One of the best, approachable overviews of all this I’ve ever read. I’ve dabbled in some, but not all of the topics you’ve raised here, and I certainly know about the difficulties they’ve all faced with increasing to a scientific level of rigor. What I’ve always said is that parapsychology needs Doctor Strange to become real, and he’s not here yet and probably never will be. Otherwise, every attempt at “proof” is going to be dealing with some combination of unfalsifiability, minuscule effect sizes, or severe replication issues. The only related phenomenon that has anything close to a Doctor Strange is, well, reincarnation—it’s had a good few power players who’d convince anyone mildly sympathetic. And it lacks the above unholy trinity of bad science; lack of verification would mean falsification, and it’s passed that with flying colors, the effect sizes and significance get massive quick even within individual cases, and they sure do keep on coming with exactly the same thing. But it certainly needs to do a lot better, and that’s why it has to move beyond Stevenson’s methodology to start creating its own evidence. So my progressive approach holds that, if it is to stand on its own merit, then it is time to unleash its full capacity and conduct a wholesale destruction of normalcy with it; if such an operation fails, then it has proven too epistemically weak to be worthy of major attention if it is genuine at all.
One of the best, approachable overviews of all this I’ve ever read. I’ve dabbled in some, but not all of the topics you’ve raised here, and I certainly know about the difficulties they’ve all faced with increasing to a scientific level of rigor. What I’ve always said is that parapsychology needs Doctor Strange to become real, and he’s not here yet and probably never will be. Otherwise, every attempt at “proof” is going to be dealing with some combination of unfalsifiability, minuscule effect sizes, or severe replication issues. The only related phenomenon that has anything close to a Doctor Strange is, well, reincarnation—it’s had a good few power players who’d convince anyone mildly sympathetic. And it lacks the above unholy trinity of bad science; lack of verification would mean falsification, and it’s passed that with flying colors, the effect sizes and significance get massive quick even within individual cases, and they sure do keep on coming with exactly the same thing. But it certainly needs to do a lot better, and that’s why it has to move beyond Stevenson’s methodology to start creating its own evidence. So my progressive approach holds that, if it is to stand on its own merit, then it is time to unleash its full capacity and conduct a wholesale destruction of normalcy with it; if such an operation fails, then it has proven too epistemically weak to be worthy of major attention if it is genuine at all.