SCEPCOP Forum

For sure! I mean the Director of General Neurology at Yale? Pfl! What a lightweight! How could anyone take him seriously! I'll bet James Randi paid someone off to get him that post! Amirite?

Arouet,
Once again, I am horrified by your lack of real skepticism. You have a glaring double standard. Titles are meaningless to you when they are on the other side of the argument, but oh, so important when they appear to back you up.

I'm going to take a wild guess here that you've never done any fact checking of skeptics, ever. Let alone Novella. There is a reason he is unimportant in debates on psi. He gets his facts wrong.

I'm going to keep telling you this. You have to be skeptical of the skeptics. You have not proven to me that you are capable of this.

Arouet,
You have not demonstrated any fact checking of skeptics that I've seen. You tell me you are skeptical of everyone, but I don't see it demonstrated in any of your posts. All I see is heavy favoritism towards skeptical opinions.

Novella is a lightweight talking head on parapsychology subjects. He's never been mentioned in any serious parapsychology literature that I'm aware of. He is only mentioned by Radin in his blogs when he commits one of his many factual errors. He's probably a good neurologist, I don't know. But he's very bad at parapsychology. NDE's are not in his field. Neurology is not the study of consciousness.

CB,
Could you post an example or two of facts that Dr. Novella has gotten wrong? It might help strengthen your position...

I already provided those examples on other threads.

I think that part of the problem is that as skeptics, you just don't see the the statements that are blatantly incorrect. You want them to be true.

Novella claims for example, that the autoganzfeld studies have not shown any effect. That is not true. The studies have shown positive effects. Skeptics are free to dispute whether this evidence is meaningful, but are not free to dispute the existence of this evidence. You two have gotten that part right. Neither of you is claiming that the evidence isn't there. You are better skeptics than Novella in this area.

Novella also touted an MRI study which claimed rather audaciously to have proven that psychic ability doesn't exist. He ignored about 4 other MRI studies and about 26 other, similar studies which had positive results. Novella is high profile and is riding his reputation. He therefore must be held to a very high standard. Making these glaring errors is inexcusable.

Again, neither of you make these sorts of errors. You want additional information and I think you can recognize a ridiculous skeptic claim when you see one.

Arouet, given that you are a better skeptic than Novella, I hope you can see that regardless of his position, he has to be held to a very high standard of objectivity.

I do not have time. Perhaps you could research this?

I've noticed that the skeptics are amazingly bad at examining skeptical positions critically. They need us to do it for them or it won't be done at all. For people who prize their rationality so highly, they just don't seem all that . . . rational.

When I'm quoting someone I try and proide the reference or at least I'll say directly that I don't have it available. The fact is, people misremeber what they hear all the time, or don't catch the subtleties.

Craig W made a specific comment about what Novella said. I suspected that Novella didn't quite say it that way. How can I ever find the quotation that Craig heard?

And Craig B: you make statements about what people say all the time but rarely back it up.

I'm willing to do research, but not spin my wheels trying to search through the haystack to find the actual quotation you guys are referring to.

Also Craig W: for someone who abjectly refuses to engage in any of these topics in any substantive detail, I don't know that you should be criticizing here...

Arouet,
I won't engage you because your bias makes the conversation meaningless. And by the way, I found the Novella quote in under a minute using standard search techniques.

Yes, it's much easier to find the quote you had in mind when you already had it in mind! And instead of just posting your link with your quote you of course leave it out.

I know you and I differ on our points of view but that doesn't mean every discussion must be filled with acrimony. I know people like you get off on that on the net, but it's not that much fun for me. So I'll leave you alone again (should have stuck to my plan the first time I said I'd do this!)






Anyhow, you have no idea how my bias will affect any discussion because you don't allow a conversation to get into any depth.

Check out this 1978 documentary about Near Death Experiences and evidence of the Afterlife. It's very interesting.