What happened to Carl Sargent?
Personnaly i apreciated his job for Greyhawk (apart from little things like Philidor...) and i think he made good job for GH.
And, just before editind Ivid the Undying, he disappeared.
I 've heard strange things about, does anybody know the true?
Thanks.
Some say it was a breakdown, others say he just wasn't satisfied with the pay, still others say he was mind controlled by MI-5 to infiltrate TSR and determine if they really were Satanists.
You be the judge!
Basically, he came, made a huge impact on the industry (he did a lot of other work with other publishers as well) and then vanished without trace.
So not only is his work cool, but he's kinda cool as well
TAlking about rumor, i also read he made akind of breakdown, but it was not clear. I cannot believe he tried to infiltrate TSR, or , if it's true, please please infiltrate Wotc and make the same amount of work he done...;)
I just regret he diappear from the scene and don't have his word to say for greyhawk today.
No relation with that, but Oerth journal n°15 should be available at the end of the month. ( Canonfire )
Well done Carl!
Cheers
> grodog wrote:
> Do you have any contact info and/or current status on Carl
> Sargent? I've been doing interviews for the Oerth Journal
> with various Greyhawk authors, and would like to see if
> he'd be willing.
I've had no contact with Carl since the mid-90s. As far as I know he [freaked-out] the weekend he was due to fly to Chicago to take over editing the Shadowrun line, and has refused to have any contact with anyone from the games industry since then.
Carl's gone and not coming back....
Originally posted by Darth Funky
One of the reasons I liked Carl was his ability to what I considered to be total crap (Greyhawk Wars) and mold it into something that was playable. He did great things considering some of the tools he was handed.
Exactly. Alot of folks attribute the WARS to Carl but that was design decision by the TSR team at the time (and rumored to be instigated by L. Williams). Zeb Cook was handed the task of destroying the world with the GH WARS boxed set, and then handed the reigns over to Carl and basically said "here..clean this up".
He did a damn fine job with the bad situation he had landed in. Sad thing is many of the fans always blamed Carl for it.
He did some awesome work on the WH FRPG, and Earthdawn after that. Every product I've read from him was a helluva good piece of work. One of the true RPG greats in my book.
Mabye something really weird happend to him.
Mabye he was abducted by aliens desperate for Greyhawk material!?
Does anyone since have any solid leads on where the Sarge is??
I appreciate Gygax simply for creating a game. But writer's like Carl took the game into positive directions. In either case he will be sorely missed.
All good things must come to an end !
Good Luck in anything you do Carl !
He occasionally emerges from his seclusion to wreak havoc upon the local polulace, burning villages, devouring livestock, and kidnapping young virgins for ceremonies meant to unleash darker powers rumored to be entombed in the local area...
Originally posted by impy and chimpy
He occasionally emerges from his seclusion to wreak havoc upon the local polulace, burning villages, devouring livestock, and kidnapping young virgins for ceremonies meant to unleash darker powers rumored to be entombed in the local area...
Ah, living the dream I see. Good-o.
I mean, what really happened to him? What was going through his mind?
;)
Originally posted by Ranger REG
I mean, what really happened to him? What was going through his mind?
Yeah, I totally get that. It's bizarre. It'd be an interesting journalistic experience to catch up with him and get some answers...
If I were to take a guess, I'd say one day he looked in the mirror and realized he wasn't happy doing what he was doing, and decided to switch job careers. Happens all the time with thousands of people.
Either that or he was a compulsive gambler and owed the mob bucco-bucks, and had to flee the country or end up with cement boots. One of the two...;)
Originally posted by Ranger REG
I don't know about you guys, but I cannot shake the fact that this guy upped and left RPG publishing entirely. I mean, what set him off? A stalker? An epiphany? Some right-wing conservative Evangelist convinced him that he's doing the Devil's Bible? He is finally cured the Peter Pan complex (to us, it is not a mental disorder but a lifestyle) and grew up?
I mean, what really happened to him? What was going through his mind?
I have a feeling in was the Peter Pan thing. I'm a closet gamer and am often disgusted with this hobby. I can imagine that at some point he thought he was simply 'in too deep' and wanted to do something 'relevant' and more social.
Money probably played a role as well.
I think we all know someone who's gotten a bit too "into" a RPG. It can go beyond blowing off an assignment or skipping a class to something more serious.
Alternatively, he wouldn't be the first writer to succumb to the pressures of deadlines either.
I know nothing more about Sargent than what's been posted here. It's too bad, too, because I'm sitting on piles of money I'd happily send someone like him to write articles for the magazines.
--Erik Mona
Editor-in-Chief
Dungeon Magazine
Abyss
Carl Sargent: Gained his PhD in Experimental Parapsychology in 1979. His post-doctoral research was concerned with ESP in the ganzfeld. He was a member of the Parapsychological Association and author on numerous papers on parapsychology. He was widely regarded as an authority on the paranormal.
from http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/articles.htm
I also found this 1997 message on a Warhammer mailing list:
Carl dropped out of writing altogether about two and a half years ago. Nobody -- not his old publishers, nor his friends nor his old writing partners, of whom I am one -- seems to know where he is these days, or what he's doing.
There's also an old pic of Carl on James Randi's website: http://www.randi.org/jr/photos.html
I suspect Sargent has retired from both writing & teaching, & is enjoying life as a recluse.
Originally posted by Erik Mona
So far as I know (and I've looked into it extensively), there are NO printed versions of Ivid the Undying. There was a cover (later used for Birthright: Blood Enemies of Cerelia), but the book never got to the stage where internal art and maps had been ordered.
I've seen few printed versions of it in UK. It is of course adapted from the version availabe in Wizards page but it looks damn good. I've not sure about the cover if it's the same than in Birthright.
And no, I don't own one....
To my knowledge, last thing published by Sargent is a book called Workplace Companion: A Student Work-Based Learning Notebook (2001)
I think that books publisher might be the one to go if you really want to know his whereabouts. Remember to let me know first though. I want to make a documentary out of your efforts:D
--Erik Mona
Editor-in-Chief
Dungeon Magazine
Originally posted by Erik Mona
I'm willing to bet money that if any printed versions of Ivid exist they are fan-produced efforts, rather than TSR-produced books. I am _certain_ that TSR never published Ivid the Undying in complete form.
--Erik Mona
Editor-in-Chief
Dungeon Magazine
Yes, they are fan made. I should have made it more clear on my previous post.
Originally posted by Simpi
To my knowledge, last thing published by Sargent is a book called Workplace Companion: A Student Work-Based Learning Notebook (2001)
I think that books publisher might be the one to go if you really want to know his whereabouts. Remember to let me know first though. I want to make a documentary out of your efforts:D
Wrong Carl Sargent--that guy's an American educator (in the Pacific NW, IIRC) who writes books on K-12 education.
Originally posted by Robbastard
Wrong Carl Sargent--that guy's an American educator (in the Pacific NW, IIRC) who writes books on K-12 education.
I stand corrected....:D
Originally posted by Erik Mona
I'm willing to bet money that if any printed versions of Ivid exist they are fan-produced efforts, rather than TSR-produced books. I am _certain_ that TSR never published Ivid the Undying in complete form.
--Erik Mona
Editor-in-Chief
Dungeon Magazine
Erik is 100% spot-on.
Beware of possible "rare" fake printed editions of Ivid. There were several rumors floating around on the 'net last year about 6-12 pre-production copies of Ivid that were produced internally by TSR but never distributed.
These claims were recently investigated and proven false. See the Acaeum at http://www.acaeum.com/Library/Research.html
I'm updating it for my own campaign/peace of mind anyway, but I wouldn't refuse a pile of money.
I do wish Carl had been able to do more, even in the Ivid setting. A few modules or something would have been quite tasty. ;)
-wn
Erik, I'd be happy to do a 3.5 update on the Ivid material for one of those large piles of money you're sitting on.
I'm updating it for my own campaign/peace of mind anyway, but I wouldn't refuse a pile of money.
>>>
I can't pay anything for it, but I might be able to see that it gets posted somewhere "official."
--Erik
I would love to see a poster-sized map of the regions covered in Ivid in a future LGJ, much like was done for the Free City of Greyhawk in LGJ 2. Eric Anondson is one artist who springs to mind.
Stuart
Back to work....
-wn
Mike
Originally posted by WightNight
I do wish Carl had been able to do more, even in the Ivid setting. A few modules or something would have been quite tasty. ;) -wn
Actually, Carl created a very nice super-module which could very easily be placed in World of Greyhawk.
The Night Below boxed set
Stuart
******[ DESIGNER PROFILE: CARL SARGENT]******
(Interview and compilation by Joe Katzman, 1995)
BORN: 12/11/52 in Caerleon, Wales, UK.
EDUCATION: Ph.D. in Psychology
MAJOR DESIGN CREDITS:
- (TSR) City of Greyhawk boxed set*, Complete Thieves Handbook*, From the
Ashes boxed set [Greyhawk revision], The Marklands, Iuz the Evil, Monster
Mythology, Night Below [Oct. 1995], Faerie Queen and Country*.
- (GW) Warhammer City*, Power Behind the Throne, Empire in Flames, Death's
Dark Shadow, Castle Drachenfels.
- (FASA) London Sourcebook, Tir Na Nog, Paranormal Animals of Europe,
Prime Runners, Harlequin's Back*, Viviane/Skypoint [Gen Con 1995].
* = a collaborative work
NOVELS: (Shadowrun) Blood on the Streets, Nosferatu, Black Madonna
[1996]. (Earthdawn) Shroud of Madness [later 1995]. All with Mark
Gascoigne.
HOBBIES: Very academic, I have to say: historical and mythological
reading/research for the most part. I am one of those hideous serious
people who regards "fun" as a wholly alien concept, but I am a fan of the
Patriots so I do have a mitigating sense of humour.
BEST BOOK YOU'VE READ LATELY: (Fiction) The Information, by Martin Amis.
(Non-Fiction) Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy by Peter de
Rosa.
HOW DID YOU GET STARTED IN GAMING?
I started playing D&D in 1978 through friends and just wondering "what are
these people doing playing this game that has no board, hacking zombies?
What are experience points?" and the usual hundred question that occur to
an onlooker.
HOW DID YOU GET INVOLVED IN THE GAMING INDUSTRY?
I researched and taught Psych. at the University of Cambridge, and TSR UK
were based in that town. They asked me down for a drink after I'd sent an
article to the late lamented 'Imagine' magazine and everything went on
from there. The TSR UK crew decamped to Games Workshop, so I started
working for them and kept links to TSR UK. All done from personal contact,
but the UK is much smaller geographically than the US, so this may be
somewhat easier here.
FUTURE PROJECTS: [Now with FASA, see above.]
I've just completed "Night Below," which is a huge boxed dungeon set due
for September or October 1995. My brief for this was to give it the
flavour of the old GDQ modules, and to make it generic but suitable for
placement in the Realms or Greyhawk (so it may not be dead - hence the
need to keep letters coming in to TSR!) This turned out to be good, and at
800+ words per page you will get good value for your money.
THIS MUST BE A VERY COMMON QUESTION FOR YOU, BUT WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS?
As to ideas, I read very widely, almost all non-fiction and usually
historical material. I have a Psych. Ph.D. which helps with understanding
theories of human motivation and personality. Where I can say I don't get
anything is from movies or contemporary fiction, though factual TV
programs are useful. For instance, the Gwydiesin character from "Ivid the
Undying" is based on the Welsh bard Taliesin and a Japanese
environmentalist I saw a documentary about. Hopefully the relevant
chapter, on the Grandwood, will get into Dragon because it's fairly
self-contained.
I've always thought that non-fiction sources for RPG characters and
plotlines are superior to fictional ones, for many reasons. Truth is
stranger than fiction; plot devices in fiction often don't work in RPG
settings; fiction is often too "clean" in construction; and researching
non-fiction sources can offer up a dozen tangents for every theme you
wanted to get into in the first place.
For example, I've just been reading a sociological monograph, "Poverty and
Deviance in Early Modern Europe," which gives some very simple information
on the lives of the poor. Mapping causal chains for the circumstances of
their lives, a neat little flow diagram simply shows causations such as
wet weather produces fungal growth produces disease of people and crops
[Ed. Note: also hanatavirus - ask the Navajo]. Now, you can say (in a
fantasy campaign) "people are starving, there's been a famine," but how
much more impactful and "fantasy realistic" to say "after a long wet
summer that only rotting fungi and insects liked, many people have disease
and the crops have failed, rotted by blight - the King and his nobles have
real problems." I don't think you can pick up that kind of logic of
explanation from fiction (unless it's awfully good).
DO YOU PLAY AD&D REGULARLY, AND IF SO IS YOUR CAMPAIGN SET IN GREYHAWK?
I do have a Greyhawk campaign, of some 11 years standing. My first two
characters still survive; one of them is the template for Artur Jakartai
of Furyondy on Oerth.
I am indeed a freelancer [Ed. note: was a freelancer], and in a sense I
was brought in to do Greyhawk. I had done a lot of work before I was given
Greyhawk, having let it be known for some time that I was eager to write
for this game world.
ADVICE FOR WOULD BE DESIGNERS:
Find out what the company wants, get writer's guidelines and check them
out. Get familiar with the background of the game world you hope to write
for. Check how the company works: TSR doesn't accept proposals while FASA
does, for example. If a company is interested in proposals, keep them
short, and don't send complete manuscripts on spec - companies don't have
time to read them. Advance inquiry can also avoid the possible problem of
you going ahead with something the company is already doing itself.
Start small and get writer's credits with magazines in the first instance,
this is important. Dungeon/Dragon remain the best bets. There's no career
path here and no qualifications of relevance other than experience - game
designers come from all kinds of backgrounds. Zeb Cook was a teacher, Tim
Brown was a rock musician, I was a psychologist, for example.
