What would be the incentive? Forging results for highly public performances that allowed you to make money off people, sure. But for results published in obscure journals, when even academics in well-respected fields may need to fight tooth and claw for their next yearly funding? In a field that won’t even get you the respect of most other academics, and might very well ruin your scientific reputation? Trying to prove a view that doesn’t have powerful ideological backers pouring money into it the way creationists do? And with the number of fake researchers apparently staying roughly even for a period of fifty years, looking from the way the effect size hasn’t changed?
And with the number of fake researchers apparently staying roughly even for a period of fifty years, looking from the way the effect size hasn’t changed?
That right there is a really good point I didn’t think of. As for motive, my impression is that a lot of parapsychologists are trying to demonstrate the truth of beliefs that are incredibly significant to them—their new age spirituality is at stake. For that matter, if they’ve dedicated their lives to the subject. If there are no psychic phenomena they have literally spent their lives studying nothing. You might as well ask why theologians never come up with arguments disproving the existence of God. But your point about consistency makes this all moot. I’ll check out the book.
To get more funding for their work, more fame within the parapsychology community, and to make it more likely that the world at large will realize the truth via “fake-but-accurate” experiments. Some parapsychologists pay for their own experiments, using resources garnered from a “day job” in some other field, but many rely on donations from wacky psi-enthusiasts (people who also get excited about ghosts, “subtle energies” and so forth), or selling psi-controlled meditation lamps. Many others think that it’s critically important for mainstream funding sources to provide grants to parapsychologists (such as themselves) to do the work they find interesting and important.
Under those circumstances, a psychic believer could come up with all sorts of justifications:
I have to publish these “fake but accurate” experiments to convince others of the effects that I KNOW are really there, and thus gain enough resources to get definitive proof. After all, surely those dishonest skeptics and materialists (who regularly misrepresent the existing literature, and deceive the broader scientific community about the great work done in parapsychology) are doing the same thing, and if only one side ‘enhances’ its data then the truth will lose out.
What would be the incentive? Forging results for highly public performances that allowed you to make money off people, sure. But for results published in obscure journals, when even academics in well-respected fields may need to fight tooth and claw for their next yearly funding? In a field that won’t even get you the respect of most other academics, and might very well ruin your scientific reputation? Trying to prove a view that doesn’t have powerful ideological backers pouring money into it the way creationists do? And with the number of fake researchers apparently staying roughly even for a period of fifty years, looking from the way the effect size hasn’t changed?
That right there is a really good point I didn’t think of. As for motive, my impression is that a lot of parapsychologists are trying to demonstrate the truth of beliefs that are incredibly significant to them—their new age spirituality is at stake. For that matter, if they’ve dedicated their lives to the subject. If there are no psychic phenomena they have literally spent their lives studying nothing. You might as well ask why theologians never come up with arguments disproving the existence of God. But your point about consistency makes this all moot. I’ll check out the book.
Well if they do they get called philosophers of religion instead...
To get more funding for their work, more fame within the parapsychology community, and to make it more likely that the world at large will realize the truth via “fake-but-accurate” experiments. Some parapsychologists pay for their own experiments, using resources garnered from a “day job” in some other field, but many rely on donations from wacky psi-enthusiasts (people who also get excited about ghosts, “subtle energies” and so forth), or selling psi-controlled meditation lamps. Many others think that it’s critically important for mainstream funding sources to provide grants to parapsychologists (such as themselves) to do the work they find interesting and important.
Under those circumstances, a psychic believer could come up with all sorts of justifications: