Everyone has a life, so no worries. I often have to find time to respond to things in between working a full-time job, running a website, publishing writings online, plenty of academic reading, and more. Which is why all the fuss I sometimes hear about ‘having too much free time’ to write a few paragraphs is such a bad faith accusation. It’s usually the lazy resort to excuse curt behavior.
It’s up to you if you choose to reply to any of what follows, of course. I’m not holding it against anyone if they get too busy or opt not to respond. But I did give your link a read and there are several thoughts I felt like sharing on it.
Despite the promising title, that article touches only so briefly on the evidence it summarizes. There are two links to papers locked behind the registration wall for Academia.edu, and aside from this the only thing really discussed at any length at all in it is the meta-analysis referred to towards the end. The rest of the piece indulges more in criticizing the perceived attitudes and personalities of skeptics who are mostly left unnamed and uncited. The irony is that I’m relatively sure you and a lot of your friends in the RV community would be none too pleased at the brazenness and arrogance of any skeptics that might take the very same sweeping approach of attacking the collective credibility of all believers in RV.
Unfortunately, I have to limit my comments to the meta-analysis, since I don’t have access to Academia.edu. Assuming that the studies in these meta-analyses are using Cohen’s d to measure effect size, most of the effect sizes found in them *are* small by Cohen’s own metric — which is 0.8 for large, 0.5 for medium, and 0.2 for small. The numbers for RV research that are given in the article are 0.14, 0.21, 0.23, 0.21, 0.16, etc. In fact, not a one of them cracks 0.3, and a few of them are even below 0.2.
Effect size basically tells us the strength or magnitude of whatever effect is being studied. There’s a common wisdom in statistical research that statistical significance, by itself, is not that useful of a measure. While that’s true in the sense of its limitations, there are also limits to what effect size can tell us by itself. When there is no null hypothesis to consider, or alternative explanations of the phenomenon to measure against, effect size— especially a small one — is not going to shatter any ceilings for psi research.
Bryan Williams’ comparison of these results against the replication attempts by the Open Science Collaboration and Camerer et al. strikes me as bordering on disingenuous. Both these studies are well-known parts of the replication crisis in medicine and the social sciences. There are implications coming out of the crisis for both the integrity of many meta-analyses and for studies that rely perhaps too heavily on effect sizes. From the excerpt, it doesn’t sound to me like either Williams or the author of the article understands that this lowering of the playing field is actually not the happy opportunity for psi research to look better by contrast. Instead, it’s putting psi research on the same bad grounding as a whole lot of studies that are having to be thrown out in other fields for some of the same reasons to which I’ve just alluded.
There’s something they teach in a lot of philosophy courses called steel-manning. To steel-man is the opposite of what it is to straw-man your opponent. You try to give the best representation of their arguments, so that when you make your critique, your critique is that much stronger for it. Otherwise, you look like you’re attacking an easy target possibly because your own position is not such a strong one. I would think honest proponents of RV research would be more concerned to show the strength of their position in comparison to well-established research, rather than hitching themselves to what it’s not hyperbolic to call a sinking ship.
I’m not interested in defending disinviting anyone from a conference, restricting access to journals, or similar behaviors that may be taken against people that practice or believe in what doesn’t fit with mainstream science. I’m a metaphysical materialist and a skeptic, but my materialism is not a rigid physicalism nor is my skepticism based on beliefs about the “laws of physics” that I would actually confess to seeing as relatively antiquated in most of their popular conceptions. None of this is necessary to holding reasonable doubts about the existence of psychic phenomena, as I feel I’ve adequately demonstrated by now. The article you’ve provided to “counter” my claims still leaves more than a few of them unaddressed entirely, and I can’t help noticing how quickly you dropped the subject of the CIA and U.S. military programs when I linked you to the actual documentation.
All the same, though, thanks for the conversation.