Experienced designers are currently being lost to the industry (Cook,
Murphy, Rolston, Findley) and quality replacements are hard to find. If
you can get your act together, there is a market out there for these
skills.
Finally, one summary sentence on what makes a good product: get your
explanatory and connecting logic right, and check that your adventure
premises are plausible and coherent.
CONTACT ADDRESS?
Carl Sargent,
c/o FASA Corporation
1100 W Cermak B 305
Chicago, Il. 60608
U.S.A.
(No e-mail address as yet.)
CAVEAT RE: FANS SENDING HIM MATERIAL
As a rule..., I don't read anything sent to me. That's just because I need
to be able to say to the people I work for that what I write for them is
original. With the best will in the world, if I read lots of unpublished
material it's always possible that some interesting idea or image will pop
back into my head from it some years afterward and end up in something I
write for publication. It's an occupational hazard which I have to protect
against as best I can. Sorry if this seems a bit formal and aloof, but
it's really something I need to do.
FINAL COMMENTS:
It's good to know that you use what I wrote as a springboard for your own
ideas. That's what it was originally written for, after all.
ist J.P. Barlow
------------------------------------------------
Experienced designers are currently being lost to the industry (Cook, Murphy, Rolston, Findley) and quality replacements are hard to find.
Wow, I think I'm gonna get all bleary eyed here . . .
I would love to see a poster-sized map of the regions covered in Ivid in a future LGJ,
>>>
Why set your sights so low?
--Erik
Originally posted by Erik Mona
Why set your sights so low?
--Erik
Something to glue onto the cardboard on the backside of my '83 map maybe? :D
but a fellow can dream right? :PStuart
Originally posted by Erik Mona
>>>
I would love to see a poster-sized map of the regions covered in Ivid in a future LGJ,
>>>
Why set your sights so low?
--Erik
Originally posted by skerrigan
This is a very old (nearly 10 years old) profile of the man himself...
******[ DESIGNER PROFILE: CARL SARGENT]******
(Interview and compilation by Joe Katzman, 1995)
BORN: 12/11/52 in Caerleon, Wales, UK.
Fricking ...., I currently live in that place! Too bad that someone mentioned last know sighting placed him somewhere in Scotland. :D
WightNight: Go for it, i'm eagerly waiting 3.5 versions of Drax, Delglath and Ivid's Black Knights (or whetever they were called).
Stuart
PS - Scotland. Where? We must seek him out and do a Wayne's World "We're not worthy" before handing over all 3 Triad positions for Onnwal to him.
Originally posted by Simpi
Fricking ...., I currently live in that place!
I don't know how long it will take to get it done, but it WILL get done. There's 72 NPC's listed in the 'Personalities' sections of each region, and I'm on number three. heheh.-wn
Originally posted by skerrigan
Simpi, your mission if you choose to accept it is to go through the phonebook and phone all the Sargents then.
Will this message board self-destruct in five seconds, whether or not I accept:D
I did a session at his lab in Cambridge in March 1979, and it was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.
Carl was the rising star of UK academic experimental/parapsychology, but he left the arena in the mid 80s. I need to reach him in connection with a book I'm writing. Any ideas welcome!
Joke aside, Carl is one of two people who used to work for TSR and disappeared without a trace. The other being Valerie Valusek, an artist whose work graced the pages of many old issues of Dragon, Dungeon, and numerous novels (those for Dragonlance especially).
Gah, it's always the best who leave first
Here are some links that hopefully will help you:
http://skepdic.com/ganzfeld.html
http://skepdic.com/metaanalysis.html
The two best links are:
http://www.skepticwiki.org/wiki/index.php/Ganzfeld_experiments
and Dr. Susan Blackmores account (she is a Ph.D. of Parapsychology)
http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/JSPR%201987.htm
Dr. Blackmore checked the validity of his data in 1979. From what I've read, Sargent apparently dropped out of the parapsychology racket because of possibly shady experimental data.
If he couldn't handle the scrutiny of a fellow parapsychologist, I would hate to see how his data would stand up to researchers like the Amazing Randi...
I second the call for Ivid material and related map in the LGJ! More LGJ goodness Erik pleeezzzz!
Which kind of... "Material" are you explicitely asking for?...I am not sure that I can... Satisfy... All your needs... 
:P
Seriously, apparently the game designer and the parapsychologist are two different persons, at least from what I have gathered so far.
Why, it's obvious! The GH-inspired domain you promised on the FoS board :D
Why, it's obvious! The GH-inspired domain you promised on the FoS board :D
I'll first complete two projects I am writing for the Dragonsfoot community, but then resume my work on my Greyhawk-related topics. I just submitted a short article to the FoS for Qtheir Player's Guide project. If they like it, all I do is to contact a decent mapper to cartopgraph that Rauxes-related domain for me. 
Any volunteers?No the game designer & the parasychologist are the same people. Check out the wiki on Sargent:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sargent
Whatever his failings as a parapsychologist, I still enjoyed his RPG work at TSR & FASA, particularly Shadowruns Tir Na Nog.
Very interesting! Thank you! *Going to research some more...*Will somebody find Carl and drag him back into roleplaying game design?
May God bless him!Seriously though, that is a great tragedy. Sargent was one of the most creative and inspiring writers for Greyhawk in its history. Sure, it's different from Gygax's Greyhawk, but that makes it no less vivid and fun to campaign in.
Speaking of Sargent, I still can't believe Ivid the Undying never saw print. He had reached a level of respectability that few game designers acheive, and then he just faded away. It's like recording Abbey Road and calling it a day...
Check out:
http://www.io.com/~wmallman/ivid.html
A pdf of the released text updated a couple months back.
Read the full account from Dr. Blackmore. It is very suspicous that Sargent refused to supply his data to outside reasearchers. In fact the Parapsychological Association specifcally asked to see his ESP research data but he refused and wouldn't give a reason why. Not long after he completely left the field. Apparantly he moved to the states.(and got a job at TSR)
I was one of Carl's experimental subjects, so I know first hand what was going on in his lab in 1979.
I'm personally very suspicious of Sue Blackmore's 'investigation' and as she's a professed Skeptic and was a CSICOP member, I'm afraid I don't put any faith in her comments at all. Carl was an excellent researcher, he left in disgust following the SPR funded 'investigation' in which Sue B cast doubts on his statistical analyses and methodology based, as far as I can see, on her having claimed to have 'found' cards which should have been in one place, in another, while wandering around in his lab at night on her own, later finding the cards in front of one of Carls associates.
As any skeptic would say, SHE could have misplaced the cards herself!!!!!!
The scientific community has consistently shown hostility to people doing proper parapsychological research, as any investigation of the scandal surrounding CSICOP, and the Skeptical Enquirer will make obvious.
I believe we lost a superb researcher who had been producing brilliant work, but who became a victim of the prevailing ethos of misconstrued "rationalism" as personified by people like James Randi, who is anything but a scientist in his approach to 'truth'.
What Carl would have discovered if he hadn't been attacked in this way, no-one will ever know.......
I was one of Carl's experimental subjects, so I know first hand what was going on in his lab in 1979.
I'm personally very suspicious of Sue Blackmore's 'investigation' and as she's a professed Skeptic and was a CSICOP member, I'm afraid I don't put any faith in her comments at all. Carl was an excellent researcher, he left in disgust following the SPR funded 'investigation' in which Sue B cast doubts on his statistical analyses and methodology based, as far as I can see, on her having claimed to have 'found' cards which should have been in one place, in another, while wandering around in his lab at night on her own, later finding the cards in front of one of Carls associates.
As any skeptic would say, SHE could have misplaced the cards herself!!!!!!
What would she have gained by doing so? Nothing. If the experiments can't be replicated, the most rational explanation is someone's fudging something--namely, the person doing the research in the first place. Success in the lab leads to more grants, more prestige, and more money. Screwing with someone else's experiment gains one nothing. The fact that his results can't be replicated under clincial conditions by a third uninvolved party speaks volumes.
The scientific community has consistently shown hostility to people doing proper parapsychological research, as any investigation of the scandal surrounding CSICOP, and the Skeptical Enquirer will make obvious.
The hostility comes from the people who want to call their research "science" without being held to scientific standards.
I believe we lost a superb researcher who had been producing brilliant work, but who became a victim of the prevailing ethos of misconstrued "rationalism" as personified by people like James Randi, who is anything but a scientist in his approach to 'truth'.
What Carl would have discovered if he hadn't been attacked in this way, no-one will ever know.......
We already know--nothing. Try reproducing his results under clinical conditions. If his research was sound, the outcome should be the same.
First, there's a lot of reason why someone might be inclined to sabotage another person's work. If you haven't seen a hundred and one examples of that, you haven't been in research (or any other field, really) very long. Academia is notorious for its vicious fights of this sort.
Secondly, asserting you already know what he'll find is clearly very close minded and unscientific. Simple fact is, you don't know. And you can't know. Again, you don't know much about the history of science if you can't find a lot of examples of "crackpots" making meaningful discoveries either because they were right all along or because they improved their methodology with more experience.
The whole post isn't a legitimate rebuttal, its just a personal attack.
I'd like to say that I wish him a happy belated birthday, of 12/11/52 and am very proud to share the date, 19 yrs later, with him.
As a side note, Mr. RobBastard has a Masters in LibrarianAide (diff. than KoolAide, but just as cool) and as such, has likely been involved with accademia for a long time. It also means that he likely knows how to use the Dewey Decimal System to find books that CS has written and that are about him. Thus he likely knows how to find evidence supporting both sides of the argument much better than many of us do.
And if that was a personal attack on anybody, his age is certainly showing, as 15 years ago, his attacks were not nearly as subtle.
Be Well. Be Happy New Year'd.
Theocrat Issak
This thread has it all, gaming, parapsychology, implications of academic skulduggery, a mysterious disappearance and all I.R.L. The internet isn't such a waste of time after all...:D
The internet isn't such a waste of time after all...:D
Oh, yeah. The Department of Defense invested well back then. :evillaugh
Definitely a classic little slice of the 'net.
Denis, aka "Maldin"
Maldin's Greyhawk http://melkot.com
As for Vormaerin's allegations & insinuations--I could spend a crapload of time countering his arguments, but I really don't have the energy right now. Perhaps Issak was right about my age showing. . . .
They confirm that Sargent worked in the fields of psychology and experimental parapsychology at Cambridge University. Sargent is noted as working with Hans Eysenck. He was offered a job at FASA in the late 1990s, and on his travels there (to Chicago) he disappeared. The article calls the alleged automobile accident "unconfirmed." It does agree, however, that he suffered some sort of "medical problem." But, there is no concrete information on his illness or subsequent treatment or location.
The article ends by calling Mr. Sargent's disappearance from the game "one of D&D's most elusive unsolved mysteries." I don't think we shall ever truly know what exactly happened to Sargent. As Maldin noted, there is a dearth of any new information. As the years go by Sargent's trail shall get colder and colder and rumor and speculation shall completely supplant anything of fact. So, I guess we'll just have to individually square with the fact that he's gone. Luckily, we have an awesome literary legacy to enjoy. Even better, that legacy is specific to the game world we all know and love!
Happy gaming.
The Times (London)
September 6 1987, Sunday
Paranormal world is split by 'fake' claim
BYLINE: NEVILLE HODGKINSON, Medical Correspondent
SECTION: Issue 8509.
LENGTH: 508 words
A BITTER row between two of the country's leading researchers into parapsychology, the study of extra-sensory perception, metal-bending and similarly rarified and elusive phenomena, is threatening to break the subject's tenous but hard-fought hold as a respectable academic discipline.
Dr Carl Sargent of Cambridge University, one of the top names in the field, has been accused of either faking or grossly mishandling experiments in which he claimed to have proved the existence of telepathic powers.
For a science plagued by tricksters and charlatans, but in which Sargent's careful laboratory-based approach had seemed to establish a core of factual Dr Carl Sargent of Cambridge University, one of the top names in the field, has been accused of either faking or grossly mishandling experiments in which he claimed to have proved the existence of telepathic powers.
For a science plagued by tricksters and charlatans, but in which Sargent's careful laboratory-based approach had seemed to establish a core of factual evidence, the accusations are an acure embarrassment, if not a disaster.
They come from another prominent investigator in the field, Dr Susan Blackmore, a researcher at Bristol University's brain and perception laboratory, and are published in the current Journal of the Society for Physical Research.
Blackmore decided to watch Sargent at work after he published results that seemed successfully to demonstrate telepathy, but which she had been unable to reproduce. The experiments purported to test people for their ability to identify a picture being examined by someone else in another building.
Subjects would lie on a mattress, alone in a room with a red light but no windows. Half ping-pong balls were placed on their eyes, covered with cotton wool, and 'white noise' was transmitted through earphones. The idea was to promote extra-sensory perception (ESP) by blanking out the physical senses.
Each subject would describe any images that floated into their mind, and later the researchers would judge how closely that experience matched the 'transmission'.
Elaborate rules were established involving a system of sealed envelopes to make sure the picture selected for transmission could not be known by the experimenter. But according to Blackmore, who spent seveeral days watching and participating in the experiments, she saw Sargent handle the envelopes in a way that could have allowed him to know which picture had been chosen.
In the same session, he appeared to steer the subject towards choosing a particular picture. Blackmore said: 'I must emphasise that I don't know whether anybody cheated, but we must consider this as a hypothesis.
But Sargent says Blackmore made up her hypothesis on the basis of no more than 'trivial and random' errors.
