"scott" <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote in message
news:4b0eab58$1@news.povray.org...

> > Hey, studying things is a valid way to determine whether there's any
truth
> > to them - provided you do the studying correctly and don't just try to
> > dream up data that supports the conclusion you want to reach. ;-)

> Also if the potential benefits are high enough then even things with a
tiny
> chance of being successful should be studied.

That's a fallacy, at least without quantifying that "tiny" (and it's next to
impossible to quantify tiny in most such contexts since the "hypothesis" is
irrational/non-scientific anyway). There's a tiny chance that my house is
built right on a diamond mine worth a "billions and billions" of dollars,
which nobody knows about. Should I start digging?

Any of us can come of with thousands of such "tiny" probabilities attached
to outrageous gains, that, if we believe the premise, we should spend time
and effort and money to investigate them all. It's a Pascal's wager type
argument.

Probabiliy of so called psychic phenomena being "real" is, for all practical
purposes and by all intelligent accounts, is between 0 and 0. Any single
cent wasted on such research is, well, wasted, and the only reasons for an
intelligent human to bother  to do such research is employement and
publishing.

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