 Well, this lecture is on scientists and psychics, and the next lecture is on, which is the last lecture, is the importance of replicability. Because, as we said from the first, the important thing is if you're going to think well about any problem, you have to have good information. It's the garbage out thing we've been emphasizing. And now you know lots of reasons why you can't trust unaided observation, intuition, personal validation, etc. And I wanted to tell you how, many years ago, when I first got my PhD in psychology, I got fascinated by reading about or hearing about some really prominent scientists who got themselves involved with a psychic of some sort and ended up endorsing a psychic. And so I made an effort to look at every case I could find, and then I was hoping, how can I study this as a psychologist? I'm an experimental psychologist. And for experimental psychologists, you get people in the laboratory and you randomly divide people into groups and give one group one treatment and another treatment. I can't go back in history and dig these guys up and do experiments with them. But I did find over the years, I would go and read their studies. And in one case, a couple of cases, I actually hired people to translate from the French, some particular French scientist. Because I found that in some cases, these people wrote a lot, very prolific. And somehow I finally could see how their minds are working and figure out from that alone. Get a pretty good idea what is going on, how this person could be so competent and smart, and at the same time, get themselves into bizarre beliefs. And so I collected over the years a lot of these cases. And I was always thinking of maybe writing a book on it, and I still haven't had the case enough to write a book, I suppose. The hope was that, even though it's not the science that I'm used to doing, that in some ways I could, and I'm going to give you one example of what I have in mind, I could use their own writing and through that writing you would see the parts of their mind and how they're getting themselves into trouble. One thing I want to emphasize is that, I mean, he heard of Coombe, Theodore Coombe. He became a sort of a hero of the outsider type groups of people in science and stuff like that. Thomas Coombe. Scientific revolution. He had this idea that science proceeds in normal science as puzzle solving, and we go along solving puzzles. And everyone's a mile within a disciplinary matrix of a scientific specialty. You're building up theories and stuff like that, and you keep adding a few more things to the system and keep tweaking it every once in a while. Within any scientific field, there's enough anomalies, as you call them, that accumulate. So it's too much. And eventually this leads to a complete revolution, an overthrow of the old system. And this chaos and then the new system takes over and you're now back to normal science again. It takes as well as this big revolution again. And this was very controversial, and it still is. It's not as clear-cut as that, and many things he called revolutions could be seen as revolution, but also be seen as consistent with science as usual. But anyways, he used the term paradigm. That's why all the new ages and stuff like that, paradigms, they're the most used word, and you don't hear it so much anymore. But everyone was talking about a new paradigm. Parapsychologists say they're creating a new paradigm, and all these other people who were trying to be, thought they were going to challenge the establishment, they're going to create a new paradigm. And a lady, I'm trying to think of her name. I think her name was Masters during one symposium and it's in a book. She uncovered 42 separate uses of the term paradigm in his book on scientific revolutions, and they're all incompatible with one another. He admitted that. And the later article, he said, she's right. And I did, it was inconsistent, the use of paradigm. And so he restricted paradigm, and he changed what he originally meant by paradigm. He called it disciplinary matrix. What he meant by disciplinary matrix, he meant that in any field, well-developed field of science especially, there is a confluence of facts that they've accumulated, theories, hypothesis, but even more than that of ways of understanding how you will do this kind of research, what kinds of instruments you need, what controls you need, what controls you don't need within this field. And all that becomes, and ways of doing things, that becomes part of the disciplinary matrix. And within any field of science as well, especially well-developed ones, you're working within a disciplinary matrix. And the reason I wanted to bring that up, because I think that's a very important concept to help us explain, how is that top-notch scientists, the ones I've paid attention to, many of them just go out and test psychics suddenly and they fall for everything. It looks like they're, it's ridiculous. How could a conference scientist do non-science and think they're doing science? And it dawned on me finally, after reading what they say and figuring out a lot, that most scientists are not aware what they're doing. In other words, they learn implicitly. They become like a prentice, many, most of the scientists, you have a prentice, you have post-doctors and some of that. And you work with colleagues and first you have your supervisor. And eventually you implicitly absorb what we call the aspects of the matrix. So you implicitly know what to do. And you implicitly know if you want to figure out whether this guy's experiment was correct or not. You explicitly know what questions you should ask and what you would have to do to do it right or wrong. And you understand these things, but it's implicit. Very few scientists can explicitly tell you what is good science. That's why their philosophy of science is trying to tell them that. But some scientists do write about what science is and they are more explicit