In a response to Blackmore's allegations in the same issue of the SPR journal, entitled Sceptical Fairytales From Bristol, Sargent writes: 'I know the results were real because I was there and my experiencee tells me so.'
Additional works he has written include:
"ESP in the twilight zone: State of the art," a 1981 article in Parapsychology Review;
"An experiment involving a novel precognition task," a 1977 article in the Journal of Parapsychology--possibly his first published work;
Exploring Psi in the Ganzfeld, a 120 page monograph published in 1980;
"Extraversion and performance in `extra-sensory perception' tasks," a 6 page article in a 1981 issue of the Personality and Individual Differences;
"A four-subject study of psi in the Ganzfeld," a 1981 Journal of the Society for Psychical Research article with Hugh Ashton, Trevor Harley, & Peter Dear;
"A ganzfeld GESP experiment with visiting subjects," a 1982 article in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research;
"A holistic methodology in psi research?," a 1979 article in Parapsychology Review;
"Hypnosis as a psi-conducive state: A controlled replication study," a 1978 article in the Journal of Parapsychology;
"Interactions between visual imagery and psi," a 1978 article in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research;
"Personality Characteristics of Exceptionally Successful Ganzfeld Free-Response Subjects as Measured by the California Psychological Inventory," a collaboration with Scott Rogo in Research in Parapsychology (1981);
"Response structure and temporal incline in ganzfeld free-response GESP testing," an article in the June 1982 issue of the Journal of Parapsychology, written with Susan Moss & Heidi Bartlett;
"Sceptical fairytales from Bristol," a rebuttal of Blackmore's accusations, in a 1987 issue of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research;
"Three studies using a psi-predictive trait variable questionnaire," a 1981 Journal of Parapsychology article with Harley Trevor;
"An unusually powerful response-bias effect," a 1982 article in Parapsychology Review,;
"Z scores in free-response ESP methodology: Comments on their utility and correction of an error," written with Rex Stanford--a 7 page article in the October 1983 issue of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.
"I lost contact with Carl in 1995 when he was supposed to be taking up a job in the US. Apparently he never arrived.
I've heard that he was involved in a serious car accident around then but have no proof of this. In spite of some research, I haven't been able to discover a single solid fact about him since early 1995. It's as though he's vanished.
Good luck - if you discover anything at all, could you let me know? I and others have tried, and failed."
Does anyone know if he was living in the US or England when he was writing for rpgs? If we knew the city he was living in at the time of his alleged accident, we may be able to find some record of it in local newspaper accounts.
"If you find out anything, do please let me know. All I and Trevor Harley (whom I suppose you've contacted) know about it is the rumour one finds on the Web; attempts at confirming it have completely drawn a blank. He seems to have vanished about the time he was supposed to be flying off to Chicago for his big move; I'd suggesting contacting his publishers, since they must be sending his royalties somewhere. We've had no luck."
Too bad, because I was a real fan of his work.
Denis, aka "Maldin"
Maldin's Greyhawk http://melkot.com
More information: Sargent's middle name begins with an "L," it seems.
There are 4 Carl L Sargents living in the US according to ussearch.com... one is here in CA living not too far from me, but he's 93... the others are in Utah (age 78), one in New Hampshire (69), and one in Vermont (no age given, but this could be a record of one of the other three living there for a time).
"Personality Characteristics of Exceptionally Successful Ganzfeld Free-Response Subjects as Measured by the California Psychological Inventory," a collaboration with Scott Rogo in Research in Parapsychology (1981).
D. Scott Rogo (2-1-1950 to 8-18-1990) was a student in my dad's chemistry class many a long year ago...
Denis, aka "Maldin"
Maldin's Greyhawk http://melkot.com
Steve Kenson: I spoke to Steve at Gen Con several years ago, and I believe he ended up taking the Shadowrun developer position at FASA that Carl never showed up for. The story is that he never got on the plane. This was probably around 1995 or so, but Kenson would be able to confirm the details.
James Wallis: I spoke to James at Gen Con several years ago, when he was running Hogshead Publishing and putting out Warhammer FRPG products. Sargent wrote several of the later products, and Wallis was aware that he had disappeared. As a fellow Brit, he knew Carl personally and would probably be more aware of the local scuttlebutt about the situation than US freelancers.
Graeme Davis: Graeme was a major WHFRPG freelancer at the same time as Carl, about the time he disappeared. I remember speaking to Graeme at Gen Con one year and he seemed to know something about the issue, but I have forgotten what exactly (I know, helpful, right?).
I suspect more information could be gleaned from any of the above sources.
--Erik
Mike
He'll come back from Narnia when he's good and ready.
Maybe he's dead. If he never took the job at FASA then maybe he committed suicide or something ...
Or, maybe he just wants to be left alone. I congratulate him for dropping off of the grid they way he did. He may have wanted privacy and seclusion. It seems like he got it, and I respect that. Thankfully, he left us with some amazing works that still electrify us and continue to give us seemingly endless opportunities to ponder over Greyhawk.
Like Ras said, it looks like he'll be found when he wants to be found.
He didn't leave academe as a result of Sue Blackmore's unpleasant attempt to sabotage him, but several years later. At the time she was in his lab in late 1979, she describes him as being "away for several days with 'flu' " between two quotes, as if she is implying that he wasn't actually ill at all, but was avoiding her.
In fact Carl had gone down with glandular fever, according to my sources. He was feeling at a low ebb, and was extremely put out by Blackmore's attitude towards his work.
The point to bear in mind is that Blackmore was, and as far as I know still is, a member of CSICOP, a nasty little lobby group of so called scientists and others such as James Randi and Martin Gardner, who have as one of their aims the discrediting of academic parapsychology, as part of their self- appointed role as "Defenders of the Faith of Rationalism" in other words they are "Followers of Scientism".
Blackmore and co are principally a bunch of propagandists, and CSICOP has an appalling record of distortion, partiality, bias, and downright dishonesty as its legacy. Its members are expert at sly insinuation and ad hominem attacks, where no other grounds for criticism exist.
Why anyone should take anything these people have to say seriously is beyond my comprehension, but then most people don't go to the trouble of checking their sources properly.
I think Carl's work at Cambridge was some of the most important work done in parapsychology in the 20th century, and it's tragic that the report Blackmore submitted to the UK SPR may have influenced him in his decision to quit academe......though if he hadn't, he wouldn't have started writing games, I imagine.......
I know for certain that the effects in Carl's Downing Site labs were 100% bona fide, as I was one of his test subjects, and I know what happened in my own case, which was utterly beyond my wildest imaginings.
Someone said Carl was "magic"........this is actually not far off the mark, when you consider that parapsychology, as practiced at Cambridge in 1979, was the serious scientific study of the powers of the human mind which are often described as "magical".
There are good reasons to support the idea that there is an "experimenter effect" in this sort of work, some experimenters seem to have an effect simply by their involvement in the experiment, (NOT by cheating!) Blackmore, unfortunately, seems to exert a strongly negative effect, Carl was the opposite......I know when I did my first session, I wasn't really expecting anything much to happen in a 'lab setup', though I had had experiences of precognition quite clearly in normal life over a period of many years.
What happened in this session was so mind boggling that I'm sure most people would not believe it. I am writing a book in which I want to use this material, but without Carl's word that it happened as it did, I can't see the point, as it simply would not be believed.
'Telepathy', precognition and telekinesis are stock subjects of investigation, and much of Carl's work was an investigation to see what correspondence, if any, could be found between different personality types (as defined by the standard 16PF test) and 'psi ability' as measured against a chance outcome, using the ganzfeld method of bringing out psi.
Blackmore herself claims to have tried the ganzfeld with negative results, and assumed the mantle of 'Skeptic' as a result, but I have spoken with another PhD parapsychologist who told me that when Blackmore herself was tested as a subject using ganzfeld, she (Blackmore) actually got a direct hit! In other words she gave a good description of the target picture.
Blackmore, in true CSICOP 'scientific' tradition, put this result down to 'coincidence'.
If I track Carl down, I will never reveal his whereabouts.
Good luck to you, Carl, and I'll be in touch! (I hope.....)
I certainly understand your desire to not reveal Carl's whereabouts should you ever find him. I'm more than just curious as to what happened to him, since he once collaborated on a paper in 1981 with D Scott Rogo, a former chemistry student of my dad's in the 1960's...
However, Randi and the others appear to have assumed there is no such thing as psychic phenomena and set out to prove it... which is not in the least bit scientific!
Actually, that IS scientific. Scientific theories are not so much "proven," but instead survive attempts to "disprove" them. That is why hypotheses must be falsifiable. All possible mundane explanations must be explored before accepting the hypotheses as true.
Can't put it better than Sherlock Holmes
however...there IS extreme skepticism that's just out to destroy anything it doesn't agree with. Science is no more immune to zealots, of any stripe, than any other Human organization. Science though can expose them better than most organizations, but they still exist, and hide behind "so called rationality".
I've known folk who were bitterly skeptical because they had experiences they refuse to accept, so trashed any such thing that threatens their "comfort zone", or they behave like the "witchcraft paranoia" (condemning others to hide their own selves), and such cowardice can ruin innocent folks' lives.
hal23,
Oh, I'd believe you. I love Science, but there's waaaay too much odd stuff I can't explain.
At the time she was in his lab in late 1979, she describes him as being "away for several days with 'flu' " between two quotes, as if she is implying that he wasn't actually ill at all, but was avoiding her.
You're being disingenous. "Away for several days with 'flu'," is a quote that you apparently devised to discredit Blackmore, as it appears nowhere in her report (http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/JSPR%201987.htm). She only mentions that he was away with 'flu' on day 6. The reason it's in quotes could be that she was quoting him.
In fact Carl had gone down with glandular fever, according to my sources.
Your sources being. . . . ?
The point to bear in mind is that Blackmore was, and as far as I know still is, a member of CSICOP, a nasty little lobby group of so called scientists and others such as James Randi and Martin Gardner, who have as one of their aims the discrediting of academic parapsychology, as part of their self- appointed role as "Defenders of the Faith of Rationalism" in other words they are "Followers of Scientism".
Your implication that Blackmore was a member of CSICOP at the time, & was sent to Sargent's lab to sabotage/discredit his work, is pure conjecture. According to her bio page on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Blackmore), she did not become a skeptic until sometime after 1980--her visit to Sargent's lab occurred in 1979. You're also mischaracterizing CSICOP (known known as CSI). Such accusations are par for the course from believers who's assertations fail scientific testing.
Blackmore and co are principally a bunch of propagandists, and CSICOP has an appalling record of distortion, partiality, bias, and downright dishonesty as its legacy. Its members are expert at sly insinuation and ad hominem attacks, where no other grounds for criticism exist.
Please provide some hard evidence supporting your accusations, as it seems to me like you're the one engaging in ad hominem attacks.
Why anyone should take anything these people have to say seriously is beyond my comprehension,
No surprise there.
I know for certain that the effects in Carl's Downing Site labs were 100% bona fide, as I was one of his test subjects, and I know what happened in my own case, which was utterly beyond my wildest imaginings.
Sorry, but being a participant is not the same as being an unbiased observer.
There are good reasons to support the idea that there is an "experimenter effect" in this sort of work, some experimenters seem to have an effect simply by their involvement in the experiment, (NOT by cheating!)
Yes, which is why we have double-blind studies, as well as allow other experimenters to attempt to replicate results: http://skepdic.com/experimentereffect.html
I am writing a book in which I want to use this material, but without Carl's word that it happened as it did, I can't see the point, as it simply would not be believed.
But it might be believed if it could pass scientific testing. See if someone can replicate Sargent's results.
Blackmore herself claims to have tried the ganzfeld with negative results, and assumed the mantle of 'Skeptic' as a result, but I have spoken with another PhD parapsychologist who told me that when Blackmore herself was tested as a subject using ganzfeld, she (Blackmore) actually got a direct hit! In other words she gave a good description of the target picture.
Blackmore, in true CSICOP 'scientific' tradition, put this result down to 'coincidence'.
Assuming this bit of hearsay is true, "coincidence" is usually a far more accurate explanation than "superpowers."
Actually, that IS scientific. Scientific theories are not so much "proven," but instead survive attempts to "disprove" them. That is why hypotheses must be falsifiable. All possible mundane explanations must be explored before accepting the hypotheses as true.
One doesn't begin with the premise, "It's impossible and I'm going to prove it!" One begins with, "This is odd. Let's explore this using scientific principles and see if we can explain it. If we can't, then maybe it's nothing more than coincidence, sleight-of-hand or some other form of trickery, or perhaps we haven't designed an experiment to properly test it or we don't have enough knowledge yet to explain it."
There is a difference. Randi and his cronies begin with the former, not the latter, premise, and that is totally unscientific. Even then, they did manage to prove that Peter Popoff was a fraud, but even a broken clock is correct twice a day.
Seriously, he probably had to get away from such a stressful job and fickle fans. I hope he enjoys the rest of his life.
Fair comment, in the report as shown she says "he was away with 'flu'......" on day 6.
I was quoting from memory, possibly of an earlier version of the report.
My informant was one of the group of people who knew Carl well and worked with him in 1979/80.
You suggest that I should prefer the opinion of an "unbiased observer" over my own perceptions, but an unbiased observer has no direct experience of MY THOUGHTS, and it's the inner workings of the conscious mind which is the object of investigation here.
I had Dr Sargent's observation of the session, his records, both written and recorded, but I also had something he didn't, and no other observer could have, that is my own perception as receiver in the ganzfeld, so sorry, I had rather more evidence even than Carl.
I am not a "believer" as you slyly try to insinuate, I am a staunch supporter of the scientific method, and far from being in favour of New Age woolymindedness.
I'd be interested to see your definition of 'believer', by the way.
