>> 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?

Cost/benefit analysis.

Also, diamonds don't turn up my chance. They turn up according to 
well-understood rules.

> Probabiliy of so called psychic phenomena being "real" is, for all practical
> purposes and by all intelligent accounts, is between 0 and 0.

There was a time when all of humanity honestly believed the world was 
flat, and anybody who claimed it wasn't was *obviously* a lunatic.

It was once considered "obvious" that if a person's heart stops beating, 
they're dead. The idea that you could make the heart start beating again 
and bring them back to life was absurd. (And probably qualifies you as a 
practitioner of necromancy, by the way.)

Scientists once thought it "obvious" that all life on Earth derives its 
energy from the Sun. There was a probability somewhere between 0 and 0 
of finding life in places where the Sun's energy cannot reach... And 
then they found the volcanic vents at the bottom of the sea, swarming 
with life feeding off of highly toxic chemicals, and the scientists had 
to go away and rethink their entire idea of ecosystems.

It was once "obvious" that entire continents cannot move around. How 
silly! What could possibly move an entire continent? Oh, and then they 
discovered plate tectonics.

If you want to stick to what is "obvious", you're not going to get very far.

> Any single
> cent wasted on such research is, well, wasted,

False.

Disproving a theory is every bit as important as proving a theory. By 
proving that the psychic phenominon does not exist, now nobody else 
needs to study it. This is beneficial.

> and the only reasons for an
> intelligent human to bother  to do such research is employement and
> publishing.

Well, I'm sure there are cynical people who do research into absurd 
things just to make a living (e.g., the guy who proved that a duck's 
quack does in fact echo, or that guy who's still trying to prove that 
the MMR vaccine somehow causes autism), but most people are just trying 
to be thorough.

Any claim, no matter how stupid it sounds, could turn out to have some 
kind of truth to it. Ideas about psychic phenomina have existed for 
millennia; it's not unreasonable to suspect some truth to it.

(There are people who think that accupuncture is nonesense. But now 
scientists are finding that it causes measurable chemical changes in the 
body that do, in fact, do something. As crazy as that sounds...)

The *best way* to determine whether something is crazy or not is not to 
stand there and say "that's crazy", but to actually go out and do actual 
research and *prove* the answer one way or the other. THIS IS HOW 
SCIENCE WORKS!

Post a reply to this message