Xref: utzoo sci.bio:1378 sci.misc:2187 Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!nrl-cmf!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!microsoft!gordonl From: gordonl@microsoft.UUCP (Gordon Letwin) Newsgroups: sci.bio,sci.misc Subject: Re: Strange results in Nature article (fallout...) Summary: support for debunking Keywords: skepticism debunking Message-ID: <1653@microsoft.UUCP> Date: 29 Jul 88 00:54:23 GMT References: <1911@aecom.YU.EDU> <6445@megaron.arizona.edu> <492@metapsy.UUCP> Organization: Microsoft, Inc., Redmond, Washington Lines: 123 In article <492@metapsy.UUCP>, sarge@metapsy.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode) writes: > I found the data on the Amazing Randi's investigation of the Nature article > unfortunate and unsurprising. > > Randi already "knows" that nothing unusual could ever happen. He is no > scientist, nor does he have the spirit of the true scientific investigator, in > my opinion, which is a committment to discover the truth, whatever it be. > ..... > He, and his fellow "CSICOP" professional debunkers, are, in my > view, doing the scientific community a disservice by intimidating and > ridiculing those who have unusual ideas that could lead to major breakthroughs > in unimagined areas. Perhaps 99.9999 % of these wild ideas are fallacious, but > if some are not and are not being given a fair trial because of the negative PR > generated by CSICOP, then we could be missing out on some pretty exciting > advances. This is incorrect. I agree that some super large percentage of these ideas are bogus. And how much time would be spent pursuing 999,999 bogus (and often fradulent, in fact) claims, time which couldn't be spent pursuing valid claims? And what about support for science from the public, gvmnt, universitys, when lots of effort is spent on stuff which is garbage? It's very valuable to detect and discard bogosity as soon as possible. The fact is, nearly all such claims are nonsense, and the most efficient thing to do to advance science is to treat them just that way: "almost certainly nonsense." As someone (forget who) once said, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". You disagree with this tenent; you claim that extraordinary claims should be accepted on the basis of "ordinary" proofs, extraordinary claims that as other posters have pointed out, would throw a monkey wrench into practially all fields of physical and organic chemistry. Sending James Randi was a completely appropriate thing to do. Come on, Sarge, use your diagnostic talents: Here you have this *extraordinary* claim. It can be explained three different ways: 1) it's true 2) the experimenters fucked up accidentally 3) fraud Of the three, you yourself admit that #1 is pretty damn unlikely. And #2 is less likely because the experimenters claim that they used great care and replicated the experiment - it's not a 'research note' by someone who is getting anomolous results from dirty glassware. So #3 has to loom big in your mind. Fraud happens on a daily basis in the scientific world. There are many many examples of key scientific studies that were fraudulent. Some famous twin studies come to mind, and the guy who injected ink into mice to make their coats turn colours. Given the facts of this case, fraud is a very very plausible hyphothesis, and Randi is an expert at detecting fraud. Scientists usually think that they're too smart to be defrauded, and yet they've been shown, time and again, to be easy marks. (There was a case of a legitimate scientist who was doing ESP research. Randi offered to vet his protocol to protect against fraud, but he said, "no, no one will be able to fool me". Randi explicitly warned him against magicians and conjurers. Then Randi had a couple of teenage magicians enroll as subjects, and they EVEN LISTED THEIR OCCUPATIONS AS MAGICIANS on the forms they filled out. They then proceeded to run this guy around in circles, with tricks that seem to us, when we read about them, as trivial and obvious. After this guy announced his amazing findings, Randi's cohorts revealed themselves. In some of the cases, the magicians even had their own video tapes of them pulling the tricks. I heard on the radio the French scientist bitching about Randi being there, him saying indignantly, "They were *looking* for fraud." Damn right they were. No appologies. The odds of their being fraud are 1000 times greater than the odds of the result being correct. If I were the experimenter, I'd realize this and not be offended. I'd say, "there's no fraud, so let them look." Nobody has every produced even a semi-plausable argument that Randi lies or makes up evidence of fraud. If he can't find any, he'll say so. > It's like the mutation theory of evolution -- perhaps 99.9999 % of > mutations are lethal or contra-survival, but if we took steps to eliminate all > mutation altogether, what would happen to evolution? You've got it all wrong. The issue is not to kill - to ignore heritical ideas. That would be easy. Circular file the paper. Forget those guys. Don't send Randi to france, just say "it ain't so because I say so." Since they DID send an investigative team, it shows that they WEREN'T discarding wild ideas. They were just testing them to make sure that time and money and effort wasn't wasted on a wild goose chase, which history shows us is nearly always the case. > Fallacious ideas -- > mainstream or otherwise -- are eventually discovered in the course of unbiased, > dispassionate investigation. We do not need a special "thought police" to > protect us from ourselves. No thought police here. As per my previous paragraph. This isn't the church saying "we don't want to hear it", this is just some guys saying "we wanna strip search you because your claim is so extraordinary." > I do think that a claim that lays waste to a useful scientific schema requires > a higher standard of proof than a claim that is compatible with that schema. A > certain conservatism is beneficial. But the possibility of error in the > received schema must always be considered to be there, for a true scientist. Exactly right. So where's your beef? Such a wild claim needed to meet a really high standard. And that means inspection for fraud, going over everything with a fine tooth comb, etc., etc. To sum up, the fact that this effort was taken shows that the possibility of error in a received schema was considered, you betcha. Otherwise, why waste your time? And if your complaint is that the investgator's report said, "invalid experiment", then YOU'RE the one who is denying facts and data in favor of your schema, because you're not arguing that the investigation was done poorly, or that they came to their conclusion incorrectly, you're just saying that they done wrong to investigate and conclude "bullshit". > -- > -------------------- > Sarge Gerbode -- UUCP: pyramid!thirdi!metapsy!sarge > Institute for Research in Metapsychology > 950 Guinda St. Palo Alto, CA 94301 Gordon Letwin Microsoft