Any sensible analysis will show that the proper scientists are the people like Sargent, who were prepared to risk academic dissapproval by pursuing research in parapsychology because it interested them.
The "Believers" are the followers of Randi & Co, who "believe" in the precepts of Scientism.....ie "There Are No Such Things as Psi Powers and Anyone Claiming Otherwise is a Fraud".
This is a truly idiotic notion, which denies the accumulated anecdotal evidence of human history, AND the results of academic research which HAS been replicated, if you can be arsed to actually check.
Russel Targ also did successful Ganzfeld work, as have many others.
As for the credentials of your buddies in CSICOP or whatever new acronym they now use, you obviously know very little of their history or you would hardly be trying to claim their innocence.
Don't tempt me to post the damning material here, I have it all in my records, you could start by checking Marcello Truzzi's thoughts on the matter.
Truzzi was one time editor of the Skeptical Enquirer, and is an honest observer.
You suggest that I should prefer the opinion of an "unbiased observer" over my own perceptions, but an unbiased observer has no direct experience of MY THOUGHTS, and it's the inner workings of the conscious mind which is the object of investigation here.
I'm stating that unbiased opinions/observations are more valuable than biased ones. If, for example, Neil Armstrong writes a book saying the moon is made of green cheese, should we believe him simply because he was there? No. We judge this claim against what science tells us of the moon's composition. Your opinion may be of more value to you personally, but it's of considerably lesser value to the rest of us.
I'd be interested to see your definition of 'believer', by the way.
A believer accepts things on faith, even in the face of contradictory evidence.
Any sensible analysis will show that the proper scientists are the people like Sargent, who were prepared to risk academic dissapproval by pursuing research in parapsychology because it interested them.
So, if for example, I bombard myself with radiation because my hypotheses states that doing so will allow me to gain significant muscle mass, super-strength, and green skin, then I must be a "proper" scientist? Just because I want it to be real?
Granted, often in the scienctific community there are paradigms to overcome (such as resistance to plate tectonics, impact theory, etc), but such are eventually overcome by the wealth of evidence, & by defenders of the old paradigms dying off. Unlike plate tectonics, impact theory, germ theory, etc, psi consistantly fails to goin scientific support.
The "Believers" are the followers of Randi & Co, who "believe" in the precepts of Scientism.....ie "There Are No Such Things as Psi Powers and Anyone Claiming Otherwise is a Fraud".
So, despite the fact that any displays of psi thus far put to scrutiny have proven to have more plausible explanations, we should ignore the probability that there is no such thing? I suppose you'd want to give flat-earthers the same benefit of the doubt?
This is a truly idiotic notion, which denies the accumulated anecdotal evidence of human history, AND the results of academic research which HAS been replicated, if you can be arsed to actually check.
Replicated in which academic journals?
Russel Targ also did successful Ganzfeld work, as have many others.
Targ claimed success, which Marks and Kamman showed to be otherwise. Targ also believed that Uri Geller had true psychic powers, if that tells you anything.
As for the credentials of your buddies in CSICOP or whatever new acronym they now use, you obviously know very little of their history or you would hardly be trying to claim their innocence.
Sorry, but I'm not "buddies" with anyone in CSI/CSICOP.
Don't tempt me to post the damning material here, I have it all in my records,
Now that's an odd turn of phrase. Why must you be "tempted" to do so? Please, I'd love to see such material.
you could start by checking Marcello Truzzi's thoughts on the matter.
Truzzi was one time editor of the Skeptical Enquirer, and is an honest observer.
Truzzi was editor for about a year, but then received a no-confidence vote. Not exactly what I would consider an "honest observer," either. His form of skepticism ("zeteticism") is more fence-sitting & wishfulness than anything--ie, rather than say "elves are highly unlikely to exist due to the lack of evidence," a zetetic would be more likely to say, "elves probably do exist--we just don't have to ability to find them yet."
First, a question.....
What is your source for Marcello Truzzi "receiving a vote of no confidence"? I assume you are implying that he was kicked off the 'Skeptical Inquirer'?
My information was that he resigned in disgust.
As an indication of why I don't trust CSI or CSICOP or whatever they call themselves, I can't do better than repeat this piece by Brian Inglis, which I posted originally on another forum.
"The full extent to which scientists have cheated in order to discredit Psi research will never be known, but the behaviour of the so called Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal gives an indication of practices carried out in order to discredit certain research findings, unwelcome because they could be regarded as ‘promoting occultism’.
It’s worth looking at the history of CSICOP.
CSICOP is a cousin of the American Humanist Association. The circumstances of the AHA’s conception are illuminating. It was originally formed in 1933, its manifesto leaving no doubt that one of its aims was to overthrow the capitalist system. From 1948 it was largely funded by Corliss Lamont, a declared Marxist and fervent admirer of Stalin. On his return from a visit to Russia in 1938, at the height of Stalin’s purges and ‘treason’ trials, Lamont claimed that he had left ‘with the definite feeling that its people are well-nigh invincible in an economic, moral and military sense’; as a consequence, ‘mankind again forges ahead to conquer new heights of economic and cultural achievement’. The AHA Journal, the Humanist, inevitably preached dialectical materialism. As at the time parapsychology was condemned in Russia as bourgeois deviationism, it was denounced, along with the profit motive.
In the 1970s the editor of the Humanist , Paul Kurtz, Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and himself far from being a communist, became alarmed at the news of a revival of astrology. Twenty years earlier Michel Gauquelin, a French psychologist, had hit apon a surprisingly simple way of testing astrological claims. With his wife, he compiled a list of 576 doctors who were members of the Académie de Médicine.....in other words an élite group....and worked out the position of the planets at the hour of their births. To his astonishment, he found that they had been born far more often under Mars and Saturn, while those planets were rising in the sky, than under Jupiter – and far more often than a control group.
Intrigued, he went on to test other groups, finding that sports champions and military leaders tended to be born under Mars ‘rising’, whereas famous actors were more often born under Jupiter. Similar studies in Belgium produced similar results. The difference between the élites and the rest, acting as controls, was not great, but statistically it was highly significant.
This did not mean, Gaughelin was careful to emphasise, that astrology deserved to be brought back into the scientific fold. It did mean that there were anomalies which pointed to the possibility of some kind of planetary influence, of the kind that astrologers had long accepted. But so low had astrology sunk in the estimation of most scientists that when the news of Gaughelin’s findings began to spread, in the early 1970s, the general reaction was to damn it.
A questionnaire sent out by the Humanist in 1975, inviting leading scientists in America and Europe to put their names to a manifesto entitled ‘Objections to Astrology’, met with a remarkable response. No fewer than 186 signed, including eighteen Nobel Laureates.
‘Scientists in a variety of fields have become concerned about the increased acceptance of astrology in many parts of the world’, the manifesto began. The words rang a bell for Paul Feyeraband, echoing as they did the Papal Bull promulgated by Innocent VIII five centuries earlier: “It has indeed come to our ears, not without afflicting us with bitter sorrow’ that in many parts of the world ‘persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation, have strayed from the Catholic Faith and abandoned themselves to devils.’ This was the Bull which provided the Introduction to the notorious Malleus Maleficarum, heralding the campaign against witchcraft and heresy which was to destroy hundreds of thousands of lives. The failure of the Papacy to realise that it was not devils who were the threat, but the corruption within the Church, Feyeraband recalled, was to drive young Martin Luther into mounting the campaign which was to split the Church in two.
One well known scientist, Carl Sagan, refused to put his name to the manifesto on the grounds that it was too authoritarian. ‘It is simply a mistake’, it had stated, ‘to imagine that the forces exerted by stars and planets at the moment of birth can in any way shape our future.’ Yet though Sagan did not believe that astrology had any validity, the manifesto’s assumption that it could be dismissed because there was no known mechanism by which the planets could influence life on earth struck him as unwise. No mechanism had been known for the ‘continental drift’ theory, which had been derided as a consequence, it had turned out to be correct.
‘Statements contradicting borderline, folk or pseudoscience that appear to have an authoritarian tone’, Sagan concluded, ‘can do more harm than good.’
Some damage was in fact done to a number of the Nobel Laureates, who, when asked to appear on a BBC programme to give their views, excused themselves on the give-away ground that they had never studied the subject. For Paul Kurtz, however, the response to the questionnaire had been so gratifying that he hastened to consolidate the rationalist-materialist alliance for which the Humanist had been campaigningby inviting well-known scientists and sceptics to form CSICOP.
On its stationery appeared such names as Isaac Asimov, Milbourne Christopher, Martin Gardner, Professor Ray Hyman, Laurence Jerome, The Amazing Randi, Carl Sagan, B.F. Skinner and Martin Zelen. Among the British members were Christopher Evans, Professor Anthony Flew, Eric Dingwall and Professor C.E.M.Hansel.Although they carried less weight than the Nobel manifesto-signers,most of them better known as publicists and polemicists than for scientific achievements, it was for their polemical capabilities that Kurtz needed them. In 1974 he held a press conference in New York to announce the launching of a campaign to purge the media of occultist leanings.
In particular, he pledged that CSICOP would try to ensure that no TV programme dealing with parascience would go out unvetted by the appropriate authorities. He left no doubt that the appropriate authorities should be CSICOP members.
The Campaign duly began, and for a time was so intense that producers such as Alan Neuman who had had a successful American TV series on paranormal phenomena and was about to have another, felt they were back in the McCarthy era. The tactics used caused the first split in CSICOP. Among those who resigned were Marcello Truzzi, originaly designated CSICOP’s co-chairman and editor of the new CSICOP journal.
Truzzi, Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michegan University, complained that CSICOP was ‘tarring everybody with the same brush’. He thought it unwise to lump together serious parapsychologists, deluded though they might be, with Moonies, believers in the Bermuda Triangle, and little green men with goggle-eyes.
Undeterred, Kurtz went ahead with what was designed to be CSICOP’s first major exposure. Gaughelin had found that 23% of sports champions had been born under Mars rising, compared to 17% of non-sports champions. That 6% difference, soon to be described as ‘The Mars Effect’ would have to be challenged
It had in fact already been challenged in the Humanist by the science writer Lawrence Jerome, but that had proved counter-productive, provoking Gaughelin into a devastating riposte and almost into a libel action against Jerome.
In 1976 Marvin Zelen, a colleague of Kurtz in Buffalo, suggested what appeared to Kurtz to be a safer course, because it would hoist Gaughelin with his own petard. Gaughelin would be asked to test for the ‘Mars Effect’ on ordinary people born about the same time and place as the sports champions (in case regional differences might be shown to account for the earlier differences). The figures were duly produced. They showed that in the new sample the proportion of non-sports-champions born under Mars rising was 16.4%. The Mars Effect,in other words, was even greater than in the earlier trial.
Kurtz was appalled. He could not ignore the result because, without consulting his committee, he had presented the offer to Gaughelin as a formal challenge, promising in the Humanist that the outcome would be ‘definitive’. He consulted with George Abell, Professor of Astronomy at UCLA, who had joined the Executive Committee of CSICOP, and with Zelen.
What could they do?
They were confronted with two alternatives, neither of them palatable. They could accept the new Gaughelin findings, and embark on a search for another natural, rather than astrological, explanation. Or they could challenge the valididty of his statistics.The first would be humiliating. The second would be dangerous, as Gaughelin had easily disposed of such challenges before. They decided against taking either course. Their report in the Humanist in the Nov/Dec 1977 issue contrived to show that the new test had demolished the case for the Mars Effect. It sounded so convincing that Jerome, grateful for what he took to be retrospective support for his paper, sent his congratulations.
As it was unlikely that any member of CSICOP would want to rally to Gaughelin’s defence, that might have been the end of the matter, had it not been for Dennis Rawlins, an astronomer and member of the inner council. One of CSICOP’s hard-liners, his view from the start had been that Gaughelin must have erred, perhaps even unconsciously cheated. If so, what was the point of inviting Gaughelin to do a second test? It would presumably give the same result. When it did, Rawlins felt his warning had been justified.
When he saw Kurtz’s contention that the new test had exploded the Mars Effect, Rawlins was astonished. His initial assumption was that a mistake had been made. Only when Kurtz ignored his pleas did it dawn on Rawlins that it had not been a mistake but a decision, taken without consulting him, although he was a council member and an authority on the subject.
At least some of his colleagues on the Council, Rawlins assumed, would agree with him that this had been disgraceful. Randi agreed, for one; Kurtz’s decision, he thought, had been deplorable. Martin Gardner, too, was unsympathetic, ‘chuckling about what an incredibly hilarious foul-up the whole thing had turned out to be’. They declined, however, to take any action. Gardner continued to treat the matter as a joke and Randi, Rawlins eventually realised, had pretended to be sympathetic only to keep him in line. “When I asked him why, he repeated the tired old alibi that the occultist kooks would whoop it up if Kurtz fell.”
Kurtz made a final appeal to Rawlins for loyalty. He seemed genuinely bewildered, Rawlins recalled. To him, it was a political, not a scientific issue. Refusing to be persuaded, Rawlins told the whole story in Fate magazine.
He had previously believed, Rawlins explained, that it was simply a figment of the imagination of journals such as the National Enquirer that the science establishment would cover up evidence for the occult. Now, no longer. He was till sceptical, ‘but I have changed my mind about the integrity of some of those who make a career of opposing occultism’.
‘They call themselves the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal’ an editorial note in Fate commented. ‘In fact they are a group of would be debunkers who bungled their major investigation, falsified the results, covered up their errors, and gave the boot to a colleague who threatened to tell the truth.’
