I once did a deep dive into some of the peer reviewed academic research on "supernatural phenomena" including papers on studying patterns in past life memories, and trying to externally verify the details of remembered past life events.
First, I was shocked that these things are researched academically, and have their own regular looking peer reviewed journals. A lot of the papers are from tenured professors at well known universities, often from divisions affiliated with a medical school like this one: https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/
Secondly, I was also shocked to find I could find no obvious flaws in the reasoning or methodology in the papers I looked at- despite the subject matter seeming to be something that is "obviously impossible" they followed standard scientific procedures, and supported their findings with the same level of care and rigor you'd expect from other fields. I suppose then that the obvious explanation is that these "standard procedures" are themselves flawed, but from just reading the paper, I could not spot the flaw.
The US Army tried "psi" experiments in the 1970s/80s with the Stargate Project[0]. They were mainly trying "remote viewing" - seeing if somebody could spy on the Soviets with their minds from far away. There was a book[1] about it called "The Men Who Stare At Goats", the title referencing a guy who purportedly killed a goat just by staring at it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Stare_at_Goats
> but from just reading the paper, I could not spot the flaw.
Do you have 3 nice examples? During the pandemics my hobby was to read the ivermectin papers and try to find the error.
I'd have to find them again... one that really stands out was simply studying the stories of people claiming to remember past lives and looking to see the spacial distribution of where those memories seemed to occur relative to where the person lived- and finding that they followed some interesting patterns.
Yes, it make sense that you don't have your private collection of freak articles.
Anyway, I guess everyone was Ramses or Cleopatra, and nobody was a farmer near Angkor Wat.
I don't get the conclusion.
The two blue graphs (academic psi and lay psi) look like each other, and the two yellow graphs (academic skeptics and lay skeptics) look like each other. The data show the opposite of the headline: academic researchers into the paranormal seem to believe in it, while other academics don't.
Maybe this is some kind of meta-comment on how the "academic psi researchers" typically interpret hard data...
It seems to be assumed that I've heard of "psi". No definition is given, nor can I even find one on wikipedia. A search yields information about the unit of physical pressure.
One of the examples given of a psi-related phenomenon is extra-sensory perception. As far as I know, ESP has never been rigorously demonstrated to exist, although it's been attempted many times.
What's this about?
It's defined in the second paragraph. Mind reading, extrasensory perception, ghosts, and the like.
The full article is here: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
Note that the editor's presentation linked in HN only shows the belief plot (showing that psi researchers tend to be believe in psi), but the actual article draw most conclusions from their figure 2 (which studies correlation between belief in psi and what they call open-minded thinking)
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