I keep reading little mentions, here and there that entire lines of scientific inquiry were quashed over the last century.
As someone who is fascinated by the UFO witnesses coming forward, which I have posted about on this site to standard ridicule, I think theres something to it.
But as a former member of CFI, I am well aware of the number and levels of grifters in the world. So I look forward to that intersection, of impeccable reputation and genuine curiosity in a single person, who decides to ressurect these dead threads of research.
If the 1930s ESP experiments showed anomalies, lets reproduce them and learn something new. Same goes with Townsend Brown's high voltage gravity anomalies. I hope, but I expect to die disappointed.
I dunno. I can understand OP's point, but in an era where bullshit runs rampant at every level of society, it's hard for me to agree that "We need to hear these guys out" is either a priority or a generally good idea.
> “I found myself attacked by the Committee members and board, who considered me to be too soft on the paranormalists,”
It is actually a pretty interesting point to consider deeply. Engaging with people from a position of constructive scepticism does require going in with an open mind that could realistically be changed. However, anyone who has done that once or twice quickly realises that:
1) Most people appear to have avoided thinking critically about any of their beliefs at all. At best they are repeating poorly-understood arguments from other people they respect, at worst they are playing team sports.
2) Many topical problems appear to have been settled decades or centuries ago and people are just not interested in the problems they are professing to be concerned about. This happens a lot in politics; it is wildly unusual for a new topic to come before a legislative body and most policies that make it through the process haven't been thoughtfully assessed in terms of what happened the last time people tried it. The fact that people want to tinker with the laws at all is actually a pretty big tell that the process is weird - the situation a society faces doesn't change so quickly that the laws need to be adjusted every year. It should be a rather rare thing.
It requires a sophisticated understanding of the world and an unusual grasp of empathy to maintain a level of honest scepticism in the face of those two dynamics. Trying to have a conversation about why people believe something just turns up the answer that they do and they don't have any particular reason. Most of the time there isn't anything to discuss or dig in to.
About 20 years ago I used to volunteer for CICAP, the Italian skeptics society. One year we had a big convention with lots of cool speakers. Obviously also some weirdos with wacky ideas showed up at the venue. I will always remember how Marino, one of the senior members, used to interact with them: he didn’t take them seriously, but he made them feel heard. I bet many of them came ready for a “fight” (or to be ridiculed) and they found enough respect to be content and leave in peace.
It should be noted that the author thinks ESP is a Thing, and it's worthy of study / research. They're essentially concern-trolling / no-true-scotsman-ing skeptics - that they're not the right kind of skeptics or occasionally skeptics also did misleading things, and bullied those poor poor ESP researchers and hurt the field of ESP research and that's why we don't hwave any proof ESP is a thing. That a skeptic didn't perfectly skeptic-ize a ESP researcher (or two, or three) doesn't mean ESP research has the slightest legitimacy or value because regardless of a skeptic's methods, the burden of evidence on something as extraordinary as ESP is purely on the researcher claiming ESP exists.
Of James Randi, he complains in another article (which for some reason BoingBoing published...) on his site: "[Randi made] it more difficult for serious university-based and academically trained researchers to study ESP and mental anomalies, and to receive a fair hearing in the news media."
Uh....Yes? That was the point? Randi dedicated his time and energy to debunking shysters. At best they were seeking fame while popularizing paranormal crap and hurting scientific literacy...and at worst taking advantage of people finanically to varying degrees.
TV used to be awash in idiots claiming to be psychic or able to do absurd things like magnetize their bodies with their mind. I remember Randi was on such a show with such a "magnetic" person, watched them stick something metal to their body...then he whips out a container of baby powder, applies it to the guy who claimed to be able to magnetize himself...and wouldn't you know, the "magnetism" disappeared....because the reason something metal stuck to him was because his sweaty skin had enough stiction (and probably using some rosin to 'help') and use a part of their body angled a bit from vertical. And Randi then demonstrates this, showing he can "magnetize" himself, too.