about it. But most scientists, even the best of them, they're good in their fields, but they can't tell you why they're good. They don't understand why they succeed as good scientists. They can do good science. But when they step outside of that matrix, they don't have that supporting context. They don't have the background, all that information, what we call a good mind-ware. That's implicitly underlying everything they do in this field. They don't realize that they're outside of that. This field can be consistent. We thought of it as a, I'm not supposed to move around like this, as a safety net. So as long as they're working within the disciplinary matrix, they have the safety net. The safety net consists of colleagues, but also rivals within their field. And they know what the rivals are going to say if they do this and that. So they're always aware of these things and they keep them honest and keep them also from doing boo-boos. And this is how they can be good at their field. But they don't understand that. So when they leave their field, they get, they're going to study your psychic. This is the, so this is one of the things. Okay, now, I can go to other reasons for that, but I wanted to, rather than talk about, let me tell you some of the examples of the past, but I don't want to give details of that. We don't have the time. There were civilian crooks, very famous chemist, physicist, well, just before the turn of the ninth, it was in the middle of the 1800s. And he did some, obviously some, he was editor of his own journal in physics. And he was a well-established scientist, but he became also notorious, you might say, or famous, whichever side of the issue you're on, for dealing with Daniel Douglas Hume. H-O-M-E is his name, he spelled his name, but he called himself Hume. He was an American, but there was, he thought he had a Scottish ancestry, and maybe he was related to the famous David Hume. He was one of his ancestors, so that's why he called himself Hume. He is known as the, even today, among Paris psychologists especially, is that the one medium who never was caught cheating of any kind. Well, he's never caught cheating because he never allowed himself to be tested by any inadequate way. But he still has his reputation of never being caught cheating. He got a famous reputation, I won't go into all the details. But the only time he was scientifically ever tested at all was by Crookes. Crookes did some experiments with Hume, and he had some, I won't go into it, he made some special equipment, and he said that Hume was able to move, he had a level of move supposedly by spirits, you know, without touching it and so on. The other thing he said came notorious far was Florence Cook. She was a young, sort of a tractor supposedly, spirit who could materialize a psychic, a spirit who came from the other world but who once lived in this world. And those people who tend to say this with Florence Cook at Crookes' home were very much impressed with how wonderfully similar to Florence that this spirit medium looked, I mean spirit that came from the spirit world. She materialized. And when she materialized, Florence Cook was supposedly in a trance behind a curtain. But she never saw the two together. And so it's not really suspicious of it. And for some reason, even though Crookes claimed he'd done a scientific type of work, a laboratory with Hume, with her he just described the phenomenon to pictures, and at one point he did say he did see them together, but it was very vague. So that was a notorious case. I won't go into all the details, I just want to give you a kind of case. Alfred Russell Wallace is my favorite of all. He's the co-founder with Darwin of the Theory of Evolution by natural selection. In fact, many people think what happened was that Darwin's working for years on the theory and not ready to publish yet because there's always some things he still might have to work out. Wallace, living out in the East Indies and stuff like that, what we now call that, in the jungles all by himself, gets one of the fevers there from the, the fevers out there, and malaria maybe. And he's in his camp all by himself, high fever, and he gets this big idea, which is basically the theory of natural selection. And he writes it out and he sends it to the only person he knows in the field back in England, who's Charles Darwin, and this created, you know, this big dilemma for Darwin, what does he do about it? This guy got his theory scooped him in a way, but they made the powers that be realized what the situation was. They fixed it up very nicely and they had a joint paper and it was called the Douris-Wallon Theory for a while, of the Wallace-Dawin, many people put it the other direction, the Wallace-Dawin Theory for a while. You don't hear about Wallace anymore in relation to that, and you won't hear about it because soon after he came back to England after the years out, being, uh, picking plants and sending, being a naturalist out in the wilds, he, uh, became friends with Darwin and all the other people, although he was from a lower class, self-educated. Almost all the scientists at that time were very wealthy people, who had the time and the money to carry out research. And Wallace was an outsider. He was very poor all his life. He always was struggling to make money and stuff like that, uh, by somebody keeping himself going so he could do his research. Top-notch scientists, though, in many ways, as a naturalist, and he's known for the Douris-Wallon Line and he did some other famous things, but today he's not that famous. And many biographers think he's not that famous because he became an embarrassment. Uh, he even challenged his own theory of natural selection after being the major champion of it. But right when he got back to England, he said it doesn't apply to the highest spiritual levels of man. That's an exception. And, uh, that came about because he would get sitting in unscences when he came back and one of his own, his house lady, house worker, um, uh, she became also a medium and produced some phenomenal farm and stuff like that. Okay, so that's a big, many other things that Wallace defended. Wallace was his whole life. He defended phrenology and stuff like that. At the same time doing very good work. And it's hard to dislike the guy. I've read almost everything he's ever written. He's very prolific. He lived a long life to his late 90s. And, um, obviously a smart guy but self-educated, never would, had the opportunity to go to any colleges and stuff like that. And a very likable guy. He'd read his arguments for phrenology and stuff like that. They're fascinating. And, but you learn how his mind works. And, uh, then there was several others. We can go all the way down there and several famous ones. But I'm going to jump down to the present. Of course, we already talked about Russell Targ. And, uh, I mentioned also his buddy Harold Pulloff, who were the two physicists at the time. I went to Stanford Research Institute in 1972. And I told you the story. They were studying Erie Gellin. Okay. There were some other scientists that also looked at Erie Gellin. And in, uh, about 1974, I think it was, uh, Nature, the top general science magazine in the world, a very conservative paper, by Haystead, John Haystead. And, um, David Bohm, some of the very top scientists, physicists you could get together in England, about five years. And, uh, it was on there. The idea is about how you study something like Erie Gellin. How you deal with a person like Erie Gellin. And now I want to show you how you can get into them. Haystead's people, by what they write, even. Here we are. So, this is a later book by one of the people that wrote this thing. This is the cover of a book. It's called The Metal Bending. It's John Haystead. One of Britain's top physicists at the time. He passed away only fairly recently. But Haystead, here, let me get this down so you can see the top. There it is, like that. Okay. Uh, I just want to show you the cover of his major books. On primary, he called this primary metal bending. And he's not only studied Gellin, but he's studied a lot of other, uh, some other students, children especially that he studied, who apparently, after seeing Gellin, they could bend spoons as well. And metal. And so he had to, had to, had to vote his laboratory to do it. He was the major supporter of, uh, the reality of things. But here was this article that appeared in Nature in 1975. Okay. It was 1972 that Gellin burst on the scene here. And I went to see him at Stanford Research Institute. But John Haystead, David Bohm. Those of you who have know about physics or history of science, David Bohm is one of the top men, uh, at the time. And Bayston and O'Reilly, the other side, physicists as well. So these four physicists wrote this article and got it published in, uh, Science and Nature, rather. And the point of the article was, when you're studying someone like Erie Gellin, a psychic, or a claims psychic like Erie Gellin, you can't treat him as, like he's a particle or something like that, like, or an object. You've got to realize that you're dealing with a sentient human being who has feelings and stuff like that. So this is an article that they wrote in Nature and how you have to deal with a psychic like that. It's strange you never consult a psychologist who's dealing with real people all the time, or almost real people, college sophomores, but they're going to come real people sometime. Okay. So I'm taking these quotes. I'm just going to show you that. You go even to their scientific articles and you can see, we can learn something about how the minds are working and how they can get themselves into trouble. These are physicists. They never, physicists don't know anything about people at all, right? You know that. They get into laboratories and they look at bubble chambers and they look at equipment and stuff like that, but they never see any living thing, right? Okay. So now they, but they're confronted by Gellin. They've had some experiences with Gellin and he does things that, wow, and they have no idea how it happened. So they feel this is worth, important to study. So we have come to realize that in certain ways, the traditional ideal of completely impersonal approach of the natural sciences to experimentation will not be adequate in this domain. This domain to me studying psychics like Gellin. Rather, there is a personal aspect that has to be taken into account in a way that is somewhat similar to that needed in the disciplines of psychology and medicine. Why didn't they call in psychologists and medicine? They're at the universities and they have colleagues there, but they talk to one another. That's strange, okay? This does not mean, of course, that it is not possible to establish facts which we can count securely. And remember the whole point of this course is how to have facts that you can count on before you think. If you're thinking with facts that you don't know, you can't count on as being secure, then you're having what we call contaminated mind wear. And contaminated mind wear is one of the major reasons how intelligent people can be stupid, right? Rather, it means that we have to be sensitive and observant to discover what is a right approach which will properly allow for the subjective element and yet permit us to draw reliable inferences. So as scientists, they want to draw reliable inferences, but they realize they're going to have to not do it quite the way a physicist does it. So in the study of psychokinetic phenomena, psychokinetic phenomena, how many don't know what psychokinetic is? So we're thinking with your mind? Yeah, that's right, exactly. The idea of psychokinesis is that part of parapsychology which has to do with mind over matter, okay? So in the study of psychokinetic phenomena, such conditions are more important than in the natural sciences because a person who produces a phenomena is not an instrument or a machine. Any attempt to treat him as such, this is before they had to say him or her, I guess, that any attempt to treat him as such will almost certainly lead to failure. Rather, he must be considered to be one of the group, actively cooperating in the experiment and not a subject whose behavior is to be observed from the outside in a cold and impersonal manner as possible. I suspect it's one reason they didn't want to bring in psychologists because we are people who study subjects. I guess I think that's a bad, that's already something bad. Isn't that right, Barbara? Yeah. Okay. Anyway, so we see here there's a start of a problem here, right? We have found also that it's generally difficult to produce a predetermined set of phenomena. Although this may sometimes be done, what happens is often surprising and unexpected. Now, if we go back to the first lecture on key-betting, the reason I did it is because I want to emphasize that when you don't know what to expect, you can't rely on what is described afterwards, right? It's very important to have a plan. That's the whole point of science, is that they have to plan their observations so they know what to expect, what to look for. But they find that studying psychics like Gallard, you can't do that. Because what happens is often surprising and unexpected. And of course, if you're a magician or a deceiver, you want it to be surprising and unexpected. If it's expected, they'll catch you, okay? We've observed that the attempt to concentrate strongly in order to obtain a desired result, for example, the bending of a piece of metal, tends to interfere with the relaxed state of mind needed to produce such phenomena. These guys are getting themselves into real trouble here, right? However, they're aware that this is going to create problems and that some people are going to say, you're setting yourself up to be tricked. They're not stupid people. They're, as I said, they are, at that time, the most eminent physicists in England. And sometimes in the world, perhaps. One of the first things that reveals itself as one observes there, is this a duplicate where I just spread there? Oh no, okay, it's closed. Is that concisory kinetic phenomena cannot in general be produced unless all scientists who participate are in a relaxed state. Now, I don't know about you, but if you're doing experiments, you want to not be too relaxed, because you want to be at the right moment, you want to be focused on what's going on. Okay, a feeling of tension, fear or hostility, on the part of any of those present, generally communicates itself to the whole group. The entire process goes most easily when all those present actively want things to work well. In addition, man has seemed to be great, by the way, this is published in the major magazine, Science Magazine in the World, right? In addition, man has seemed to be greatly facilitated when the experimental arrangement is aesthetically or imaginatively appealing to the person with apparent psychokinetic powers. Okay, this will be the last one and we'll give you a quote from them, but I still can't believe it, I'm not caring. How then are we to avoid the possibility of being tricked? They're aware of that. They're setting themselves up to be tricked, but they want to avoid the possibility, but still be not antagonized and not threaten the phenomena they're studying. It should be possible to design experimental arrangements that are beyond any reasonable possibility of trickery and that magicians will generally acknowledge to be so. In the first stages of our work, we did in fact present Mr. Geller with several such arrangements. Notice that they presented Geller, they actually worked out arrangements they thought could be meet all their conditions and yet be devoid of trickery. But these proved to be aesthetically unappealing to him and of course they've already said in the previous statement that it's very important that everything be aesthetically appealing to the person. Unfortunately, this was up and so they couldn't get away with that. They were hoping in that article, the whole point of the article, they were writing that they had some, a lot of experiments with Geller, but they realized that there was magicians and other scientists weren't going to prove of their controls and stuff. So they were showing that the reason they had to be, I had the kind of control that scientists ordinarily would use in the physics laboratory is because of the nature of the subject matter and the sensitivity. But they also wrote this article show but they had no doubts they had confidence that they'd be able to develop the right kind of arrangements that would not threaten Geller or inhibit him but still avoid the possibility of any trickery. And of course they did get Geller never came back to be tested for them and that never happened. Now, the next thing I want to tell you about related to that, which relate to things, is that in 1967, 87, I'm sorry, Deborah, it's a word about, a little more, about 10 years, just about 10 years, no, the same year, 1987. Oh no, that was 1970. Okay, so this is about 10 years later. Deborah Delanoi, I think she still is, was a parapsychologist at the laboratories, the parapsychological laboratories set in Scotland by the, some fund, I'll give you the name of the fund. It's actually a fund for parapsychological work and I wanted to use it for Cambridge, for Cambridge in London. So they offered this Oxford-Oxford in London. It became a kind of a scandal even that it allows money for departments of parapsychological research was being offered to major universities and major universities had not wanted. So finally the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, I took it to the Department and they had Robert Morris, a very good parapsychologist, I was a good friend of mine actually, high respect in some ways. And Robert Morris took over, he was a parapsychologist, a