Sorry Robert, you’re wrong and I’m right!
Ok, just kidding. As a psychologist, the most amusing aspect of this is that no matter how many psychologists write about this, they rarely apply it to their own beliefs!
Some 70-80% of psychologists believe parapsychology (telepathy, remote viewing, etc) is a pseudo science. “We’re open minded,” they say, “Just show us good scientific proof and we’ll accept it. There isn’t any proof so we don’t accept it.”
BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CLAIMS OF PARAPSYCHOLOGY SKEPTICS;
1. It’s all fraud
2. Ok, you’ve fraud-proofed your experiments, but the methodology is no good.
3. Ok, no fraud and you’ve made the methodology perfect but your statistics are off.
4. Ok, no fraud, you’ve got good methodology and statistics, but you can’t reliably repeat your successful experiments.
5. Ok, no fraud, you’ve got good methodology and statistics, you’ve been able to regularly repeat successful experiments, but the odds against chance aren’t good enough.
6. Ok, no fraud, good methodology and statistics, good repetition of experiments, and odds more than a trillion to one against chance.
SKEPTIC: (two responses nowadays) (1) Ok, you now have given us perfect scientific proof of parapsychology in all the ways we’ve been asking for teh past 100 years. Our conclusion? Since we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that parapsychology is impossible, if the best science proves it, then something is wrong with science. (2) We don’t care how much. You improve the science - since by the laws of nature parapsychology is impossible, we don’t even have to look at the research.
This last one, by the way, is the conclusion of the psychologists hired by the American PSychological Association to respond to a long summary of successful parapsychology experiments from their 2018 issue. I even know one of the authors, Arthur Reber. I tried to have a conversation once with him about parapsychology and he simply was not capable of offering one coherent statement about it!
And I’ll even predict, if some skeptics respond to this, they won’t provide any rational, informed responses either!
I could be wrong. Honestly, I wish I was. I’d love to meet an intellectually humble parapsychology skeptic. I never have.