Randi was a magician, saw people abusing lazy/shitty magic to rip people off, and didn't like that. And the world is a better place for it. That he had an ego, or that his methods weren't perfect, or he was too aggressive for the author's taste - is all completely irrelevant.
What's next, complaining that some doctor is an asshole for appearing on TV to refute people claiming ivermectin cures covid, thus making it impossible for people to seriously study ivermectin's covid benefits? Or that they were too aggressive in responding to the shyster?
>Randi dedicated his time and energy to debunking shysters.
That's not how I see Randi. I see him as a profoundly dishonest person who claimed to be doing debunking when in fact he was not.
Debunking is great, but it requires actual attention and critique. Randi customarily dismissed weird claims and claimed that they had "failed his test." In fact he had not tested them; he had not done anything more than glance at them and toss the letters in his outbox or his trash.
For example, it is very weird to claim a human can go indefinitely without food. If presented as a miracle, this claim is called "inedia." Randi received letters from presumably delusional or dishonest people who claimed to be able to live without food in a miraculous sense. Randi claimed that he had debunked these claims but he never investigated them. If he had actually taken the trouble to debunk these claims, he would have been a real debunker. Because he dismissed the claims out of hand and declared victory, he was a charlatan. Randi was very willing to have CSICOP collect donations for his cause, but he did very little actual debunking.
If an honest debunker -- someone like Feynman -- had been approached by such a claim, Feynman would have met the claimant, said a lot of rude things, and written something informative. He might have actually taken some numerical measurements. That is the sort of debunking I would pay money for.
On very rare occasions, Randi tried to do some real debunking. The results were not what I would call satisfactory. His colleagues at CSICOP (later CSI) were a little more diligent, but not very good at debunking. An example is the Demkina case.
CSI/CSICOP was supposed to be providing a team of experts, but they bumbled around like the Keystone Cops. CSICOP, to me, seems to have the same problem as allegedly "Christian" churches -- the preachers talk a lot, claim to embrace lofty ideals, collect monetary donations, and nothing useful happens. I don't believe these self-proclaimed "Christians" are worthy of the name -- why would I believe that self-proclaimed "skeptics" are worthy of the name?
>Randi dedicated his time and energy to debunking shysters.
A lot of people informally call Randi himself a "shyster." But if you mean "shyster" in a legal sense, the only "shyster" Randi spent time and energy on was Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga.
When you say "shyster" you are using loaded, ambiguous language. A scholar would define his terms more clearly. You are probably referring to people like Uri Geller, who are semi-public figures that make money by making claims that are hard/impossible to verify through respectable channels. You might center your definition of "shyster" on Uri Geller or some other public figure.
I don't want to put words in your mouth. I would truly love to see your definition of "shyster," and refer to the professional community that accepts your definition. Then I would ask the professionals why Randi himself does not fit the description of "shyster."
If you believe (first) that people like Uri Geller are shysters and (second) that Randi made the world a better place by harassing people like Uri Geller, you can provide a definition of "shyster" that can be referred to the appropriate professional body -- perhaps the American Bar Association or the I.C.E.
> This kind of misinformation is often recycled in journalism and reference literature [ ... ]
Including this article, whose preferred outlook quickly becomes clear. This can all be resolved by objective research programs having strong controls and a high bar of statistical significance (much higher than P = 0.05). Speaking hypothetically, of course.
> My sympathies for parapsychology are self-evident.
This should be the first sentence in the article, not nearly the last, buried in the footnotes.
The article tries to say that, because of bad actors, parapsychology research has failed to resolve basic scientific issues. This is false. Bad actors on both sides notwithstanding, an evidence vacuum continues to draw air away, leaving room only for breathless argument.
If you're actually interested in skepticism, I recommend the podcast Skeptics Guide to the Universe (SGU). James Randi was a good friend of the hosts. The show mainly is a discussion of general science news from a skeptical lens. Their attitude towards the paranormal stuff is pretty dismissive, but this is because they've engaged with the believers for decades and have discovered a complete disregard for evidence or truth in those communities.
