Psi Rage

Interesting post by Greg Taylor at the Daily Grail about comments by PZ Myers, a biologist and fabulously prolific blogger (four to five posts a day, and allegedly with a university teaching job - how does he do it?). Myers was taking a pop at Rupert Sheldrake, clearly the kind of person who would pull all his levers. 'The man is nuts ... His 'experiments' are exercises in gullibility, anecdote, and sloppy statistics ...embarrassingly gullible nonsense ... grossly in error in the way he pursues science... " Etcetera and so on.

Greg got Sheldrake's response to this, which as one would expect from a researcher of his long experience was dignified, resigned and a bit puzzled. He wondered whether it was worth engaging with people who aren't interested in the facts and are just venting their rage. Both pointed out that Myers had not read any of the research, so his opinion couldn't be worth much. But of course he expresses himself in such a combative and authoritative way, he serves to reinforce prejudice and dogmas. 

I've sometimes been tempted to say that sceptics are calming down a bit, but that's clearly not right. It might apply to critics like Ray Hyman and Richard Wiseman, who understand some aspects of the subject quite well and can talk about it without becoming apoplectic. But the rest don't seem to have moved on much from the Gardner-Randi template: a rabble of sarky-sneery gremlins.

Yet I sometimes think we need to take a more detached view of this sort of thing. It's a natural response to what is perceived as awesome and dangerous - if only a human tendency to believe in such things as telepathy, and not the thing itself - and which makes a person feel utterly impotent. Hence the rage.  But it's like a toddler having a tantrum - one just has to be firm and patient, and wait for it to blow over. It's something we need to understand and address, more than get upset about. Sceptics like Myers are angry and opinionated, and of course their tirades attract readers. But they are not stupid, and they can't be immune to reason. A few hours with some appropriate reading materials might help a person to see that this isn't about silly people 'swallowing crazy stuff', or mere Fortean anecdotes.

Is it naïve to think that sceptics can change? Perhaps, but at least we could try to find out. People who pride themselves on their reason can't go on indefinitely refusing to engage with the research - we have to find ways of confronting them with it. To be sure, the die-hards will still prefer to pick apart the weakest experiments as a justification for rejecting it. But my guess is that a lot of people who currently side with the sneerers will have their curiosity roused, and will start to take a more nuanced view.

So one could at least suggest they have a look at the literature. Damien Broderick's excellent Outside the Gates of Science might be a good place to start. Another could be Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's Extraordinary Knowing, which I'm reading just now and plan to discuss shortly. This is the story of a sceptic who was forced to change her own view by a powerful anomalous experience, and then gradually discovered that other people with whom she was in daily contact - colleagues, patients and friends - were having exactly the same kinds of experiences, but seldom discussed them for fear of ridicule. 

I'm due to talk at an SPR seminar in the autumn on the subject of sceptics and scepticism, and hopefully Sheldrake will be contributing as well. Doubtless Myers's outburst is one of the things we will be chewing over. My own idea is to focus on the psychological foundation of knee-jerk scepticism - a large and complex subject, as I'm starting to discover, and one I doubt I can do justice to. I'll also push my view that parapsychology needs to be taking more account of it, drawing attention not just to the anomalies themselves, but also to the very natural difficulties that humans have in processing this information. There's a lot of work to be done here.

Comments

[Art]

As Robert Heinlen says, “Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.”

[Dean]

Art's humorous contribution is dead on. We are talking about a religion here. Especially revealing is:

"You can't just simply carry out a Fortean exercise in collecting odd anecdotes and unexplained phenomena."

Myers has, clearly, not read very much from Sheldrake. Putting down ideas before understanding them, name calling, and similar arguments are a mark of a fundamentalist.

Is it possible to change the mind of a fundamentalist? It is very, very hard, and I'm not sure it is necessary in the least.

[jkfw72t972ygwvg]

It's cognitive dissonance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

"In psychology, cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling or stress caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a fundamental cognitive drive to reduce this dissonance by modifying an existing belief, or rejecting one of the contradictory ideas.

Often one of the ideas is a fundamental element of ego, like "I am a good person" or "I made the right decision". This can result in rationalization when a person is presented with evidence of a bad choice, or in other cases. Prevention of cognitive dissonance may also contribute to confirmation bias or denial of discomforting evidence. If not corrected, this can lead to further bad choices for the sake of consistency, rather than learning from mistakes."