Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

That's the real controversy here. Many journals are biased against articles that describe attempts to replicate previously published results, even if the outcome is negative. This is a disincentive for scientists to engage in much of what would be very useful research.

This is dead on the money -- I agree. I keep Richard Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" address here: http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm [lhup.edu] permanently open in a browser tab just to remind me how important replication really is. There is a major effort at the highest levels of the government that sit in oversight of the granting agencies and that ultimately fund the journals themselves (indirectly) to change some of this, because it is this very reluctance (plus a tendency to publish "results" but hide the actual data and methodology from precisely the public access and scrutiny and critical replication that is essential to the scientific process) that leads to a huge amount of junk science being published every year, much of it (sadly) in social psychology, medicine, and climate science, where at least two of these have enormous costs associated with error.

ESP, fortunately isn't one of them. As you note, it (as a hypothesis) could be true, but there is so far no good reason to believe in it. Such evidence as there is is anecdotal and fails to stand up in a reproducible way to skeptical critical tests seeking to verify the anecdotes. However, we can go farther than this -- ESP may exist, but it is in some sense a rare phenomenon if it does. If it were universal and common, we could hardly have failed to discover this by now. The many experiments that have been done seeking to confirm the phenomenon (and failing) have the effect of gradually lowering the plausible boundary of its existence, just as the many (failed) experiments seeking e.g. magnetic monopoles don't disprove their existence but they do establish plausible limits on how common they are (at least in the forms being tested).

ESP, unlike monopoles, suffers from a serious flaw as a scientific hypothesis. I can understand how a monopole might exist, and can further see how their existence has considerable explanatory power and esthetic appeal -- electrodynamics would become more symmetric, charge quantization would be "explained", if there was at least one monopole in the Universe. They consistently fit in with our existing knowledge. ESP, on the other hand, does not. There is not one single theory (that I know of) that offers a consistent explanation of how ESP could function in terms of known physical law. Indeed, things like precognition overtly violate so very many physical laws -- for starters, the second law of thermodynamics -- that verifying it might well require the complete rewriting of all the laws of physics. This is actually a serious problem. It is like "coming back from the dead" or other forms of supernaturalism and magic -- sensible people reject such hypotheses as the default belief (often in the face of various offerings of anecdotal "evidence") because, to paraphrase somebody (Thomas Paine?) it is far more easy to believe that a human is a liar or mistaken than to believe that the stars themselves have gone out of their courses. If true precognition were reproducibly demonstrated, analyzing the requisite dynamical flow of information involved would very much make the stars go out of their courses, with future complex phenomena causing entropic shifts in current chemistry. We do not, as a general rule, ever observe entropy-shifting effects preceding their causes.

rgb