I also really the movie "behind the curve", which goes deep into the flat earth movement. Really a great way to understand what motivates these people (status in their community, mostly) and how they think (with lots of bias).
>If any of this stuff worked, there would be commercial applications by now
Criticism A: Lots of people claim to have made money off dowsing/clairvoyance for mineral exploration. Debunking them is nontrivial. McMoneagle would be a tough nut to crack.
Criticism B: If an oil company is using an alleged clairvoyant such as McMoneagle, they are not likely to be candid and are not likely to cooperate with debunkers.
Criticism C: The market is frequently unfair and genuine working inventions don't always get to market.
Interesting. During my life, I met two "belligerent skeptic" types, who, as mentioned in this essay, were more interested in personal attacks than anything else.
Both came from families where they were force-fed religion at young age and this was their method of revenge.
While I understand their motivation, it is a "two wrongs don't make a right" situation. Creating an emotional association "science == assholes" is already backfiring on us quite hard.
I got about half way through the article and wasn't sure what I was reading, or if it was worth my time so I had Perplexity summarize it for me [1].
Tbh, from the title I had expected it to be how skeptics were dealing with living in a post truth world under a Trump presidency, but it's in regards to the paranormal & 'parapsychology'.
> Neither parapsychology, nor any science, can thrive without them.
This is an absurd article. Scepticism is not the psychological disposition to treat the increasingly implausible with the same equanimity as the increasingly plausible. The sceptic is under no obligation to ignore decades or centuries of science, nor be partisan to no established body of knowledge.
Sceptics are at their very best profoundly partisan to such bodies of knowledge, and at the same time, very mindful and knowledgeable about their limitations. Otherwise scepticism is just paranoia or gullibility.
This is an article in praise of gullibility as the highest form of scepticism, a very common attempted rebuke to sceptics when one has failed to meet the reasonable standard of evidence they demand.
It is also a subtle ad-hom, it says, "look at some of the mild hubris and minor moral failures of some particular sceptics" whilst sneaking its way to, "Neither parapsychology, nor any science, can thrive without them.". As if there is a connection.
The principled and knowlegable sceptic, who is not credulous nor obnoxious, not paranoid nor overly trusting -- this is a person in 2025 who would give no time to "parapsychology" because of the decades of time already given, to great effect. There is no science there, no truth, nothing.
>Scepticism is not the psychological disposition to treat the increasingly implausible with the same equanimity as the increasingly plausible.
Okay, maybe that is a fair description of skepticism, but you're stating it as if you're an authority. I don't know that you're an authority on skepticism.
>The sceptic is under no obligation to ignore decades or centuries of science, nor be partisan to no established body of knowledge.
I don't think there is any authority figure who can say what skeptics are obliged to do or not to do.
>Sceptics are at their very best profoundly partisan to such bodies of knowledge,
I have no reason to believe you know what the "best" sort of skeptic is.
>This is an article in praise of gullibility as the highest form of scepticism, a very common attempted rebuke to sceptics when one has failed to meet the reasonable standard of evidence they demand.
I don't think you are reading the article correctly. I don't expect you to justify your interpretation to me, but I wonder whether you have a method to justify your interpretations to anybody. Maybe you are a very systematic and logical debunker, and you can justify your debunking calculations to your peers. If that is so, you should be a university professor or a think-tank principal investigator. You could share your debunking methods with the world that needs them.
>It is also a subtle ad-hom,
I think you are misreading that.
>The principled and knowlegable sceptic, who is not credulous nor obnoxious, not paranoid nor overly trusting -- this is a person in 2025 who would give no time to "parapsychology"
Well, maybe you really are qualified to decide which skeptics are principled and well-informed. If you really are qualified, you should be teaching others to be skeptics. If your methods really are so foolproof, you could purge the world of superstition.
But maybe you are not qualified to speak as if you were an authority on who is a skeptic and what methods are skeptical methods.
