somebody wrote:
> "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?

Is the probability that there is a diamond mine beneath your house
greater than the ratio of the cost the mine would cost to the probable
return? Lets say there is a one in a million chance there is a diamond
pipe there worth several billions, and a mine would only cost a few
thousand dollars. Suddenly, the objection fades away.

Or lets say the diamond pipe is even rarer, 1 in a billion chance, but
the total cost of a mine is only 1 dollar. Would you do it then?

> 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.

Academic research often searches for things that there is little chance
of creating directly, because the reward for finding it could be very
valuable. Now we know that these phenomena are bunk, but to get to that
knowledge we had to study it. If someone comes up with something that
just 'feels like it is psychic' but has a physical explaination that may
or may not be reality, then discounting it just because your gut says it
is wrong is just as useless as trusting that it works without any proof.

Proof, by the way, is not deploying a stick with a crystal on the end
into the middle a war zone.

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