That the cover had been blown in Fate gave Kurtz and his associates on the Council the chance to pretend to ignore the onslaught. Although Fate had in the past made many damaging exposures of various forms of occultism, it was dismissed by Gardner as ‘pulp’. Rawlins, it was put about, had long been a trouble-maker. A letter purporting to correct his mis-statements was circulated privately to CSICOP members by Kurtz and Abell (it simply re-hashed their mis-statements, Rawlins complained). To rally the faithful, the Scientific American, to which Martin Gardner had long been a regular contributor, printed on the Committee’s behalf: ‘Who will guard the truth? The answer is CSICOP will!’
Unluckily for this boast, Marcello Truzzi had commissioned an independent survey of the affair from Patrick Curry, a historian of science with a special interest in astrology. It appeared in the Zedetic Scholar, which Truzzi had founded after he left CSICOP, and it followed a very different line from CSICOP’s Skeptical Inquirer or the Humanist, giving plenty of space to both sides in any controversy. Curry’s concern was with the actual evidence for the Mars Effect. On balance, he concluded, it had been corroborated.
More disturbingly for Kurtz, it was also corroborated by Richard Kammann, a psychologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Kammann was highly regarded in CSICOP circles as co-author with David Marks of ‘The Psychology of the Psychic’- a book which, according to Martin Gardner, ‘should have been printed and promoted with trumpets by a major publishing house’ – a tribute which in itself was clear evidence of its author’s outright scepticism.
Kammann’s initial feeling had been that Rawlins could not have been the single honest person, as in fact he claimed, on a nine-man council of men of such stature as Martin Gardner and The Amazing Randi. Rawlins, he thought, must have let his anger get the best of him. When Kammann studied the evidence during seven months of research, he was forced to realise that Rawlins had been right. What made it worse was that a one page statement in the Skeptical Inquirer, signed by the nine members of the Council, with Abell in Rawlins’s vacant seat, asserted that there was nothing to hide and no cover up. Abell was actually smearing Gaughelin with innuendo. Gaughelin, he told Newsweek, had no way of proving he had not cheated. This was too much for Kammann. He resigned from CSICOP, sending his report to Truzzi, who published it in the Zedetic Scholar. CSICOP, it concluded, ‘has progressively trapped itself, degree by irreversible degree, into an anti-Rawlins propaganda campaign, into suppression of the evidence, and into stonewalling against other critics.’
At long last, in the Spring 1983 number of the Skeptical Inquirer , Kurtz, Abell and Zelen were smoked out. The issue contained what they euphemistically described as ‘A Reappraisal’. ‘Apologia’ would have been the more appropriate term. They had to concede they had made mistakes. Some they glossed over-they had been wrong to think that the test of the Gaughelin findings would be ‘definitive’ when ‘of course it could not be immune to sample irregularities, such as biased or fudged data’. This was the very point Rawlins had made, which they had ignored. They now came round to it, hinting that Gaughelin might still be caught out. That they had failed to show the challenge had actually confirmed Gaughelin’s findings, they now had to admit, constituted a valid criticism. Kurtz, involved in the administration, and Abell ‘heavily involved with other projects’ had ‘neglected to examine the manuscript with sufficient care’. This, as Rawlins had shown, was false. Abell had examined it six months before it was published as evidence against Gaughelin, with sufficient care to realise it was actually evidence for Gaughelin, and had written to warn Kurtz.
Kurtz and Abell managed to make it all sound as if a few unfortunate errors had occurred which had only come to light later.No reference was made to the fact that Rawlins had drawn their attention to the matter years before. Nor could they leave the subject without yet another thinly disguised attack ‘we should like to add that there is no clear evidence that the Gaughelins intentionally biased the sample’. No clear evidence? There was no evidence of any kind. No apology was made to Rawlins for the attacks on his character and his credibility. No apology was made to CSICOP members for having deceived them for so long.
The ‘reappraisal’ actually concealed the fact that they had managed to maintain the cover-up for over five years.
The heading under which Kammann’s account appeared,’The True Disbelievers’, contained an irony which must have been lost on most readers, though not on Kammann himself.
In The Psychology of the Psychic he had offered a model to account for the persistence of false beliefs, such as the belief in the reality of psi, even when they are undermined by the evidence. ‘The model says that once a belief or expectation is found, especially one that resolves uncomfortable uncertainty, it biases the observer to notice new information that confirms the belief, and to discount evidence to the contrary’ –an echo of Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance. ‘This self perpetuating mechanism consolidates the original error and builds up over-confidence in which the arguments of opponents are seen as too fragmentary to undo the adopted belief.’
All that Kammann would have needed to do, in connection with Kurtz and Abell, was add a ‘dis’ before each ‘belief’.
The most depressing aspect of the affair, as Kammann evidently recognised, is not so much that individual scientists should have engaged in unworthy tactics to avoid humiliation, as that their fellow scientists, when they realised what was happening, should not have mainifested their disapproval, either by demanding that the culprits should resign, or by themselves resigning. Only a handful of members quit.
That CSICOP’s reaction to the Gaughelin findings was not an isolated example, attributable to the foolishness of the individuals concerned, was shown up by Curry in his Zedetic Scholar article, in connection with the very similar reaction of the committee which had been set up in Belgium to investigate Gaughelin’s findings. When the Belgian committee also, to its embarrassment, found that its work confirmed Gaughelin’s, it rejected the results by claiming that Gaughelin must be using the wrong control group level, using this as an excuse to pursue the issue no further. Examining the Comité Para’s attempt at a rebuttal of these charges, Curry came to the conclusion that it was deplorably misleading, constituting ample evidence of the committee’s unfitness to be entrusted with such an investigation.
To find it ‘reiterating the same half-truths, untruths and inconsistencies with which we are now familiar’, was, to Curry’s mind, disturbing."
By the way, according to your definition of 'believer', I am most certainly NOT one. Nor is Carl Sargent.
You ask in which Journals are the replications of Psi experiments to be found.....why in the Journals of Parapsychology, of course!
NOT in Nature or Science. They both have editorial policies apparently written by CSI......they don't report on Parapsychology unless it's a negative result, in which case they might......
Critical thinking is a double-edged sword: it must be applied to any claim, including the claims of skeptics.
We will see that many of the skeptical arguments commonly leveled at psi experiments have been motivated by non-scientific factors, such as arrogance, advocacy and ideology.
The fact is that much of what scientists know - or think they know - about psi has been confused with arguments promoted by uncritical enthusiasts on one hand, and uncritical skeptics on the other.
History shows that extremists, despite the strength of their convictions, are rarely correct.
So, are all scientists who report positive evidence for psi naive or sloppy? No.
Are all skeptics intolerant naysayers? No.
Does psi justify the belief that angels from the Andromeda galaxy are among us? No.
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
The Necessity of Doubt
Skepticism, meaning doubt, is one of the hallmarks of the scientific approach.
Skepticism sharpens the critical thought required to sift the wheat from the chaff, and it forces experimental methods, measurements, and ideas to pass through an extremely fine sieve before they are accepted into the "scientific worldview."
A little critical thinking applied to many of the claims of New Age devotees reveals why many scientists are dubious of psi phenomena.
Science requires substantial amounts of repeatable, trustworthy evidence before taking claims of unexpected effects seriously.
Depending on the claim, providing sufficient evidence can take years, decades, or half-centuries of painstaking, detailed work.
Learning how to create this evidence requires long training and experience in conventional disciplines like experimental design, analysis and statistics.
Conducting research on controversial topics like psi requires all this plus an appreciation for interpersonal dynamics, politics, aesthetics, philosophy, and physics, combined with intellectual clarity and a strong creative streak to help break the bounds of conventional thinking.
From the lay perspective, science appears as a logical, dispassionate, analytic process. This is true sometimes, but it is also a harshly adversarial, emotional battlefield when it comes to evaluating unusual claims. The process of gaining acceptance for effects that are not easily accommodated by dominant theories takes an enormous amount of energy and persistence.
This is why most scientists and psi researchers alike grimace upon reading breathless advertisements hawking, "The amazing miracle blue crystal, found deep beneath an ancient Mayan pyramid, proven by top researchers to relieve headaches and enhance psychic powers, and now available for a limited time for only $129.95!"
The claim about a blue crystal is not the problem. After all, if someone were to claim that a moldy piece of bread could cure all sorts of horrible diseases, they'd be labeled a charlatan, unless the mold happened to be penicillin.
The problem with many popular psi-related claims, especially claims for health-related products and devices, is that it doesn't take much digging to discover that sound, scientific evidence for the claim is either entirely absent, fabricated or based solely upon anecdotes and testimonials.
The Danger of Uncritical Doubt
'It's one thing not to see the forest for the trees, but then to go on to deny the reality of the forest is a more serious matter'. Paul Weiss
However, the same scientific mind-set that thrives on high precision and critical thinking is also extremely adept at forming clever rationalizations that get in the way of progress.
In extreme cases, these rationalizations have prevented psi research from taking place at all.
Ironically, the very same skeptics who have attempted to block psi research through the use of rhetoric and ridicule have also been responsible for perpetuating the many popular myths associated with psychic phenomena.
If serious scientists are prevented from investigating claims of psi out of fear for their reputations, then who is left to conduct these investigations?
Extreme skeptics?
No, because the fact is that most extremists do not conduct research, they specialize in criticism.
Extreme believers?
No, because they are usually not interested in conducting rigorous scientific studies.
The word "extreme" is important to keep in mind. Most scientists seriously interested in psi are far more skeptical about claims of psychic phenomena than most people realize.
Scientists who study psi phenomena grind their teeth at night because television shows predictably portray psi researchers as wacky "paranormal investigators" with dubious credentials.
Psi researchers cringe at seeing the word "parapsychologist" used in the telephone yellow pages to list psychic readers.
And unfortunately, because the only thing most people know about parapsychology is its popular association with credulous "investigators" and psychic over-enthusiasts, it is understandable why some skeptics have taken combative positions to fight what they see as rising tides of nonsense.
This (book) is intended to help illustrate that common stereotypes about psi research are overly simplistic at best, and in many cases, they are just plain wrong.
As an example of "just plain wrong," here is one stereotype that many mainstream scientists have simply accepted as conventional wisdom.
As philosopher Paul Churchland put it, "Despite the endless pronouncements and anecdotes in the popular press, and despite a steady trickle of serious research on such things, there is no significant or trustworthy evidence that such phenomena even exist. The wide gap between popular conviction on this matter, and the actual evidence, is something that itself calls for research. For there is not a single parapsychological effect that can be repeatedly or reliably produced in any laboratory suitably equipped to perform and control the experiment. Not one."
Wrong.
(As we've seen,) there are a half-dozen psi effects that have been replicated dozens to hundreds of times in laboratories around the world.
As another example, conventional wisdom often assumes that professional magicians and conjurers "know better" than to accept that some psychic phenomena are real.
In fact, as parapsychologist George Hansen wrote, "Although the public tends to view magicians as debunkers, the opposite is more the case. Birdsell (1989) polled a group of magicians and found that 82% gave a positive response to a question of belief in ESP. Truzzi (1983) noted a poll of German magicians that found that 72.3% thought psi was probably real. Many prominent magicians have expressed a belief in psychic phenomena. …. It is simply a myth that magicians have been predominantly skeptical about the existence of psi."
Skepticism about Skepticism
Why it is necessary to spend any time at all on the criticisms of psi research when we can simply refer to the previous chapters to demonstrate that there are valid experimental effects in search of answers?
One answer is that very few are aware that the standard skeptical arguments have been addressed in exquisite detail, and they no longer hold up.
Another is that the tactics of the extreme skeptics have been more than merely annoying.
The professional skeptics' aggressive public labeling of parapsychology as a "pseudoscience," implying fraud or incompetence on the part of the researchers, has been instrumental in preventing this research from taking place at all.
In a commentary in the prominent journal "Nature", skeptical British psychologist David Marks wrote, "Parascience has all the qualities of a magical system while wearing the mantle of science. Until any significant discoveries are made, science can justifiably ignore it, but it is important to say why: parascience is a pseudo-scientific system of untested beliefs steeped in illusion, error and fraud."
Such statements are pernicious because significant discoveries do not occur by themselves.
Such statements published in influential journals have had strong effects on the ability of scientists to conduct psi research.
Many funding agencies, both public and private, have been reluctant to fund parapsychological studies because they fear being associated with what conventional wisdom has declared to be a "pseudoscience."
Fortunately, there are notable exceptions among funding agencies who know that there is a difference between popular stereotypes and serious researchers.
Skepticism Today
'The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance of things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.' Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788-1860)
In 1993, the late parapsychologist Charles Honorton from the University of Edinburgh considered what skeptics of psi experiments used to claim, and what they no longer claimed.
He demonstrated that virtually all of the skeptical arguments used to explain away psi over the years had been resolved through design of new experiments.
This does not mean the experiments conducted today are "perfect," because there is nothing perfect in the empirical sciences. But it does mean that the methods available today satisfy the most rigorous skeptical requirements for providing "exceptional evidence."
As we've seen, such experiments have been conducted, with successful results.
What Skeptics Used to Claim
Honorton pointed out that for many decades the standard skeptical assertion was that psi was impossible because it violated some ill-specified physical laws, or because the effects were not repeatable.
It was also easy to claim that any successful experiments were really due to chance or fraud.
Today, informed skeptics no longer claim that the outcomes of psi experiments are due to mere chance because we know that some parapsychological effects are, to use skeptical psychologist Ray Hyman's words, "astronomically significant."
This is a key concession because it shifts the focus of the debate away from the mere existence of interesting effects to their proper interpretation.
The concession also drops the decades-long skeptical questions over the legitimacy of parapsychology as a science.
It states, quite clearly, that skeptics who continue to repeat the same old assertions that parapsychology is a pseudoscience, or that there are no repeatable experiments, are not only uninformed about the state of parapsychology but they are also uninformed about the current state of skepticism!
