NY Times reports great distress among psychologists today ("Journal's Article on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage"):
One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.
The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author, Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell, testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects.
Reporter Benedict Carey does a good job of laying out why this is so upsetting to people - the principal reason being that "[c]laims that defy almost every law of science are by definition extraordinary and thus require extraordinary evidence." According to objectors, the researchers failed to take this into account, plus, for shame, they didn't use "topflight statisticians."
Point: if the scientific community only allows in ideas that do not defy "every law of science," how can any new knowledge, ground-shattering as it might be, become the new laws? Right, Copernicus and friends?
