 What's your assessment of professional parapsychologists who have an investment in the field and how much do you, if you talk to these people, do you get a sense that they have such a personal investment in the study that it's hard for them to look like when you were presenting the data and you saw the line go down and that's contrary to how a functioning science should go up, why can't they see that so clearly? The question is, when I talk to parapsychologists and stuff like that and you point out that the effect size is going down over time and even if it weren't going down if it were flat even, it should be going up if it's a progressive science and they really are getting control of things and when I talk to parapsychologists what do they say about that, why can't they see it? Actually to be fair the first people being in pointing this out is this Dutch parapsychologist Biermann I think he is and he's a very, I think a very respectful guy and he pointed out in a long article he had and he was on at that time bringing that up because he wanted to point out that we parapsychologists got to worry about the fact that our phenomena are so elusive and also we have this decline effect that over time it seems to be going away and that may be a characteristic of the phenomenon itself and maybe we have that kind of phenomenon that does that but we've got to be careful about claiming replicability and other stuff, we've got to be careful about this and there are different parapsychologists as a man named Stanley Krippner who actually if you read what he does it's pretty far out stuff you know he's into shamanism and stuff like that and on the other hand he's a very fair minded guy he's this recently published a book where he got skeptics and believers together I mean we weren't together in a sense physically but we wrote articles on our view of the I said I wrote an article on parapsychology is dead you know it's gone and parapsychologists don't realize it but it is and I did my I did it nice as well I could and I tried to tell them they can go to other fields you know there's other things they can do life is over if parapsychology isn't real but I did it in a nice way I did my best putting together my best arguments and they had other people on the other side and it was a mixed bag of things but the interesting thing about this book they then after we contributed our chapters they let us comment on other chapters and put those in as well you can't do it all weekend but we did that and so we got into some and there was one parapsychologist some of them were reasonable but one I consider very unreasonable guy his idea that people like me are shower tins and we're just putting down things anyway and what have you and very nasty he wrote a whole book about this as well a British young British fellow and he wrote a chapter but he then commented on my chapter he's right any of the time but Crippin was always very careful to make sure I got all this and apologized for anything he said he said you know loudest is uncalled for Crippin is very fair so fair that I didn't tell the story did I DJ about the Randy and Crippin never well okay in I think it was ninth in the 70s after Gellar just come on to see and stuff like that and both Randy and I were then involved in being the major taggadess major gallery Randy the major one real big major one getting right the triple a s the American Association for the Advancement of Science the people published science magazine at their annual convention in San Francisco decided to have a session on skepticism and on the paranormal and Randy was on and I was on it there may be in a few other people too and was a I think was all half-day thing but Randy and I are on it and they were as I said there may be a few other people on there as well that I don't remember who the others were but the forefront row in this room of the hotel where they having the conference forefront row was or I could I recognize what many of them were was occupied by parapsychologists they were ready to attack us you know defend their figure and I don't think they they they should have had parapsychologist maybe some parapsychologists on the panel too but I think it was all loaded in this case with science with non parapsychologists on our panel and afterwards though Stanley Krypney Krypney was one of the major parapsychologists in the Bay Area Stanley came up to me we've always been recently friend he's a nice guy actually and came up to me and said race could we invite you while you're here in San Francisco tonight come to we're having a meeting of the local parapsychologists the Bay Area parapsychologists could you come and speak to us I said yeah okay so I did I came and they were in interest in talking about me they everything they as soon as I walked in it they were all asking me questions about Randy they said why is Randy so so mad at us why he's always putting us down why is he so unfair and I says don't ask me ask Randy they said would he come I said I don't know but he's here in terms of I know he and I were going to meet for another few days in San Francisco I says ask Randy I I says why don't you invite him to come why he's here and I said I'll talk to him when I go back and I'm sure if he has the time he be willing to talk to me you mean Randy would talk to us I said so sure and so I talked to Randy man he was happy to come you so next night Randy and I both together came to the parapsychologists and they were ready for bearing they were they were yelling at him it was a yelling session for I don't know how long it was but pretty soon but me and he never lost school and was calm and very polite and they were yelling and I'm saying why are you this this and Randy would tell me give him an answer or some sort but and not and not he wasn't very being provocative at all and pretty soon things began getting calming down and very soon as all lovey-dovey and they were talking to other this guy is no he's nice guy Randy you know he's not he's not a devil doesn't have horns or anything like that and suddenly they all were pulling copies of Randy's book and imagine where he was going. I was at park and they were coming up and saying could you write another one. So it was a nice session and and Krypton who was then the head of the group there he and Randy became friends and ever since then they still are friends and anytime many times in and investigations there is a program that major program that Randy had on 1989 was the first in the Fox Network first came on the air we