Honorton then pointed out that skeptics no longer claim that there are any meaningful relationships between design flaws and experimental outcomes.
This criticism was again based on the premise that psi did not exist, thus any psi effects observed in experiments must have been due to sloppy experimenters, flawed techniques or poor measurements. The assertion implied that if a scientist performed the proper, "perfect" psi experiment, that all claims for psi effects would disappear.
The basic argument is flawed, of course, because all measurements contain some error. Nevertheless, the assertion is testable by comparing experimental outcomes with assessments of experimental quality.
As we've seen, the meta-analyses described earlier have shown that design flaws cannot account for the cumulative success rates in psi experiments.
The skeptics are not eager to advertise their recent concessions.
Over the past few decades Ray Hyman and other "professional" skeptics have tried with great creativity and diligence to explain away psi.
They tried to show that the experiments were not really all that interesting, and that all of the apparently successful studies were due to one or another design flaws.
Having failed on both counts, informed skeptics have been forced to admit that they have simply run out of plausible explanations.
It is not easy to change life-long, strongly held beliefs, even when there is strong evidence that the belief is wrong, so the publicly proclaimed skeptics are not likely to ever admit that psi per se is genuine.
Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that the focus of today's controversy has significantly shifted from the flat dismissals of the past.
What Skeptics Now Claim
Because no plausible explanations remain for the experimental results, today the few remaining hard-core skeptics rehash the same old polemical arguments used in past decades.
The core assertion is the tired claim that after 100 years of research, parapsychology has failed to provide convincing evidence for psi phenomena.
This argument follows a certain logic.
Skeptics refuse to believe that psi experiments, which they admit are successfully demonstrating something, are in fact actually demonstrating psi itself.
By stubbornly insisting that the results are real and unexplainable on the one hand, but those results could not possibly be due to psi on the other, then of course they can claim that parapsychology is a failure.
This is like a skeptic who refuses to call a group of nine players who win the World Series a "baseball team."
In that case, the skeptic can simply smile, shrug and doggedly claim that yes, people do apparently go running after balls that other people occasionally hit with a bat. But still, after 100 years there is no solid evidence that anything called a baseball team actually exists.
Remember that most parapsychologists do not claim to understand what "psi" is.
Instead, they design experiments designed to test experiences that people have reported throughout history.
If rigorous tests for what we have called "telepathy" results in effects that look like, sound like, and feel like the experiences reported in real life, then call it what you will, but the experiments confirm that this common experience is not an illusion.
Another way to demonstrate the purely rhetorical nature of the "century of failure" argument is to see if the same argument also applies to conventional academic psychology.
After a hundred years and thousands of experiments, there are still vigorous controversies over such elementary phenomena as conscious awareness, memory, learning, and perception.
After a hundred years, psychology has not produced even the crudest model of how processes in the brain are transformed into conscious experience.
If we adopt the skeptics' reasoning, many of whom are psychologists, then conventional psychology is also a dismal failure.
An Unusual Controversy
After deftly exposing and dissolving the skeptical position, Honorton then pointed out an important difference between the controversy over psi and debates in more conventional disciplines.
Most scientific debates occur within groups of researchers who test hypotheses, develop and critique other researchers' methods, and collect data to test their hypotheses.
This is standard operating procedure, as witnessed by persistent debates over dozens of hot topics in all scientific disciplines.
The same sort of vigorous debating is evident in the journals and at the annual meetings of the Parapsychological Association, the professional society of scientists and scholars interested in psi phenomena.
However, the psi controversy is different in one important respect.
The vast majority of skeptics often write about the plausibility of various alternative hypotheses, but they almost never test their ideas.
This "armchair quarterbacking" is especially true of the current generation of psi skeptics, the vast majority of whom have made no original research contributions to this topic.
Their reasoning is simple: If you start from the position that an effect cannot exist, then why bother going to all the time and expense to actually study it? It makes more sense to use every rhetorical trick in the book to convince others that your opinion is correct, and that all the evidence to the contrary is somehow flawed.
This may seem like a perfectly reasonable strategy, but it is not science.
It is much closer to an argument based on faith, like a religious position.
The fact that most skeptics do not conduct counter-studies to prove their claims is not well known.
For example, in 1983 the well known skeptic Martin Gardner wrote the following:
"How can the public know that for fifty years skeptical psychologists have been trying their best to replicate classic psi experiments, and with notable unsuccess [sic]? It is this fact more than any other that has led to parapsychology's perpetual stagnation. Positive evidence keeps coming from a tiny group of enthusiasts, while negative evidence keeps coming from a much larger group of skeptics."
As Honorton points out,
"Gardner does not attempt to document this assertion, nor could he.
It is pure fiction.
Look for the skeptics' experiments and see what you find."
In addition, there is no "larger group of skeptics."
There are perhaps 10 to 15 skeptics who have accounted for the vast bulk of the published criticisms.
Beyond the "century of failure" argument, some skeptics still stubbornly insist that parapsychology is not a "real science."
As Ray Hyman wrote, "Every science except parapsychology builds upon its previous data. The data base continually expands with each new generation but the original investigations are still included. In parapsychology, the data base expands very little because previous experiments are continually discarded and new ones take their place."
This isn't true, because otherwise the meta-analyses described in this book wouldn't exist.
As we've seen, the early tests on thought-transference gave rise to picture-drawing telepathy tests.
They spawned telepathy experiments in the dream state, which later led to the ganzfeld experiments.
The dice tests begat RNG experiments.
All of these experimental variations evolved as researchers took stock of previous experimental outcomes and criticisms and refined their test designs and theories.
Of course, some skeptics have made important contributions to the development of progressively stronger evidence by systematically ferreting out design loop-holes, and by insisting upon stronger and stronger empirical evidence.
But because skeptics today can no longer demonstrate plausible alternative explanations, all that remains is rhetoric and defense of a priori beliefs.
Persisting in this stance in the face of overwhelming evidence has produced some excellent examples of minds struggling with logical contradictions.
Honorton summarized his view of the state of skepticism as follows: "There is a danger for science in encouraging self-appointed protectors who engage in polemical campaigns that distort and misrepresent serious research efforts. Such campaigns are not only counterproductive, they threaten to corrupt the spirit and function of science and raise doubts about its credibility. The distorted history, logical contradictions, and factual omissions exhibited in the arguments of the … critics represent neither scholarly criticism nor skepticism, but rather counteradvocacy masquerading as skepticism."
Skeptical Tactics
Extreme skeptics who believe that all psi experiments are flawed have used an effective bag of rhetorical tactics to try to convince others to dismiss the evidence.
These include accusations that even if real, psi effects are so weak that they are trivial or uninteresting, statements of frank prejudice, long lists of common but scientifically invalid criticisms, and severely distorted descriptions of psi experiments which make psi researchers appear to be incompetent.
Let's examine how some these tactics have been used.
Accusations of Triviality
Some skeptics have reluctantly accepted that psi effects may be genuine.
But then they attempted to reduce their discomfort by claiming that psi is simply too weak to be interesting.
For example, the psychologist E. G. Boring wrote that ESP data were merely "an empty correlation," and psychologist S. S. Stevens asserted that "the signal-to-noise ratio for ESP is simply too low to be interesting."
More recently, the skeptical British psychologist Susan Blackmore wrote:-
"What if my doubt is displaced and there really is extrasensory perception after all? What would this tell us about consciousness?"
To answer this question, Blackmore took a giant step backwards to the 1950s psychological fad of behaviorism, and concluded that consciousness doesn't have any meaning at all, that it is merely an illusion.
Not surprisingly then, she also concluded that psi, even if genuine, would tell us nothing at all about the nature of consciousness.
This is a perplexing position that hardly anyone accepts anymore, not even other hard-nosed skeptics.
In another example of trivializing psi, mathematician A. J. Ayer wrote in "Scientific American", "The only thing that is remarkable about the subject who is credited with extra-sensory perception is that he is consistently rather better at guessing cards than the ordinary run of people have shown themselves to be. The fact that he also does "better than chance" proves nothing in itself."
Such an assertion is confused, because any form of genuine psi, weak or strong, carries revolutionary potential for our understanding of the natural world.
In addition, effects that are originally observed as weak may be turned into extremely strong effects after they are better understood.
Consider, for example, what was known about harnessing the weak, erratic trickles of electricity 150 years ago, and compare that to the trillion-watt networks that run today's power-hungry world.
Prejudice
'Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge; it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.' Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man" (1871).
Prejudice - holding an opinion without knowledge or examination of the facts - is deeply embedded within human nature.
It is much easier to follow the natural impulse to form a quick judgment and stick with it, rather than take the time and trouble to study the actual evidence.
Prejudice continues to haunt psi researchers.
Sometimes it is acknowledged as such, and sometimes it is not.
Philip Anderson, a prominent theoretical physicist at Princeton University, assumed that psi was incompatible with physics, and so in an 1990 editorial in "Physics Today", he wrote, "If such results are correct, we might as well turn the National Institute of Standards and Technology into a casino and our physics classes into seances, and give back all those Nobel Prizes… It is for this kind of reason that physicists, quite properly, do not take such experiments seriously until they can be (1) reproduced (2) by independent, skeptical researchers (3) under maximum security conditions and (4) with totally incontrovertible statistics. Oddly enough, the parapsychologists who claim positive results invariably reject these conditions."
It is clear that Anderson was simply ignorant of the evidence, and yet he still felt quite confident about his opinion.
We can only imagine what Anderson thinks of well-regarded physicists who do take such experiments seriously.
Some critics have acknowledged that they simply do not wish to believe the evidence. For example, in 1951, the psychologist Donald O. Hebb wrote: "Why do we not accept ESP as a psychological fact? Rhine has offered us enough evidence to have convinced us on almost any other issue... I cannot see what other basis my colleagues have for rejecting it... My own rejection of [Rhine's] views is in a literal sense prejudice."
In 1955, psychologist G. R. Price suggested that because psi was clearly impossible, fraud was the best, and really the only remaining explanation for psi effects.
In a lead article in "Science", Price began sensibly: "Believers in psychic phenomena ... appear to have won a decisive victory and virtually silenced opposition.... This victory is the result of an impressive amount of careful experimentation and intelligent argumentation.... Against all this evidence, almost the only defense remaining to the skeptical scientist is ignorance, ignorance concerning the work itself and concerning its implications. The typical scientist contents himself with retaining ... some criticism that at most applies to a small fraction of the published studies. But these findings (which challenge our very concepts of space and time) are - if valid - of enormous importance ... so they ought not to be ignored."
Price then flatly asserted that because ESP was "incompatible with current scientific theory," it was more reasonable to believe that parapsychologists cheated than that ESP might be real.
Price based his argument on a famous essay on the nature of miracles by philosopher David Hume.
Hume argued that since we know that people sometimes lie, but we have no independent evidence of miracles, then it is more reasonable to believe that claims of miracles are based on lies than that miracles actually occurred.
Based on this reasoning, Price concluded, "My opinion concerning the findings of the parapsychologists is that many of them are dependent on clerical and statistical errors and unintentional use of sensory clues, and that all extrachance results not so explicable are dependent on deliberate fraud or mildly abnormal mental conditions."
Another critic of the same era was skeptical British psychologist Mark Hansel, from the University of Wales.
Like Price, Hansel wrote, "If the result could have been through a trick, the experiment must be considered unsatisfactory proof of ESP, whether or not it is finally decided that such a trick was, in fact, used (p. 21). [Therefore,] it is wise to adopt initially the assumption that ESP is impossible, since there is a great weight of knowledge supporting this point of view."
Such opinions - that existing scientific knowledge is complete and that psi necessarily conflicts with it - has motivated skeptics to imagine all sorts of good reasons to make the psi "go away."
A prime example of the power of this motivation is illustrated by a 1987 report on parapsychology issued by the National Research Council.
National Research Council Report
In the mid-1980s, the U. S. Army recruitment slogan was "Be all that you can be."
The slogan reflected the Army's desire to train soldiers to achieve enhanced performance.
These highly trained warriors would be fearless and cunning, fight without fatigue, and employ a variety of enhanced, exotic, or possibly even psychic skills.
In 1984, the U. S. Army Research Institute asked the premier scientific body in the United States, the National Academy of Sciences, to evaluate a variety of training techniques and claims about enhanced human performance.
These techniques included sleep learning, accelerated learning, biofeedback, neurolinguistic programming, and parapsychology.
The National Academy of Sciences responded to the Army's request by directing its principal operating agency, the National Research Council (NRC), to form a committee to examine the scientific evidence in these areas.
Because the NRC is often asked to investigate leading-edge and controversial topics, it maintains an explicit policy of assembling balanced scientific committees.
In fact, the policy requires members of its committees to affirm that they have no conflicts of interest either for or against the objects of study.
This helps ensure that the scientific reviews are fair.
On December 3, 1987, the NRC convened a well-attended press conference in Washington, DC, to announce its conclusions.
John A. Swets, Chairman of the NRC Committee, said, "Perhaps our strongest conclusions are in the area of parapsychology."
The bottom line: "The Committee finds no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena."
Whoops. Where did this come from?
To help understand the disparity between the actual data and the NRC's conclusion, the Board of Directors of the Parapsychological Association (PA) selected three senior members of the PA to study the report in detail and respond to it.
The three members were John Palmer, a psychologist at the Rhine Research Center, Durham, North Carolina, Charles Honorton, who at the time was Director of the Psychophysical Research Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, and Jessica Utts, professor of statistics at the University of California, Davis.
After some study, the PA committee issued its report, with three main findings.