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."
What I found most interesting in the article was the frank acknowledgement by J B Rhine that Walter Levy, director of the Institute for Parapsychology was committing fraud.
I view research into parapsychology with a background assumption that I understand the motivation. Reductionist materialism suggests that death is the end. Parapsychology may imply the existence of souls, a spiritual realm, life after death, and maybe the chance of heaven. What wonderful balm for existential angst!
Does this make me doubt research into parapsychology? No, quite the opposite. A researcher can only soothe the pain of existential angst with genuine results. If they fake the research, they know that they faked it, and it provides no consolation. My take is that I cannot dismiss positive results in parapsychology as fraud.
Grifters are real. It is possible in principle that researchers in parapsychology are faking results with an eye to making money selling pills that "boost your ESP". I think that I am able to spot and dismiss grifts without difficulty, and that it is not what is at issue here.
But now I learn that I'm wrong. Walter Levy's results are fake. I have to flip from modus ponens to modus tollens. Instead of saying "I understand the motivation, therefore Levy's results are genuine", I have to say "Levy's results are fake, therefore I don't understand the motivation".
I'm in a pickle. A central principle of how I understand the world is that fraud is motivated. No motive, no fraud. Now what? Since there is motiveless fraud, much of what I thought I knew about the world is on shaky ground.
My form of skepticism is just waiting for proof. Happy to wait. Costs me nothing. Just get the proof from your hands to mine without it vanishing into smoke.
I think software engineering opens the mind a little to being willing to believe things that should be impossible. Some of my bugs are certainly ghost stories: "...and the programmer never figured out how something that weird could be happening!" Others have pushed me to the brink of questioning my own sanity, only to have it all snap back into place when the explanation is finally laid bare.
While I have no particular reason to "believe in ESP" it is impossible not to recognize the very real state it puts a person in to have seen some kind of evidence that nobody else will believe, and I don't necessarily see any reason to suppose that someone somewhere in this psychic card testing didn't see evidence of some real information transfer effect. But what effect?
We know beyond doubt that people can pick up on perceptual signals without really understanding what we're picking up on. I once had the strange experience of "seeing" a cat in pitch black because I was creeping up some stairs and the cat was a few feet directly in front of my head. I'll swear to you up and down that I never saw it with my eyes, though I couldn't say for sure. I'm convinced that I actually heard it, not even its breathing but the lack of any ambient room noise coming from directly in front of me caused an immediate cognitive dissonance in some part of my brain that knew nothing should be there to absorb sound. In the immediate moment this led to my knowing something irretrievably that at the time I really could not say how I knew. But also I was blessed with proof. I reached out, and there was a cat there.
I guess my point is that the most logical explanation to me is that in a card-guessing experiment you have two players who keep careful records but who both want the guessing game to be won by the guesser. You're allowed to keep playing with different guessers and to keep practicing the game until you get results, so it's logical to me that you should eventually find a guesser with whom you build a rapport, and who becomes able to pick up on impossibly small clues that the clue-giver does not know they are giving and the guesser does not know they are receiving. Nothing about my skepticism of supernatural claims prevents me thinking a guesser could develop an outside-logic means of perception that could explain those kinds of results.
19 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 37.8 ms ] threadAs someone who is fascinated by the UFO witnesses coming forward, which I have posted about on this site to standard ridicule, I think theres something to it.
But as a former member of CFI, I am well aware of the number and levels of grifters in the world. So I look forward to that intersection, of impeccable reputation and genuine curiosity in a single person, who decides to ressurect these dead threads of research.
If the 1930s ESP experiments showed anomalies, lets reproduce them and learn something new. Same goes with Townsend Brown's high voltage gravity anomalies. I hope, but I expect to die disappointed.
It is actually a pretty interesting point to consider deeply. Engaging with people from a position of constructive scepticism does require going in with an open mind that could realistically be changed. However, anyone who has done that once or twice quickly realises that:
1) Most people appear to have avoided thinking critically about any of their beliefs at all. At best they are repeating poorly-understood arguments from other people they respect, at worst they are playing team sports.
2) Many topical problems appear to have been settled decades or centuries ago and people are just not interested in the problems they are professing to be concerned about. This happens a lot in politics; it is wildly unusual for a new topic to come before a legislative body and most policies that make it through the process haven't been thoughtfully assessed in terms of what happened the last time people tried it. The fact that people want to tinker with the laws at all is actually a pretty big tell that the process is weird - the situation a society faces doesn't change so quickly that the laws need to be adjusted every year. It should be a rather rare thing.
It requires a sophisticated understanding of the world and an unusual grasp of empathy to maintain a level of honest scepticism in the face of those two dynamics. Trying to have a conversation about why people believe something just turns up the answer that they do and they don't have any particular reason. Most of the time there isn't anything to discuss or dig in to.
Of James Randi, he complains in another article (which for some reason BoingBoing published...) on his site: "[Randi made] it more difficult for serious university-based and academically trained researchers to study ESP and mental anomalies, and to receive a fair hearing in the news media."
Uh....Yes? That was the point? Randi dedicated his time and energy to debunking shysters. At best they were seeking fame while popularizing paranormal crap and hurting scientific literacy...and at worst taking advantage of people finanically to varying degrees.
TV used to be awash in idiots claiming to be psychic or able to do absurd things like magnetize their bodies with their mind. I remember Randi was on such a show with such a "magnetic" person, watched them stick something metal to their body...then he whips out a container of baby powder, applies it to the guy who claimed to be able to magnetize himself...and wouldn't you know, the "magnetism" disappeared....because the reason something metal stuck to him was because his sweaty skin had enough stiction (and probably using some rosin to 'help') and use a part of their body angled a bit from vertical. And Randi then demonstrates this, showing he can "magnetize" himself, too.
Randi was a magician, saw people abusing lazy/shitty magic to rip people off, and didn't like that. And the world is a better place for it. That he had an ego, or that his methods weren't perfect, or he was too aggressive for the author's taste - is all completely irrelevant.
What's next, complaining that some doctor is an asshole for appearing on TV to refute people claiming ivermectin cures covid, thus making it impossible for people to seriously study ivermectin's covid benefits? Or that they were too aggressive in responding to the shyster?
That's not how I see Randi. I see him as a profoundly dishonest person who claimed to be doing debunking when in fact he was not.
Debunking is great, but it requires actual attention and critique. Randi customarily dismissed weird claims and claimed that they had "failed his test." In fact he had not tested them; he had not done anything more than glance at them and toss the letters in his outbox or his trash.
For example, it is very weird to claim a human can go indefinitely without food. If presented as a miracle, this claim is called "inedia." Randi received letters from presumably delusional or dishonest people who claimed to be able to live without food in a miraculous sense. Randi claimed that he had debunked these claims but he never investigated them. If he had actually taken the trouble to debunk these claims, he would have been a real debunker. Because he dismissed the claims out of hand and declared victory, he was a charlatan. Randi was very willing to have CSICOP collect donations for his cause, but he did very little actual debunking.
If an honest debunker -- someone like Feynman -- had been approached by such a claim, Feynman would have met the claimant, said a lot of rude things, and written something informative. He might have actually taken some numerical measurements. That is the sort of debunking I would pay money for.
On very rare occasions, Randi tried to do some real debunking. The results were not what I would call satisfactory. His colleagues at CSICOP (later CSI) were a little more diligent, but not very good at debunking. An example is the Demkina case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natasha_Demkina
CSI/CSICOP was supposed to be providing a team of experts, but they bumbled around like the Keystone Cops. CSICOP, to me, seems to have the same problem as allegedly "Christian" churches -- the preachers talk a lot, claim to embrace lofty ideals, collect monetary donations, and nothing useful happens. I don't believe these self-proclaimed "Christians" are worthy of the name -- why would I believe that self-proclaimed "skeptics" are worthy of the name?