were the first program they did and it was a two hour program Bill Bixby was the moderator on testing psychic powers live and the premise of the show was that there would be psychics who would challenge Randy and I was the one who was and Krypton and I were team so this is an example how Randy does work with and many parapsychologists were happy to work with Randy we were a team Randy Krypton and I were formed appointed by Randy to be a team so we would arrange to have tests that we could do on television that could be definitive to see whether the psychics who could challenging Randy could could actually do what they claim to do and we had to work that out so it was Tripp and I who did all this and in other cases were several Randy has contacted Krypton and make sure that what he was doing was okay with Krypton and stuff like that so there is this unknown story that credit he has some good friends in the parapsychological community and doesn't bother them that they are parapsychologists believe differently from him at least they're willing to go by scientific method and agree with certain conditions and so on and there's no problem there and most people don't realize that oh by the way I don't think I answered your question yeah it's a mixed bag you know I've known Krypton is a good guy and he's never had this problem with him but I have met other parapsychologists my first time I really got to meet some of them and you have some real time with them in 1979 I think maybe maybe 89 not I could be 10 years off and I'm so I you know now time is fuzzy with me but anyways I think it was 1979 the parapsychologists had their major annual meeting a Parapsychological Association in St. Mary's College in Orinda California and they invited me to come and pay my expenses and stuff because they wanted to show me I guess that they didn't have horns and and you know I was a major critic so they wanted to me to mix with them and I know so so they so that happened there was a good good good time I had there but except they had a spoonbending party wouldn't let me go to that because they didn't want any skeptics ruining the spoonbending and there are a few other things they barred me from as a result some parapsychologists got very mad and decided to stay with me and not go to any functions because they thought as their guests I should be allowed to go anything that they go to right so I got to know a lot in that way and Robert John was there and some other people and some became very good friends some of them I was surprised to find agree with me that even though they're willing to believe they believe something is real like one of the parapsychologists passed away he was from he had the major chair he swish Martin Johnson was his name he was from swish I don't know I know they know I guess my Johnson to be swear a Swedish name but he had the only major parapsychological position in the university now is the university you checked in the Netherlands which still has a parapsychology department but he was the head of it so he was they had a special position there well he was there some major parapsychology he became he was one of the people that refused to go to any functions that I was not allowed to go to so several times he and I were alone we actually got the very good friends and he turned out to be a very good friend and he to my surprise told me look I think basically you're right Ray that and and he turns out he's written articles for parapsychologists look we should we parapsychologists I'm do making a terrible mistake trying to get the scientific community to take us seriously we're asking him to look at our data and say look we are real science take we've got something here we don't have anything we have a mess we should have a mess first before we ask the outsiders to come in and look at it and yes you said earlier that mentalists were confused people I say that's just a bias I can't prove it that's my opinion I'm I think that was on here we're talking about parrot well cold reading an absent parapsychologists are mentalists most mentalists I know look at cold reading and cold readers is with with awe it's much like the power would be that many many card magicians carbonic ways that I look at these gamblers who have these reputation being able to deal second uses of it had flawlessly they look upon them as something big they don't realize that these gamblers who can do that through a good second deal that's flawless that's all they do that's your whole life and if they and the ones that they know of they know of because those guys would do it so well that they still are alive they didn't get caught the ones that got caught are dead believe me so but but as many crooked gamblers that magicians admire and think they're somehow super to them are actually only good at one thing and if a guy some specialized in bottom building some specialized other things that they're different things but they're but they do that one thing over and over again magicians are different it's a different animal but somehow with card magicians worship and think the ideal is to be like these gamblers these crooked gamblers this I think in some sense mentalists do the same thing with psychic readers cold readers they look at them as somehow the top of the game of what they're trying to be but you think of mentalists supposed to be entertainment it's just a show it's like a magic show but it's now done with 90 types supposedly things and the other thing they admire about Colby's I think is because the psychics actually pretend and claim to be real psychics but mentalists have come apart of the magic community a very uncomfortable part but they're part of the magic community and the magic community gets very upset with them if they imply that they are real because there's an ethical issue here that fight still goes on so their mentalists are confused in the sense that they admire they think their their ideal is the psychic reader and psychic readers are not entertainers they're dealing with problems real problems that people have and it's a dangerous we point this out when we talk about the ethics so in that sense that's what I meant that there is that mentalists are confused people that's all maybe I shouldn't shouldn't have said confused people they're dishonest people that's all I should be nicer yeah not the size they're conflicted let me self set internally conflicted I think that's better yes given that there was such a small significant thing that they use the excuse of well only a small percentage