Peterson, Priestcraft, Profits and the Paranormal

[drumdude]

It's basically the same as Joseph Smith's treasure digging "services."

I'm sure there are some easy ways to leave your participants feeling satisfied that they accomplished something. Just like the trend of speaking to the dead years ago, you do a lot of fishing around, and take advantage of vague language where anything can be considered a "bullseye."

Remember John Edward?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b6HvH0hA-Q

[Gadianton]

I think Peterson needs to give full disclosure on this one. He is promoting to his small but clearly easily influenced audience something that costs thousands of dollars. He’s endorsing it.

The most important point so far and shows you just how broken a certain moral compass is.

[Everybody Wang Chung]

I think Peterson needs to give full disclosure on this one. He is promoting to his small but clearly easily influenced audience something that costs thousands of dollars. He’s endorsing it.

The most important point so far and shows you just how broken a certain moral compass is.

Yes, this is a great point. It's reckless of DCP to promote this expensive scam to his mentally fragile and easily susceptible audience. It speaks volumes about DCP's moral compass and character.

[Tom]

It's basically the same as Joseph Smith's treasure digging "services."

I'm sure there are some easy ways to leave your participants feeling satisfied that they accomplished something. Just like the trend of speaking to the dead years ago, you do a lot of fishing around, and take advantage of vague language where anything can be considered a "bullseye."

Remember John Edward?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b6HvH0hA-Q

The Proprietor has noted the impact of Gary Schwartz’s The Afterlife Experiments on his “previously long-held conviction that there was simply no evidence to support parapsychological claims.” “Reading Professor Schwartz’s book,” he’s written, “shook me profoundly.”

I would note that John Edward is a prominent figure in The Afterlife Experiments, participating in several experiments detailed in the book. Schwartz is clearly impressed by Edward, writing, “[A]ll of our experiments suggest [Edward] is as real as steel” (225) and “John Edward and Suzane Northrop [another medium who participated in experiments detailed in the book] are extraordinary mediums. Their integrity for this work is matched only by their passion for the mission. . . . [T]hey have scientific minds and appreciate the requirement for experimental validation. Not only have they encouraged us to conduct controlled research, they have helped us share the discovery process in this book” (356).

The book is available online. I was struck by the author’s credulity.

Of possible interest:

https://archive.ph/20230314184905/https ... rlife.html

https://www.proquest.com/docview/195034 ... 20Journals

https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-con ... 59/p26.pdf

https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-con ... 33/p20.pdf

https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-con ... 19/p58.pdf

https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.c ... 19/p61.pdf

[Physics Guy]

While every paranormal huckster likes to emphasize how new their discoveries are, the discipline of providing and analyzing evidence for paranormal phenomena is by now well over a hundred years old. It goes back at least as far as the Spiritualism of the mid 19th century, which got big enough to emerge from early folk magic circles and attract scientific attention. Its history is a long, sad story of hype and credulity, of some earnest stupidity and a lot of crass fraud.

It has shown some robust patterns: not in firm evidence for paranormal effects, but in how people deal with the subject. One clear pattern is of physical scientists with impressive credentials getting bamboozled by tricksters. If any paranormal effects ever become appropriate subjects for physicists, they won’t be paranormal any more at that point. Until then, experienced experimental psychologists will be much better judges—and they shouldn’t bother looking at anything until the professional illusionists have given thumbs up.

That’s not orthodox bias. It’s the unambiguous verdict of a lot of real history.

[malkie]

While every paranormal huckster likes to emphasize how new their discoveries are, the discipline of providing and analyzing evidence for paranormal phenomena is by now well over a hundred years old. It goes back at least as far as the Spiritualism of the mid 19th century, which got big enough to emerge from early folk magic circles and attract scientific attention. Its history is a long, sad story of hype and credulity, of some earnest stupidity and a lot of crass fraud.

It has shown some robust patterns: not in firm evidence for paranormal effects, but in how people deal with the subject. One clear pattern is of physical scientists with impressive credentials getting bamboozled by tricksters. If any paranormal effects ever become appropriate subjects for physicists, they won’t be paranormal any more at that point. Until then, experienced experimental psychologists will be much better judges—and they shouldn’t bother looking at anything until the professional illusionists have given thumbs up.

That’s not orthodox bias. It’s the unambiguous verdict of a lot of real history.

Yep - all I'd need would be for a paranormal practitioner to contact James Randi and return with a message from James confirming that all of these paranormal "practices" and "theories" are complete nonsense.

[Moksha]

There is a chance that both Mormons (and especially the Sic et Nom crowd) would be exceptionally reactive to psychic influence due to the dowsing receptivity of Dr. Peterson and his ability to rid his allies of Body Thetans. Once free of these thetans, this special crowd of Saints can begin to stretch out their minds and view events from the past and the future, both near and far.

Would it be possible to get some feedback on this from both MG and Sage regarding this on the AI thread to confirm this idea?

[Tom]

It's basically the same as Joseph Smith's treasure digging "services."

