Also, with respect to this:

“but the[y] [skeptics of science] come to a different conclusion at the end – that science (essentially) does not work.”

What utter nonsense. No skeptic of science I know claims that science “does not work”. They merely claim, as Steve will also admit, that science is flawed, and, more importantly, that science does not arrive at perfectly objective, absolute truth, nor does it hold primacy of place as the only valid way of viewing and interpreting phenomena.

OK, point made. So, Steve and the Amen Corner: Get your flame-throwers ready, consult your “Ad Hominem Thesaurus”, and go nuts!

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer

His article takes off Schooler’s evaluation of his own experiment. Yet here is another article that asserts Schooler’s observations have indeed been repeated by other researchers and there was some common ground between those further researches.

http://digitalcommons.utep.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=christian_meissner

I disagree with the statement that ubiquity of the results weaken the “regression to the mean” hypothesis. Here is a question: Let’s say Schooler’s initial experiment suggested a result that was in line with the previous conclusions about verbal overshadowing, that there was no such thing. Would he feel the need to repeat his experiment? I don’t think so. We observe a “decline effect” which is a fact, yet the reason there is no “rise effect” is because the assumption that is not contrary does not get reevaluated. Even if regression to the mean exists, for us to be able to observe it there needs to be a decline effect, and that seems to weaken the hypothesis while it does not mean that it is weakened.

Besides that, I fully agree with the conclusion of Steven Novella’s article. I think it says everything I want to say about the second part of Lehrer’s article.

Thanks.

Anyways, what I am curious about is Schooler’s testing of the decline effect, i.e. the precognition experiment mentioned in the essay. Was Schooler’s protocol changing between testing attempts? It is suggested that it can be explained with regression to the mean, but why is it generally a really “high” response in the first attempt that decreases later? It seems like something about the experiment has actually changed. Better controls, better observation, more/less bias (either could change results), etc would seem like a better explanation than just regression to the mean. If it is just regression to the mean, then wouldn’t that imply that these people are simply applying bad statistics? They aren’t having tight enough error-bars, etc., to sufficiently show the effect is real?

So what is really going on with modern studies that are demonstrating the decline effect (ignoring the supernatural ones)?

Thanks,

Jacob Block

Also, it’s ironic that whenever someone wishes to prove the inadequacy of scientific assumptions, they use as evidence … the findings of science.

But I’m sympathetic to their plight, because, after all, what other way is there?

You are an idiot.

There, did you get the reaction you were after?
Sneering caricature, my ass.
Let us both look in the mirror and see if we come up roses.

Love the sneering caricatures.

http://crayz.org/science.pdf

If you cut off the head (“The truth wears off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method?”) and the tail (“When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe”), you are left with the body of the article which is actually not all that bad.

Which makes me wonder if he actually understood what he was being told by the various scientists he interviewed. It seems he got lost in the detail and missed the big picture.