Analysing Skeptics?
























6 responses to “Analysing Skeptics?

  1. Excellent post, with which I agree entirely.

    If supporters of the paranormal allege there is evidence of it, and if they accuse science of ignoring it, then it’s disingenuous of them to then claim it only works sporadically, or can’t be tested, because these are features that exclude it from scientific consideration in the first place. The reality is, of course, that almost everyone has had at least one weird experience in their life, many experience several. It takes a leap of reason to realise that these experiences are psychological in origin, both the actual experience and the way we later recall it. Hence even people who don’t ‘believe’ in the paranormal will, in effect, contradict themselves by saying ‘but there are things we can’t explain’ (implying supernatural, that is).

    There’s also the point that the scientist who actually finds genuine evidence of the paranormal would become renowned over night. Of course, if they announced this with the level of evidence presented by the parapsychologists then they’d be treated as a joke.


    • Geoff, thanks for your comment.

      The woo folk do not understand why their so-called evidence for the paranormal does not meet even the minimum standards required by science. If they did understand, then they wouldn’t be using the only other option they have, namely ad hominem attacks against science in general and sceptics in particular.

      They only compound their problem when they assume they know enough about psychology to “explain” why sceptics like me (and you, I guess) lift an eyebrow and shake our heads at paranormal claims. The irony, of course, is that there are sound psychological reasons why the believers themselves stick resolutely to faith claims that they cannot prove, and which have very often been completely disproven.

      I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: a sceptic’s work is never done.


  2. Michael Prescott
    He thinks thoughts can turn into spirits and take on objective existence, he also thinks ectoplasm is real (it was cheesecloth), he believes in levitation of tables too. Nuff said. He has fooled himself.


  3. I arrived at this entry searching for “psychology of believers in pseudoscience”. You say that pseudoscience believers attack you as not reading their evidence. For four months I have debated a man who fits the personality profile of low self-steem, low agreeableness, high distrust for authority, nay, for everything and I’m already fed up with his arrogance and ignorance. At first I thought it could be interesting to see what he had to provide and, as you, I have cared to read (begin to read is more accurate) everything he has pointed out as “evidence”, which has been a stream of flawed logic, failure to understand probability, failure to understand conditional probability, failure to understand that science doesn’t explain the why (just the how), failure to understand that science never promised to understand everything, failure to understand double blind experiments and the scientific method in general, and so on and so forth. After having began to read all these “evidence”, I can only classify the authors as broken, arrogant fools, begging for validation and money in the worst case, or simply ignorant, well meaning fools in the best case. It’s sad that some of these authors are scientists working at universities with a track record of published papers and academic qualifications (Gary Schwartz, author of The afterlife experiments, a book full of nonsense not because of what he is investigating, but because not one of his experiments satisfies proper scientific standards). The man I have been meeting is certainly not after fame or fortune, and doesn’t have the mental capacity to scheme in any way. He’s a nice, well-meaning fool who lives in a world of fantasy. He lives 100% off the government and is disconnected from the reality of how ideas are evaluated. To illustrate his broken logic: one of his contentions with science is that any fenomenon that cannot be explained with the current paradigm is dismissed as unpublishable or false. There is no point in arguing then that Einstein was reviled by his fellow scientists, that he rendered the Newtonian understanding obsolete, and that his theories were accepted after they agreed with experiment. Just as there is no point in arguing about how QM also turned classical understanding upside down (in its domain of the very little), and was accepted after the experiments began working out. To people on this level of ignorance, it’s easy to dismiss Einstein, quantum mechanics and everything else as wrong, or a conspiracy. But when I point out that savants exist, and that no one doubts them, and yet there is no theory for how they perform their feats of memory, no understanding, but that they deliver everytime, that they “work” in the presence of skeptics, and how charlatans do not reach even that level, he pauses and mumbles some excuse, unable to continue. To him, savants were cute, sympathetic, living proof that everything is possible and that science does not understand everything, therefore all of it must be wrong.


    • Lara, thanks for commenting.

      I detect some frustration in your comment, but I would suggest it’s not worth worrying about. True believers (in anything) will never change their minds about their firmly held beliefs. But worse than that, there is what is known as the “backfire effect,” in other words, even if you provide positive proof that they are wrong, it only strengthens their belief.

      Personally, I don’t see myself as trying to convince any believers that they might be wrong, although I do see myself as trying to get any believer to provide convincing evidence that their paranormal beliefs might be true. Much of the evidence for the paranormal is weak at best, and there are, as you say, many flaws in the evidence the proponents of the paranormal put forward.

      I don’t mind if anyone can prove the existence of any alleged paranormal phenomenon, although the evidence would have to stand up to scrutiny, especially the need for any such evidence to be tested and confirmed by independent scientific researchers.

      It seems to me that parapsychology research will not make much (if any) progress until those researchers are willing to accept that there are flaws in their research methodology, and change accordingly. However, even when some psychics are caught out in blatant fraud, the believers just brush it aside. Eusapia Palladino, for instance, was caught repeatedly cheating, but the investigators assumed that when they didn’t catch her out then she must be producing genuine psychic powers. A similar thing happened with Colin Fry when someone switched the lights on during a supposed séance and saw he was walking around waving a spirit trumpet everyone thought was flying because of psychic energy. Just two examples among many, but the believers are not going to accept that maybe – just maybe – their preferred psychics might not really be psychic at all. And it goes without saying that any psychics caught out in fraud are still going to be supported by those who believe in them.

      It looks to me like you are debating with someone whose mind is not only closed, but welded firmly shut. Personally, I think you might as well give up on him.


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