I'm sure there are some easy ways to leave your participants feeling satisfied that they accomplished something. Just like the trend of speaking to the dead years ago, you do a lot of fishing around, and take advantage of vague language where anything can be considered a "bullseye."

Remember John Edward?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b6HvH0hA-Q

The Proprietor has noted the impact of Gary Schwartz’s The Afterlife Experiments on his “previously long-held conviction that there was simply no evidence to support parapsychological claims.” “Reading Professor Schwartz’s book,” he’s written, “shook me profoundly.”

I would note that John Edward is a prominent figure in The Afterlife Experiments, participating in several experiments detailed in the book. Schwartz is clearly impressed by Edward, writing, “[A]ll of our experiments suggest [Edward] is as real as steel” (225) and “John Edward and Suzane Northrop [another medium who participated in experiments detailed in the book] are extraordinary mediums. Their integrity for this work is matched only by their passion for the mission. . . . [T]hey have scientific minds and appreciate the requirement for experimental validation. Not only have they encouraged us to conduct controlled research, they have helped us share the discovery process in this book” (356).

The book is available online. I was struck by the author’s credulity.

Of possible interest:

https://archive.ph/20230314184905/https ... rlife.html

https://www.proquest.com/docview/195034 ... 20Journals

https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-con ... 59/p26.pdf

https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-con ... 33/p20.pdf

https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-con ... 19/p58.pdf

https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.c ... 19/p61.pdf

The Proprietor writes:

Years later, I went through a period in which I read a number of books by the late John Hick, a well-known Anglo-American philosopher who taught at Cornell University, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Cambridge University but spent most of his career at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom and Claremont Graduate University in the United States. In one of his books — I don’t now remember which one of them — he surprised me by writing with considerable respect about the work of the Society for Psychical Research, in Great Britain.

Hick writes of his respect for the work of the Society in his published autobiography:

I am not … in any doubt as to the reality of ESP (extra-sensory perception, or telepathy). And I am impressed by some of the communications recorded in the early days of the Society for Psychical Research. I was a member of the Society for many years, reading its regular publications, having joined at the suggestion of my Oxford dissertation supervisor, H.H. Price, who was one of the most highly intelligent people I know, and author of not only important books on epistemology but also of fascinating philosophical discussions of psychical research, or parapsychology as it is known today.

John Hick: An Autobiography, p. 29.

Hick: “[The Society for Psychical Research] is a highly respectable body, publishing research, exposing fraud, and providing a forum for the philosophical work of such people as Price, C.D. Broad and others” (John Hick: An Autobiography, p. 74).

Hick also discusses psychical research in Death and Eternal Life. (Hick was a favorite writer of mine when I was in middle school; I would carry a book of his to church to read when Sunday school classes became boring.)

[Physics Guy]

The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882. It’s part of the long history of paranormal research that I mentioned above. In its day it has published exposés of fake mediums and such, outraging spiritualists, but articles in its journal apparently also often adopt a Ghostbusters-like pretence that poltergeists or clairvoyance or whatever are well established phenomena. So “highly respectable” is a debatable description of the SPR. It does have pedigree.

And that’s the big problem right there. Psychical research has been an active field since 1882, and how far has it come in that time, compared to the progress of science? It’s still just sputtering suggestions and bad statistics. Real phenomena under serious investigation don’t stay that elusive that long.

[Physics Guy]

Yep - all I'd need would be for a paranormal practitioner to contact James Randi and return with a message from James confirming that all of these paranormal "practices" and "theories" are complete nonsense.

In his expertly informed skepticism Randi followed Harry Houdini, who exposed many fraudulent claimants to paranormal powers. Before Houdini died, he famously left his widow Bess a secret message that she could use to test anyone who claimed to contact his spirit. He assured her that, if it was really him, then he would not fail to mention the pre-arranged nonsense text; the text used a private code, which Harry and Bess had used in a mentalist act, to convey the word, “believe”.

A few years after Harry’s death, Bess did at one point acknowledge that a medium had successfully produced the secret message. She afterwards declared it a trick, however, and it seems likely that she inadvertently gave away the secret during a difficult patch in her life.

I heard Randi once when he gave an after-dinner speech at a physics conference. His speech was entertaining and enlightening, but for me his upbeat ending fell flat. Contrasting the delusions of believers with the steady progress of science, he declared that he himself was “going to the stars”. To me he already looked a bit too old for that. I didn’t reckon he’d live to see humans on Mars, let alone other stars.

Randi himself certainly wasn’t going to get off Earth in any way or sense other than the mystical ones he had spent his speech disavowing. And pretending that the hope for scientific progress by the human species in the distant future was an emotionally satisfying substitute for a personal afterlife seemed as big a delusion as any; it was almost as if Randi hadn’t really faced his own conclusion.

Probably he just felt a need to end his speech on a high note and said the most Rah-rah thing he could think of to say, without really meaning it seriously. He was a performer first and a skeptic second, after all.