of people have the capability and so you would expect to have large differences between you're getting the issue of the size of the effects they tend to be small then and yeah you know this one may have may have statistically got more people who are good whereas the replicator over in the year if it's a small effects as that will happen yeah in fact this is in fact a criticism that Jessica utz who is a very nice person in many ways she's a very good statistician and she gets very upset with me when I say it but I think a very poor parapsychologist in the sense that as a good statistician she accepts the data that comes out of parapsychology does very good statistics on but it's the same thing garbage in garbage out if you're taking bad data so she's not an experimentalist she's a statistician she's getting the data after the fact she's not there she doesn't know how to judge well it's good data so what's going into her sausage machines it could be good after the goes in there she's doing good good grinding but she's grinding bad stuff you know and then she doesn't like it she gets very upset when I say that so well I apologize Jessica wherever you are she's a good statistician a very good person but she her point is to come back to what you asked your question her point is that because the effects sizes in parapsychology tend to be slow weak and small that it's going to be there's going to be you know repeatability is going to be very difficult because the power of the tests that you're using is very low get very every time you use a experimental tests in parapsychology with the low effect it's going to be harder to find unless you have a huge effects at a huge number of cases and so that is her explanation of why two things why it's seemingly so that the results are erratic and second thing is why we need meta-analysis to compensate for by combining lots of different experiments that have already been done you get a equivalent of making being much larger sample size and getting more power and more likely to get a significant effect that way that's that's her argument so it is an argument that people parapsychologists do make they take advantage like we all do of every every every possibility of justifying your particular cause yes because it's a nature of the beast it's a small effect they just they don't try this right but this is it you know you're studying something we don't know what you what it is see another serious problem with parapsychology extremely serious problem I point this out in several articles effect in that chapter I did on why speak smart people can be so stupid in that book to go back chapter I pointed out examples of scientists who have done some very stupid maybe stupid things there is a levier the guy who discovered the planet Neptune by purely mathematical reasoning and never looked in the telescope and it's considered an Asian thing he just analyzed the data of previous people and discovered that there was a there was a anomaly and that made a prediction of that there'd be a planet this point it came out to be planet Neptune he was the same calculations to deal with the oddities in the perihelion of Mercury and decided that this could be accounted for by a planet an interplanet inside between Mercury and the Sun and he made predictions of one was going to be and during that time all the telescopes of the world were on that spot where he predicted this new planet and no one saw it but a few people did you know he had these dramatic things some people thought they saw it and some people said well it's just sun swatches seeing and then they had a way to make the clips of the Sun to make this picture of it and again he made the prediction again and where it would be and people and pretty soon the scientific community astronomy and some of the other side there is no such by the way by this time he had named the planet Vulcan so it was called the planet and he had no doubts that existed and whereas he'd waited to astronomers had sought saw the plan he predicted before he named a planet called Neptune and so until his death unfortunately he was the last one he still believed in the planet of Vulcan and he went to his death bed but he believed it because his calculations had worked and he got tremendous notoriety in fact at that time there were parades for it better be all over Europe and especially in France he got all kinds of honors we would say he was the next best thing to biggest thing since Newton because he had saved Newtonian system by finding this a county for the parrot is anomaly nor could explain in the perihelion of the orbit of Mercury by finding his planet that just about fix everything and it wasn't until maybe 50 or 60 years after Levier's death that Einstein's general theory of relativity fixed the whole thing it exactly predicted the account for the perihelion denomination perihelion but anyways I had a lot of examples like that of scientists of scientists making goose and send then there are a lot of things that like the n-rays and stuff like that where scientists for years were discovering these n-rays and work with them it turned out to be no such thing so I gave examples like that and said now look when we no longer could scientists no longer replicate it they gave up on it but one thing that don't gives up on it is the field of parapsychology they consistently keep finding their original paradigms that they had in the past don't work and they give up on those but they started again with a new one you know that they don't just give up you have one sentence sort of take home message about the course course you want to tell everybody yeah the take home message I repeated again again I hope you get it is that there are a lot of reasons why smart people intelligent people can go badly wrong and in fact unfortunately in some cases it's just because they're intelligent that they can defend successfully defend an erroneous belief because he was your intelligence to do that and the most important thing about being able to think well about any issue is to start with good data good quality data that's a hard thing to come by and most of the data that you're getting asked to judge and stuff like that come from unaid observation or things that happen unexpectedly and so on and if you try to think about those that day and use that day and you're thinking it's going to be contaminated and it's not not going to have good thinking so the most important thing is to make sure you've got good data and then think well about it and you'll be fine