From: Jet Wimp Subject: ganzfeld experiments Message-ID: <9307240604.AA22360@lll-winken.llnl.gov> Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1993 20:36:22 EDT York Dobyns has reacted to my recent posting about the renewed interest in the ganzfeld experiments with much posturing and asperity. Clearly, he has a vested interest in the consideration in which the scientific community holds these experiments. He condemns my "ad hominem" comments by wafting a few ad hominem comments of his own, and his willful misreading of what I wrote does not, to quote him, "seem entirely consonant with disinterested scholarly evaluation of evidence." For instance, I expressed regret that such research efforts exploited the talent of young, perhaps married, researchers, whose chances for tenure and promotion were certain to suffer because of the difficulty--- I would say, impossibility--- of obtaining dramatic confirming evidence for parapsychology. Dobyns trumpets that Honorton was neither young nor married. However, since I was discussing tenure and promotion, it was clear my comments were aimed at research facilities in an academic setting, not private, in fact, shadowy, efforts such as Honorton's. I'm afraid that not all Dobyn's piety nor wit can lure a circumspect person to take these experiments seriously. He points out my "lamentable ignorance" about experimentation with human subjects. He says there could hardly have been more than five experiments a week at Honorton's facility, while I estimated 40. Very well, five experiments a week means that the 190 experiments took 38 weeks to complete. The experiments were "drawn from" (ominous expression, that) a seven year period. Where is the data from the other 6 1/3 years? It could be argued that other research was being conducted in this time period. I argue that it is extremely unlikely that this could have been the case, for the researchers, if we can believe their data, would have been certain immediately to appraise the results as a rare confirming instance, and would have assigned the highest possibly priority to the ganzfeld research. Dobyn finds my suggestion that the data was consciously or unconsciously selected by Honorton "outrageous and infuriating." "Were Honorton not deceased I would be demanding that this 'Jet Wimp' character, whatever his or her real name, should be tendering a formal written apology and retraction." Not likely. I have nothing against pro forma, even posthumous, apologies. However, my principles do not permit me to apologize to the deluded, particularly when their expensive and time-consuming frivolities muddy scientific discourse. For, to tell the truth, I'm angry and outraged, too. If manpower and resources were unlimited, researchers could be hooking microphones and sophisticated waveform analyzers to oaks in an attempt to discern the secret language of trees, and I wouldn't care. But manpower and resources are limited. Every dollar spent on parapsychology has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the reserve of assets that can improve the quality of our lives and the compass of our intellects. In the past dozen years amazing discoveries have been made in all fields of science: chemistry, physics, medicine, biology. In my discipline, mathematics, we have recently seen the four color theorem proved, the Bieberbach conjecture established, and Fermat's last theorem proved. These astonishing feats of the human intellect have cause some to call the twentieth century the golden age of mathematics. Where is parapsychology's four color theorem, its dna cloning, its buckyballs, its Josephson junctions, its monoclinal antibodies? What has parapsychology given us in terms of results that are consistently reproducible by independent investigators? Nothing, only excuses, and the promise of more "experiments." If it weren't for the money pumped into this harlequinade by wifty anti-rationalists such as Koestler, whose most egregious foray into non-fiction was a ludicrous attempt to resuscitate the failed doctrines of Lysenkoism, I suspect parapsychology by this time would have atrophied. I and other scientists are tired of the excuses, the posturing, the data that is missing, the experiments that go nowhere. Parapsychology has been in a public lavatory with the door locked for forty years. Excuse me if I'm tired of waiting.