you might well not notice by touch), you’ll have drained out of that crystal enough energy to lift the same crystal about 75 meters high in the air.

Whoa, right? It’s amazing. It won’t heal your aura or rejigger your chakras, but it has already changed the world more than anything else in history ever has.

“It” being not crystals but heat. Condensing steam turns out to be dramatically more impressive, in terms of energy release, than cooling crystals. So the things that changed the world were steam engines, not crystal engines.

The problem with pseudoscience is not that it postulates wonderful invisible forces while real science insists that only dull things are real. Wonderful invisible forces really are everywhere. They can do more than any magicians have dreamed.

The problem with pseudoscience is only that it is incompetent. Revealing and harnessing real invisible forces is much harder than pseudoscientist can accept. They want things to be easy.

[drumdude]

Revealing and harnessing real invisible forces is much harder than pseudoscientist can accept. They want things to be easy.

It seems like this particular guy is just milking the gig and prestige he got studying this stuff for the government. The government study showed no promise, so they ended the program. He still styles himself a "CIA psychic spy" on his website.

That didn't stop him from using it as a springboard to continue without the pesky limitations of peer review and experimental confirmation. I'm sure it's much more lucrative to teach these $12,000 classes than to do the tedious work of disproving his theory.

[I Have Questions]

Revealing and harnessing real invisible forces is much harder than pseudoscientist can accept. They want things to be easy.

It seems like this particular guy is just milking the gig and prestige he got studying this stuff for the government. The government study showed no promise, so they ended the program. He still styles himself a "CIA psychic spy" on his website.

That didn't stop him from using it as a springboard to continue without the pesky limitations of peer review and experimental confirmation. I'm sure it's much more lucrative to teach these $12,000 classes than to do the tedious work of disproving his theory.

Yep. Paul H. Smith is conning a living.