First, the two principal evaluators of psi research for the NRC Committee, psychologists Ray Hyman and James Alcock, both had long histories of skeptical publications accusing parapsychology of not even being a legitimate science.
In contrast, there were no active psi researchers on the Committee. This violated the NRC's policy of assigning members to committees "with regard to appropriate balance."
Second, the NRC's report avoided mentioning studies favorable to psi research but quoted liberally from two background papers that supported the committee's position.
As if this were not enough, the Chairman of the NRC Committee phoned one of the authors of a third commissioned background paper, Robert Rosenthal from Harvard University, and asked him to withdraw his conclusions because they were favorable to parapsychology.
And third, the NRC report was self-contradictory.
The Committee widely advertised its conclusion that there was no evidence for psi phenomena, yet the report itself admits that the Committee members could offer no plausible alternatives to the research it surveyed.
The Committee failed to mention in the press conference that they recommended that the Army continue to monitor psi research in the United States and the former Soviet Union.
They even recommended that the Army propose specific experiments to be conducted.
The contrast between the NRC's advertised position and their actual position suggests that there were conflicts between reporting a fair evaluation of the data and what was politically expedient to report.
This was clearly revealed later when a newspaper reporter for "The Chronicle of Higher Education" asked the NRC Committee Chairman, John Swets, why he asked Rosenthal to withdraw his favorable conclusions.
Swets replied: "We thought the quality of our analysis was better, and we didn't see much point in putting out mixed signals". Swets explained, "I didn't feel we were obliged to represent every point of view."
This meant the NRC Committee in effect had created a "file drawer" of ignored positive studies that they didn't wish to talk about.
Apparently, the only acceptable views about psi for this committee were negative ones.
Given the true nature of the evidence, this was bound to lead to some major contradictions.
And it did.
The NRC Committee commissioned ten background papers by experts in a variety of fields. One of these papers, by Dale Griffin of Stanford University, explained how difficult it is to objectively evaluate evidence when one is already publicly committed to a particular belief.
According to Griffin, "Probably the most powerful force motivating our desire to protect our beliefs - from others' attacks, from our own questioning, and from the challenge of new evidence - is commitment... This drive to avoid dissonance is especially strong when the belief has led to public commitment."
The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) is an organization well-known for its impassioned commitment against parapsychology.
Ray Hyman was one of the original "Fellows" of CSICOP, and he was an active member of its Executive Council at the same time he was evaluating psi research for the NRC.
So the source of many contradictions in the NRC report is clear: Hyman's publicly committed position as a psychic debunker.
For example, at the NRC press conference, Hyman confirmed his public stance by announcing that the "poor quality of psi research was 'a surprise to us all - we believed the work would be of much higher quality than it turned out to be.'"
Yet, in contrast to this public statement, the report itself actually says, "… the best research [in parapsychology] is of higher quality than many critics assume..."
Furthermore, in contrast to the NRC's public assertions about "poor quality research," and "no scientific justification," was the actual paper commissioned by the NRC to review psi experiments and other studies of performance-enhancing techniques.
Authored by psychologists Monica Harris and Robert Rosenthal of Harvard University, the report concluded that, "The situation for the ganzfeld domain seems reasonably clear. We feel it would be implausible to entertain the null [hypothesis] given the combined [probability] from these 28 studies.... When the accuracy rate expected under the null [hypothesis] is 1/4, we estimate the obtained accuracy rate to be about 1/3."
In non-technical language, Harris and Rosenthal concluded that there was persuasive evidence for something very interesting going on in the ganzfeld experiments because they found an average hit rate of about 33% rather than the 25% expected by chance (as we discussed in Chapter 6). (Carl Sargent was getting a 60% 'hit rate')
They also compared the quality of the ganzfeld experiments to experiments in four other, non-parapsychological research areas and concluded that "only the ganzfeld ESP studies regularly meet the basic requirements of sound experimental design."
There is no need to belabor the point; it is clear that abject prejudice exists in science as is does in all human endeavors. It was detected fairly easily in the case of the NRC Report by comparing the public pronouncements with what the report actually says. Sometimes it is not so easy to detect, because we usually do not stop to think that some skeptical criticisms are simply invalid.
Valid and Invalid Criticisms
It is commonly thought that all criticisms in science are equal.
This is not so.
In fact, criticisms must have two properties to be valid.
First, it must be controlled, meaning that the criticism cannot also apply to well-accepted scientific disciplines. In other words, we cannot use a double standard and apply one set of criticisms to fledgling topics and an entirely different set for established disciplines. If we did, nothing new could ever be accepted as legitimate.
Second, a criticism must be testable, meaning that a critic has to specify the conditions under which the research could avoid the criticism, otherwise the objection is just a philosophical argument that falls outside the realm of science.
A thorough examination of the usual skeptical allegations about laboratory psi research reveals that only one is both controlled and testable: Have independent, successful replications been achieved?
We now know that the answer is yes, so the criticisms should stop here.
However, skepticism dies hard, and surprisingly few scientists realize that all criticisms are not created equal. So let's briefly review why some other common criticisms are invalid.
One popular assertion is that "Many phenomena that were once thought to be paranormal have been shown to have normal explanations."
This is invalid because it's uncontrolled - the same criticism can be applied to many discoveries in other well-accepted scientific disciplines.
If we were forced to reject psi just because we originally thought it was one thing but later we discovered that it was something else, this does not invalidate the existence of the effect, it merely redefines how we think about it.
Another criticism is that "Some paranormal effects have been shown to be the outcome of fraud or error," so we can safely ignore any successful results.
This is invalid because if we were forced to dismiss scientific claims because there have been a few cases of experimenter fraud, then we would have to throw out virtually every other realm of science as well because fraud exists in all human endeavors.
Another favorite complaint is, "There are no theories of psi."
This is invalid because for the term "psi" we could substitute the words "consciousness," "gravity," "anesthesia," or dozens of other well-accepted concepts or phenomena.
The fact that scientists do not understand some phenomena very well has not reduced scientific interest in them.
Another charge is that "Psi cannot be switched on and off, and the variables that effect it cannot be controlled."
This is invalid because there are all kinds of effects we have no direct control over, yet this does not disqualify them as legitimate objects of study, including most of the really interesting aspects of human behavior. In any case, psi is somewhat controllable in the sense that we can cause predictable effects to appear by asking people to do something in their mind. If they do not pay attention to the task, which is how control periods are conducted in some psi experiments, then no unusual effects appear.
Some skeptics have protested that "It's impossible to distinguish between psi and chance effects even in a successful experiment without the use of statistics."
This criticism is invalid because the same can be said for almost all experiments in biology, psychology, sociology and biomedicine.
Obviously, if there were some way of cleanly separating a signal from random noise before the experiment was conducted, then statistics would not have been used in the first place.
This litany of common criticisms can go on for many pages, but the point is clear. The vast majority of complaints about psi research are invalid because they equally pertain to conventional, well-accepted disciplines, or the complaints are untestable.
Another reason that psi has been ignored by mainstream science, and why decades of scientifically sound experiments have been considered controversial, is because the portrayal of these studies in the media and in college textbooks has been heavily distorted.
Distortions in Popular Media
In the July 8, 1996 issue of "Newsweek", an article appeared entitled, "Science on the fringe. Is there anything to it? Evidence, please."
Written by reporter Sharon Begley, this article is a good example of how widely disseminated information about psi experiments is sometimes seriously misleading.
Begley's story began with the following, "Say this about assertions that aliens have been, are or will soon be landing on Earth: at least a scenario like that of [the movie] "Independence Day" would not violate any laws of nature. In contrast, claims in other fringe realms, such as telepathy and psychokinesis, are credible only if you ignore a couple or three centuries of established science."
This is a commonplace assertion, but it is worth noting that critics never specify which "laws of nature" would be violated by psi, because the assertion is groundless - the laws of nature are not fixed absolutes.
They are basically fairly stable ideas that are always subject to expansion and refinement based on evidence from new observations.
For example, after the advent of relativity and quantum mechanics, some of our new physical "laws" forced the classical concepts developed in the 17th century to radically expand.
Have we magically reached the end of the trail at the turn of the 21st century, and the present "laws" of science can now be permanently chiseled into stone?
I don't think so.
Begley apparently believes that aliens landing on Earth is more credible than psi.
Does this make sense?
In the case of aliens, the evidence is based exclusively on eyewitness stories and ambiguous photographs. Some of the stories and photos are engaging, but taking the leap of faith from this form of evidence to the actual presence of extraterrestrial aliens is unwarranted.
There are dozens of alternative possibilities, none of which involve either extraterrestrial or Earth-bound aliens.
By comparison, the evidence for psi is based upon a century of repeated scientific evidence.
The seduction of the status quo is so strong, however, that a skeptical journalist would rather believe stories about little green men over controlled observations in the laboratory.
Later in the "Newsweek" article, the ganzfeld telepathy experiments were described.
After a good explanation of the basic procedure, and mentioning that the observed hit rate for Honorton's autoganzfeld studies was about 35% instead of the chance expected 25%, Begley asked, "Was it telepathy? Some experiments failed to take into account that people hearing white noise think about water more often than sex (or so they say); if beaches appear more often as a target than a couple in bed, a high hit rate would reflect this tendency, not telepathy. Also, receivers tend to choose the first or last image shown them; unless the experimenter makes sure that the target does not appear in the first or last place more often as decoys do, the hit rate would be misleadingly high."
While these criticisms are valid because they are testable, a skeptical reader might legitimately wonder, did targets with water content actually appear more often than targets with sexual content?
(No.)
Did targets actually appear more often in the first or last place?
(No.)
Were researchers so naïve as to not think of these possibilities?
(No.)
The implication was that the criticisms had been overlooked, but they weren't.
Begley continued, "Skeptic Ray Hyman of the University of Oregon found that, in the Edinburgh runs, video targets that were used just once or twice had hit rates of about chance, while those appearing three or more times yielded a "telepathic" 36 percent. How come? A video clip run through a player several times may look different from one never played for the sender; a canny receiver would choose a tape that looked "used" over one that didn't."
In fact, the ganzfeld system at the University of Edinburgh used two separate video players to address this criticism, and successful effects virtually identical to what Honorton had reported earlier were still observed.
Again, the implication of the criticism is that the ganzfeld results are explainable by this potential flaw, and it is not true.
Next, Begley repeated another common criticism: "Of the 28 studies Honorton analyzed in 1985, nine came from a lab where one time believer Susan Blackmore of the University of the West of England had scrutinized the experiments." (This is Carl Sargent's Cambridge work.)
The results are "clearly marred," she says, by "accidental errors" in which the experimenter might have known the target and prompted the receiver to choose it."
What Begley fails to report is that after Blackmore's allegedly "marred" studies were eliminated from the meta-analysis, the overall hit rate in the remaining studies remained exactly the same as before.
In other words, Blackmore's criticism was tested and it did not explain away the ganzfeld results.
It is also important to note that Blackmore never actually demonstrated that the flaw existed.
Begley continued by describing the mind-matter interaction experiments using random number generators conducted Robert Jahn's PEAR Lab.
Then she added, "As for Jahn's results, there are a couple of puzzles. First, one of the subjects, rumored to be on Jahn's staff, is responsible for half of the successes even though he was in just 15 percent of the trials. Second, some peculiarities in how the machine behaved suggest that the experimenters might have ignored negative data. Jahn says this is virtually impossible. But other labs, using Jahn's machine, have not obtained his results."
As discussed in Chapter 9, analysis of the PEAR Laboratory data clearly showed that no one person's results were wildly different from anyone else's. Nor was any one person responsible for the overall results of the experiment.
Again, the criticism was tested and found to be groundless.
The comment about "peculiarities" is pure rhetoric, because without mentioning the nature of the alleged problems, it is an untestable criticism.
The assertions that other labs have not obtained Jahn's results is a commonly repeated skeptical mantra, but it is also false, as we've seen.
Jahn's results are entirely consistent with a larger body of more than 70 other investigators, and overall there is no question that replication has been achieved.
If anything, Jahn's results are somewhat smaller in magnitude than those reported by others.
It is rather easy to pick apart Begley's article, because it is difficult to fairly portray controversial topics in the few paragraphs available in weekly news magazines. Some distortions are to be expected. But one would hope that book-length discussions by academic psychologists would be more thorough and neutral. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.
Books by Academic Psychologists
In 1985, psychologist Irvin Child, Chairman of the Psychology Department at Yale University, reviewed the Maimonides dream telepathy experiments for "American Psychologist", a prominent journal published by the American Psychological Association.
Child was especially interested in comparing what actually took place in those experiments with how they were later described by skeptical psychologists.
The first book he considered was a 1980 edition of British psychologist Mark Hansel's critical book on psi research.
One page in Hansel's book was devoted to description of the method and results of the dream telepathy experiments. Hansel's strategy was to suggest possible flaws that might have accounted for the experimental results, without demonstrating that the flaws actually existed, and then assume that such flaws must have occurred because they were more believable than genuine psi.
Child found that Hansel's descriptions of the methods used in the Maimonides studies were crafted in such a way as to lead unwitting readers to assume that fraud was a likely explanation, whereas in fact it was extremely unlikely given the controls employed by the researchers.
Even other skeptics, such as Ray Hyman, agreed with Child.
In a 1984 broadcast of the popular science program "Nova", Hyman said,"Hansel has a tendency to believe that if any experiment can be shown to be susceptible to fraud, then that immediately means it no longer can be used for evidence for psi. I do sympathize with the parapsychologists who rebut this by saying, well, that can be true of any experiment in the world, because there's always some way you can think of how fraud could have gotten into the experiment. You cannot make a perfectly 100 percent fraud-proof experiment. This would apply to all science."
