The Bad Side of Woo

[really?]

[NucleicAcid]

That's not really woo...that's religious oppression. The Lebanese man did not do anything wrong. Sure, you may not agree with his practices, but as far as I can tell, his 'woo' didn't harm anyone.

Harmful woo is like when the AIDS mother chooses not to take HAART in favor of orange juice and homeopathy, and she and her daughter die of opportunistic infections.

[ciscop]

i am with really on this one
Religion is WOO

is woo on both sides
the lebanese idiot that believes he can do it for real
and the swetty camel riders that believe in mahoma and witchcraft

[Nostradamus]

[really?]

[Nostradamus]

[NucleicAcid]

I'm fully aware of what Wiseman said.

I just selectively ignore it because he used "begs the question" incorrectly.

Begging the question is the following train of logic:

Psi does not exist
The evidence for psi is not good enough, because psi does not exist, so the data must be full of errors
Psi has not been proven to exist because the evidence doesn't support it.
The data for psi must contain errors, because psi has not been proven to exist.
Repeat.

The important point of the matter is, the community of skeptics simultaneously argue that 1) There is next to zero evidence for psi, and there is no way it exists 2) There is enough evidence to show that psi exists by any other measure of science, but there needs to be much more evidence before we will consider its existence seriously, because it would revolutionize the world of science.

The skeptical community needs to make up its damn mind. Either renounce the possibility of psi wholesale, or agree that it is plausible, as long as there continues to be evidenced produced for it.

[really?]

[ciscop]

oooh really
common

he cant do that
otherwise the paranormal wouldnt be paranormal

there is nothing there but the imagination
and for me that's good enought
i love the lenght of the human imagination

[really?]

[NucleicAcid]

[Nostradamus]

[NucleicAcid]

That would be tricky to fit in a single post. You're invoking about a century of research, experiments, journal articles, conventions, commentary, arguments, and discussions.

However, someone has already summed up the very best of it into one convenient, 300 page package:





It's a wonderful read. It reads like a newspaper but it's annotated like a textbook.

[Nostradamus]

So there isn't an instance where there is an experiment you can point to that demonstrates success such as in the case of the AIDS work you pointed to in another thread?

When you go back a century you end up including the work at Duke that has not been replicated.

[NucleicAcid]

Science only very rarely does a "single experiment" to prove something, and usually that's only when they already know the answer, they just want to feel cocky because they are scientists, and that's what we like doing. Like the recent experiment that showed frame dragging due to Earth's rotation. But even then, that isn't the single experiment that has verified special relativity.

But nonetheless I can still deliver.

If you want a SINGLE experiment, with the most number of participants (several million), that would probably be the Got Psi report



That's the preliminary. I can't get my hands on the full report because JSE has been remodeling their website. But it shows a very significant overall effect nonetheless.

I should also note for the AIDS thing, that that case didn't PROVE HIV or AIDS. It's just a demonstration of what we would expect to see if it did exist, which it does, but that was determined through many other means. In fact, HIV, like most cutting edge discoveries, raised a HUGE stink in the world of science when it first came onto the scene. Science ALWAYS pisses and moans over validity whenever something new or unknown is discovered. Then, once all of that blows over, you'd be an idiot to question the generally accepted hypothesis.

Plate techtonics, quantum mechanics, endosymbiotic theory, yada yada yada.