A lot of people informally call Randi himself a "shyster." But if you mean "shyster" in a legal sense, the only "shyster" Randi spent time and energy on was Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga.
When you say "shyster" you are using loaded, ambiguous language. A scholar would define his terms more clearly. You are probably referring to people like Uri Geller, who are semi-public figures that make money by making claims that are hard/impossible to verify through respectable channels. You might center your definition of "shyster" on Uri Geller or some other public figure.
I don't want to put words in your mouth. I would truly love to see your definition of "shyster," and refer to the professional community that accepts your definition. Then I would ask the professionals why Randi himself does not fit the description of "shyster."
If you believe (first) that people like Uri Geller are shysters and (second) that Randi made the world a better place by harassing people like Uri Geller, you can provide a definition of "shyster" that can be referred to the appropriate professional body -- perhaps the American Bar Association or the I.C.E.
Including this article, whose preferred outlook quickly becomes clear. This can all be resolved by objective research programs having strong controls and a high bar of statistical significance (much higher than P = 0.05). Speaking hypothetically, of course.
> My sympathies for parapsychology are self-evident.
This should be the first sentence in the article, not nearly the last, buried in the footnotes.
The article tries to say that, because of bad actors, parapsychology research has failed to resolve basic scientific issues. This is false. Bad actors on both sides notwithstanding, an evidence vacuum continues to draw air away, leaving room only for breathless argument.
I also really the movie "behind the curve", which goes deep into the flat earth movement. Really a great way to understand what motivates these people (status in their community, mostly) and how they think (with lots of bias).
If any of this stuff worked, there would be commercial applications by now.
[1] https://xkcd.com/808/
Criticism A: Lots of people claim to have made money off dowsing/clairvoyance for mineral exploration. Debunking them is nontrivial. McMoneagle would be a tough nut to crack.
Criticism B: If an oil company is using an alleged clairvoyant such as McMoneagle, they are not likely to be candid and are not likely to cooperate with debunkers.
Criticism C: The market is frequently unfair and genuine working inventions don't always get to market.
Both came from families where they were force-fed religion at young age and this was their method of revenge.
While I understand their motivation, it is a "two wrongs don't make a right" situation. Creating an emotional association "science == assholes" is already backfiring on us quite hard.
Tbh, from the title I had expected it to be how skeptics were dealing with living in a post truth world under a Trump presidency, but it's in regards to the paranormal & 'parapsychology'.
[1] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/summarize-this-article-for-...
This is an absurd article. Scepticism is not the psychological disposition to treat the increasingly implausible with the same equanimity as the increasingly plausible. The sceptic is under no obligation to ignore decades or centuries of science, nor be partisan to no established body of knowledge.
Sceptics are at their very best profoundly partisan to such bodies of knowledge, and at the same time, very mindful and knowledgeable about their limitations. Otherwise scepticism is just paranoia or gullibility.
This is an article in praise of gullibility as the highest form of scepticism, a very common attempted rebuke to sceptics when one has failed to meet the reasonable standard of evidence they demand.
It is also a subtle ad-hom, it says, "look at some of the mild hubris and minor moral failures of some particular sceptics" whilst sneaking its way to, "Neither parapsychology, nor any science, can thrive without them.". As if there is a connection.
The principled and knowlegable sceptic, who is not credulous nor obnoxious, not paranoid nor overly trusting -- this is a person in 2025 who would give no time to "parapsychology" because of the decades of time already given, to great effect. There is no science there, no truth, nothing.
Okay, maybe that is a fair description of skepticism, but you're stating it as if you're an authority. I don't know that you're an authority on skepticism.
>The sceptic is under no obligation to ignore decades or centuries of science, nor be partisan to no established body of knowledge.
I don't think there is any authority figure who can say what skeptics are obliged to do or not to do.
>Sceptics are at their very best profoundly partisan to such bodies of knowledge,
I have no reason to believe you know what the "best" sort of skeptic is.