Child next reviewed a 1981 book by York University psychologist James Alcock. Alcock's basic theme in this and later publications is his belief that parapsychologists are driven by religious urges, a secular "search for the soul."
With this theme driving much of his writings, Alcock considered any psi experiments with positive outcomes to be flawed due to religious motivations.
One of Alcock's main criticisms of the Maimonides experiments was the assertion that they did not include a control group.
For example, Alcock wrote that "a control group, for which no sender or no target was used, would appear essential."
Child responded, "Alcock… did not seem to recognize that the design of the Maimonides experiments was based on controls exactly parallel to those used by innumerable psychologists in other research with similar logical structure."
The next book was by psychologists Leonard Zusne and Warren H. Jones.
Zusne and Jones wrote that the Maimonides researchers discovered that dreamers were not influenced telepathically unless they knew in advance that an attempt would be made to influence them.
This led, they wrote, to the receiver's being "primed prior to going to sleep" by the experimenters "… preparing the receiver through experiences that were related to the content of the picture to be telepathically transmitted during the night."
Child pointed out that it would be immediately obvious to anyone that such an experiment, if it were actually performed, would be catastrophically flawed.
Obviously, if you prime someone with target-relevant informationbefore he or she dreams, the entire experiment is worthless.
But given that the description is so described, readers of Zusne and Jones' book unfamiliar with the actual descriptions of the dream telepathy experiments could reach no other conclusion than the researchers were completely incompetent.
Child responded, "The simple fact, which anyone can easily verify, is that the account Zusne and Jones gave of the experiment is grossly inaccurate. What Zusne and Jones have done is to describe … some of the stimuli provided to the dreamer the next morning, after his dreams had been recorded and his night's sleep was over."
As he discovered one flawed description after another, Child finally concluded that the books he reviewed contained "nearly incredible falsification of the facts about the experiments."
But this was just the tip of an iceberg.
It turns out that many introductory psychology textbooks have presented similarly flawed descriptions of psi experiments.
These books are used in college courses, and for most students all they will ever know about any topic in detail is contained in these texts.
If basic textbooks state or imply that psi researchers are stupid or naïve, is it any wonder that future scientists and professors mistakenly assume that the evidence for psi is worthless?
Introductory Psychology Textbooks
"There is no better soporific and sedative than skepticism". Friedrich Nietzsche
In 1991, psychologist Miguel Roig and his colleagues published a detailed analysis of the treatment of parapsychology in introductory psychology textbooks.
They surveyed 64 textbooks published between 1980 and 1989, then looked for words like ESP and psychic in the index and scanned through the chapters on research methods, sensation and perception, and states of consciousness.
Of the 64 texts surveyed, 43 included some mention of parapsychology.
This is interesting in its own right, because it means that fully one third of introductory psychology textbooks did not even mention a topic that all college students find fascinating.
A mere 8 of the 43 texts mentioned that since the 1970s parapsychologists have used the term psi as a neutral label for psychic phenomena.
Twenty-one books mentioned the ESP card tests conducted by J. B. Rhine and his colleagues in the 1930s to 1960s.
A few books incorrectly claimed that ESP card tests are still representative of contemporary research, whereas anyone even casually familiar with recent journal articles and books knows that such tests have hardly been used for decades.
The remaining topics covered included discussions of spontaneous psychic experiences, which were uniformly explained away in terms of misunderstood sensory processes, coincidence, and self-deception.
Other topics included brief reviews of a few selected experiments and alleged problems of methodology.
Most of the texts ended with a wait-and-see stance towards psychic phenomena, with 35 of the 43 books mentioning lack of replication as the most serious problem.
The second and third most serious problems were described as poor experimental designs and fraud.
Surprisingly, only a few texts mentioned the development of experiments since the 1970s. Nine books mentioned RNG experiments, three mentioned the Maimonides dream telepathy studies, and only one mentioned the ganzfeld telepathy studies.
Roig and his colleagues concluded their survey as follows: "Much of the coverage reflects a lack of familiarity with the field of parapsychology, … there is an unacceptable reliance on secondary sources, most of which were written by nonparapsychologists who are critical of the field and who, at least in some cases, have been found to distort and sometimes fail to present promising lines of research. We conclude that most textbooks that cover the topic present an outdated and often grossly misleading view of parapsychology."
This is unfortunate but not surprising. College textbooks reflect the status quo, and the status quo has not yet caught up with the latest developments in psi research. But what sustains the status quo?
What has driven some academic psychologists to see psi research in such distorted ways?
Motivations
Skeptics are fond of claiming that believers in psi are afflicted with some sort of abnormal mental condition that prohibits them from seeing the truth.
Skeptical psychologist James Alcock has suggested that one motivation for this "affliction" is that psi researchers are really motivated by hidden desires to justify some form of spiritual belief.
This belief, according to Alcock, has biased psi research to such an extent that he believes there must be something wrong with it.
But Alcock's belief about hidden spiritual motivations have produced an equally strong counter-bias. This is clear in a lengthy background report that Alcock prepared for the NRC Committee mentioned earlier.
For 40 pages, Alcock's report rips apart the mind-matter interaction studies reported by physicist Helmut Schmidt and Princeton University engineer Robert Jahn, then it concludes that, "There is certainly a mystery here, but based on the weaknesses in procedure mentioned above, there seems to be no good reason at this time to conclude that the mystery is paranormal in nature."
In dismissing the mystery, Alcock missed the forest for the trees.
It is true that any one or two experiments can be explained away as being due to chance or poor design, but the entire body of evidence cannot be dismissed so easily.
And in contrast to Alcock's belief about what motivates psi researchers, parapsychology was formally recognized by the mainstream as a legitimate scientific discipline in 1969 when the Parapsychological Association, an international scientific society, was elected an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Religious sects, New Age societies, and skeptical advocacy groups are not affiliates of the AAAS.
We may now turn the tables on Alcock and ask what motivates skeptics to spend so much time trying to dismiss the results of another scientific discipline?
For Alcock, it seems that his feelings towards organized religion and his fears about genuine psi are motivations.
For example, Alcock has written, "In the name of religion human beings have committed genocide, toppled thrones, built gargantuan shrines, practiced ritual murder, forced others to conform to their way of life, eschewed the pleasures of the flesh, flagellated themselves, or given away all their possessions and become martyrs."
and,
"There would, of course, be no privacy, since by extrasensory perception one could see even into people's minds.
Dictators would no longer have to trust the words of their followers; they could "know" their feelings….
What would happen when two adversaries tried to harm the other via PK?"
Given Alcock's feelings about religion and psi, he should be suspicious about the motivations of the prominent physicist, Stephen Hawking.
In Hawkings widely-acclaimed book "A Brief History of Time", the final paragraph reads, "… if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone.... Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist.
If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would know the mind of God."
In other writings, Hawkings has declared his skepticism about psi, so apparently his religious feelings do not interfere with his skepticism.
On the other end of the spectrum, what would Alcock say about the motivations of his fellow super-skeptic, Martin Gardner, who wrote:
"As for empirical tests of the power of God to answer prayer, I am among those theists who, in the spirit of Jesus' remark that only the faithless look for signs, consider such tests both futile and blasphemous.…. Let us not tempt God."
In other words, religious faith can motivate scientists both towards or against psi research.
Ultimately, there are as many reasons for why people may be for or against something as there are people.
Then, from the skeptical perspective, what else might account for the widespread belief in psi? Is society going crazy?
Is Society Crazy?
If there is no scientific evidence that psi exists, then strong public belief in such topics must be a sign of mass delusion.
This is a common but rather peculiar skeptical position, as we could draw a parallel with, say, belief in God.
There is no scientific evidence that God exists, yet there is strong public belief in God.
For some reason, skeptics do not openly point to mental delusion as a reason for the widespread, "unscientific" belief in God.
But is there any evidence that society is delusional?
Can paranormal experiences be attributed only to known psychological processes?
This question was examined by Catholic priest Andrew Greeley, a sociologist at the University of Arizona.
Greeley was interested in the results of surveys consistently indicating that the majority of the population believed in ESP.
In a 1978 survey asking American adults whether they had ever experienced psychic phenomena such as ESP, 58% said yes; a 1979 survey of college and university professors showed that about two-thirds accepted ESP; a 1982 survey of elite scientists showed that more than 25% believed in ESP; and a 1987 survey showed that 67% of American adults reported psychic experiences.
The same surveys showed, according to Greeley, that "People who've tasted the paranormal, whether they accept it intellectually or not, are anything but religious nuts or psychiatric cases. They are, for the most part, ordinary Americans, somewhat above the norm in education and intelligence and somewhat less than average in religious involvement."
Because Greeley was surprised about this outcome, he explored it more closely by testing people who had reported profound mystical experiences such as being "bathed in light."
He used the "Affect Balance Scale" of psychological well-being, a standard psychological test used to measure healthy personality.
People reporting mystical experiences achieved top scores.
Greeley reported that "The University of Chicago psychologist who developed the scale said no other factor has ever been found to correlate so highly" as reports of mystical experience.
Greeley then investigated whether prior beliefs in the paranormal or the mystical caused the experiences, or whether the experiences themselves caused the belief.
He found that many widows who reported contact by their dead husbands had not previously believed in life after death. This suggests that they were not unconsciously creating hallucinations to confirm their prior beliefs.
He also studied whether people who had lost a child or parent reported contact with the dead more often than people whose siblings had died. The assumption was that people who had lost family members closer to them might have had a stronger need to communicate, and hence a greater frequency of reported contacts.
According to Greeley, "We were surprised: People who'd lost a child or parent were less likely to report contact with the dead than those who'd lost siblings."
Such findings are incompatible with the skeptics' hypothesis that reports of paranormal experiences are due solely to hallucination, self-delusion, wish-fulfillment, or other forms of mental aberrations.
Summary
Most of the commonly repeated skeptical reactions to psi research are extreme views, driven by the belief that psi is impossible.
The effect of repeatedly seeing skeptical dismissals of the research, in college textbooks and in prominent scientific journals, has diminished mainstream academic interest in this topic.
However, informed opinion, even among skeptics, shows that virtually all of the past skeptical arguments against psi have dissolved in the face of overwhelming positive evidence, or they are based on incredibly distorted versions of the actual research.
damn nice! *cheers him on*
I may love Science, but after you bump into the genuinely weird, you find it deeply lacking, as it changes your outlook.
Science = the meat and potatoes of life.
Faith, emotions, empathy, whatever, are the sense of taste that lets you appreciate the food.
paranormal = adds a sense of smell and sound to the experience, a depth.
Hal23,
damn nice! *cheers him on*
I may love Science, but after you bump into the genuinely weird, you find it deeply lacking, as it changes your outlook.
Science = the meat and potatoes of life.
Faith, emotions, empathy, whatever, are the sense of taste that lets you appreciate the food.
paranormal = adds a sense of smell and sound to the experience, a depth.
Nicely put.
normal sceptical inquiry is fine....problem is there are "sceintific" folk who're just as extreme as the "I was probed by a pink petunia in a tutu" brigade... ;)
Another problem is our own conceits.
Science is merely the best tool we have at the moment to understand our Universe.
It doesn't mean it's capable of actually doing that!
Much as it's a headache and mental barrier to some, it's possible there's things we cannot deal with in a rational, deterministic manner. If that turns out to be the case, then Q.E.D. = Q.E.D. maybe :D
I rely on Science to explain much of the world we live in, but I am not going to bet it can do that 100%.
Give us a few million years, at least, until we can be in anyway confident, about anything! ;)
Sorry, not going to contribute to the ongoing debate above (had enough of those discussions in the past), but...
As the TSR staffer he used to drink with (normally Monday lunchtimes I remember....at least at the start), the co-author of his first published work with TSR, collaborator on numerous projects, for a while flatmate, and for a long time, friend - I can indeed confirm that Dr Carl Sargent, psychologist (primarily), parapsychologist and, indeed, chemist is the same Carl Sargent, author of RPG supplements, novels, fighting fantasy books, etc. etc, too numerous to mention.
The last time I saw Carl, and I won't say exactly when, he was happy, full of life and even capable of venturing out in daylight!!! But after that, he really did disappear.. and i've been searching for him pretty much even since...
To set the record straight, the whole Susan Blackmore business, whilst a constant source of irritation had long ceased to be a major issue.
Incidentally, he also wrote under quite a few pseudonyms and not just in the RPG/games area - some of which i have seen quite recently - so either he's still writing or somebody is running a very clever disinformation campaign!
Oh, and Carl, if you're vain enough to be reading this (which i very much doubt) please get in touch.. i'm not hard to find if you know where to look....
The last time I saw Carl, and I won't say exactly when,
So
You don't say who you are.
You wont give details of your info on Sargent.
What part of your post are we supposed to accept as authoritative?
However... did you know that neither you nor Carl are actually credited for writing that co-authored publication in the Pen and Paper RPG database? That that publication appears to be conspicuously absent from the database? And that your name doesn't even appear in the database either?
Seems that close association with Carl may also endanger your own existence. Be careful you don't disappear as well!
Denis, aka "Maldin"
Maldin's Greyhawk http://melkot.com
City of Greyhawk Sage and Cartographer... come visit my home!
Had also noticed that neither of us tend to be credited in general listings of that product. Maybe that's trying to tell us something...
Oh no, did i say the first part out loud - they'll be coming for me next....
Interesting that Mr Sargent's last known (to me) credited work was GW's Inferno volume 14 published 1999....Also using common sense, deductive reasoning, a good knowledge of geography and a super sleuthing tool also known as a computer with network access I'm fairly confident I now know the location of this person. And of course out of respect for privacy that's where this ends...An interesting diversion, all told.
Check out the wikipedia entry for him.
He was into some strange stuff-parapsychology and such.