Divinity Atlas
Parapsychology's Three Facts Reduce to Two Cases, Not Three
Parapsychology, "a long-running, methodologically serious research programme with a consistently negative or, at best, contested evidentiary record," per its own description, carries three contested facts. Read individually they reduce to two cases, not three.
One Case, Told Twice
One key-experiment fact and the replication-status fact are the identical episode at two grains. The specific claim: "Daryl Bem published nine experiments reporting statistically significant evidence for precognition in a 2011 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology," noted as debunked, "Independent pre-registered replications (Ritchie, Wiseman and French 2012; Galak and colleagues) failed to reproduce the effect." The formal verdict restates the same episode in general terms: "Independent pre-registered attempts to replicate Bem's 2011 precognition findings... found no effect; the episode became a touchstone case in psychology's wider replication crisis." One finding, not two.
A Genuinely Separate Government Programme
The OTHER key-experiment fact is a different episode entirely: "The United States government funded a remote-viewing research programme, run through SRI International and later SAIC as Star Gate, from 1972 to 1995; a 1995 CIA-commissioned evaluation split between statistician Jessica Utts, who found the statistics indicated a genuine effect, and psychologist Ray Hyman, who found the results methodologically unreliable." The programme was closed on different grounds than the statistical argument itself, "both reviewers agreed the programme's output had no operational intelligence value regardless of the statistical dispute." A published claim that became a landmark replication failure, and a decades-long government programme closed on operational grounds despite an unresolved statistical disagreement: two cases, not three facts about one.
Where To Read More
- ParapsychologyScholarly DisciplinesThree facts reduce to two cases: Bem's precognition claim told at two grains, and the separate Star Gate government programme