>This is an article in praise of gullibility as the highest form of scepticism, a very common attempted rebuke to sceptics when one has failed to meet the reasonable standard of evidence they demand.
I don't think you are reading the article correctly. I don't expect you to justify your interpretation to me, but I wonder whether you have a method to justify your interpretations to anybody. Maybe you are a very systematic and logical debunker, and you can justify your debunking calculations to your peers. If that is so, you should be a university professor or a think-tank principal investigator. You could share your debunking methods with the world that needs them.
>It is also a subtle ad-hom,
I think you are misreading that.
>The principled and knowlegable sceptic, who is not credulous nor obnoxious, not paranoid nor overly trusting -- this is a person in 2025 who would give no time to "parapsychology"
Well, maybe you really are qualified to decide which skeptics are principled and well-informed. If you really are qualified, you should be teaching others to be skeptics. If your methods really are so foolproof, you could purge the world of superstition.
But maybe you are not qualified to speak as if you were an authority on who is a skeptic and what methods are skeptical methods.
I view research into parapsychology with a background assumption that I understand the motivation. Reductionist materialism suggests that death is the end. Parapsychology may imply the existence of souls, a spiritual realm, life after death, and maybe the chance of heaven. What wonderful balm for existential angst!
Does this make me doubt research into parapsychology? No, quite the opposite. A researcher can only soothe the pain of existential angst with genuine results. If they fake the research, they know that they faked it, and it provides no consolation. My take is that I cannot dismiss positive results in parapsychology as fraud.
Grifters are real. It is possible in principle that researchers in parapsychology are faking results with an eye to making money selling pills that "boost your ESP". I think that I am able to spot and dismiss grifts without difficulty, and that it is not what is at issue here.
But now I learn that I'm wrong. Walter Levy's results are fake. I have to flip from modus ponens to modus tollens. Instead of saying "I understand the motivation, therefore Levy's results are genuine", I have to say "Levy's results are fake, therefore I don't understand the motivation".
I'm in a pickle. A central principle of how I understand the world is that fraud is motivated. No motive, no fraud. Now what? Since there is motiveless fraud, much of what I thought I knew about the world is on shaky ground.
I think software engineering opens the mind a little to being willing to believe things that should be impossible. Some of my bugs are certainly ghost stories: "...and the programmer never figured out how something that weird could be happening!" Others have pushed me to the brink of questioning my own sanity, only to have it all snap back into place when the explanation is finally laid bare.
While I have no particular reason to "believe in ESP" it is impossible not to recognize the very real state it puts a person in to have seen some kind of evidence that nobody else will believe, and I don't necessarily see any reason to suppose that someone somewhere in this psychic card testing didn't see evidence of some real information transfer effect. But what effect?
We know beyond doubt that people can pick up on perceptual signals without really understanding what we're picking up on. I once had the strange experience of "seeing" a cat in pitch black because I was creeping up some stairs and the cat was a few feet directly in front of my head. I'll swear to you up and down that I never saw it with my eyes, though I couldn't say for sure. I'm convinced that I actually heard it, not even its breathing but the lack of any ambient room noise coming from directly in front of me caused an immediate cognitive dissonance in some part of my brain that knew nothing should be there to absorb sound. In the immediate moment this led to my knowing something irretrievably that at the time I really could not say how I knew. But also I was blessed with proof. I reached out, and there was a cat there.
I guess my point is that the most logical explanation to me is that in a card-guessing experiment you have two players who keep careful records but who both want the guessing game to be won by the guesser. You're allowed to keep playing with different guessers and to keep practicing the game until you get results, so it's logical to me that you should eventually find a guesser with whom you build a rapport, and who becomes able to pick up on impossibly small clues that the clue-giver does not know they are giving and the guesser does not know they are receiving. Nothing about my skepticism of supernatural claims prevents me thinking a guesser could develop an outside-logic means of perception that could explain those kinds of results.