believer, but a very good one, a very careful person. And took over. His strategy to sell it to the rest of the people at the University of Edinburgh because this is controversial, he means the department, the parapsychology department, but also one that studied deceptions in ways people can be tricked. And you can get a degree in either one or combine it to parapsychology under him. And one of his parapsychologists was there. And now Pablo and the top skeptics and top people in England all over the world actually, and he has websites and books galore and he's quite a guy. And he was at, was he at TAMD? He's been at TAMD. Yeah, at TAMD, right. And a very colorful person and obviously a good skeptic does a good work. And his girlfriend though is a parapsychologist at the University of Edinburgh and I don't know how to get along, they maybe get along like other people I know who are mixed that way. They just don't discuss it. She's very good though, but anyway. So, let me give you some clues. Oh, at Delanoie, Deborah Delanoie at the University of Edinburgh, the parapsychologist, she, this young high schooler came to her laboratory and said that he wanted to be tested because he has psychokinetic palsy and has been spooned with his mind and stuff like that. And she was charmed by him and thought it was plausible and he seemed nice fellow and she liked him and so she did some experiments with him and actually ultimately took well over a year I think that they spent coming to that and doing some things with him. They weren't quite pinning it down. They then at one point contacted Randy because one thing he did, one time he came into the laboratory with, by the way, every time they did think they had the cameras on him and put him on, I'm sorry, but they had the cameras on him, a camera on him. Nothing would happen in the range of the cameras but outside the range of things would happen. Fires started, metal would bend and stuff like that but by the time he was under the camera it just didn't happen. And so it was very, you know, just like what was going on in SRI earlier. But one day he came into the laboratory and he had these puzzles. It's in a plastic box, you know, it's like a square, a cube and it's a coiled thing in there where you have a little ball in your key. It's a puzzle where you try to move it while everything's sealed in that thing there. He came in and the track, the metal tube or whatever it's in that thing had been twisted in a very interesting way and the cube was still sealed. And he said, he just looked at it and that's what happened. It bent like that. They couldn't figure out any way this could have been done but they sent the cube to Randy. He mailed it to Randy. Randy is excellent at this. By the way, Randy is good among the best psychic investigators and stuff like that. Not because he's a magician. He says it's because he's a magician. That's why the people say you always have to have a magician. Magicians were very badly fooled by Geller and there's a history of magicians endorsing psychics and stuff like that. A magician, because they are a magician, are not necessarily the best person to catch trickery by psychics. Most magicians when Geller came along didn't know anything about spoon bending or how he bent and stuff like that and some magicians made a fool of themselves by endorsing Geller as a psychic and one in England, a well-known magician actually still insists that Geller is a good friend of Geller and still insists that Geller has some real powers. So magicians, and I've thought history but magicians will endorse it. They're like the world of science. You can find scientists who go and endorse psychics but you also find magicians who do it. So Randy is great because he's a renaissance man. He knows a lot of things. People don't realize that Randy knows quite a bit about science even though he wasn't educated. He knows a lot about other things. He's a, what you call, a powering math. He knows lots of things. And so Randy looked at this box. He knew what to look for. He knew how to study it and he could see that it had been tampered with a little bit. How they'd open it. So he sent that back to them and was showing how it had actually been open. He could see it when he pointed it out. They hadn't been able to see it until he pointed it out. He also sent them back another box which he said, if he tampered with it, this one, they would be able to leave it. They hadn't fixed it so it was tamper proof in the sense that if he tampered with it, it would leave a trace. And of course he wouldn't do anything with the box, he couldn't. But even that, even their contact was Randy and they talked to Randy, communicated with him, otherwise he gave him some advice what to do and stuff like that. But still they continued with this guy and he kept coming back. And I said for about a year and a half maybe. Okay, so eventually, and by the way, they had two cameras but they only kept one camera on. The idea was that it would be immoral and ethical to put a secret camera on them. So they had that kind of thing. But they finally, Randy, I guess may be convinced, they finally got to the point after working with them so long and I think not me and McCaffrey or anything, they finally also used a hidden camera and everything grew up at that point. I think I'm gonna lose. Friday, cheating. Okay, so here's just two quotes for Vera. During the time we had worked together I felt I came to know Tim fairly well. We had established what appeared to be an honest, friendly and trusting rapport. If he was fraudulent, I thought he either deserved an Academy Award for a most convincing performance or that he was prone to severe self-delusion at the least. By the way, this is a problem all the time is when people assume that they can tell judge people's honesty of sincerity we've got trouble, okay? On the other hand, you can see what's going on here. These people feel they want to do this because they really aren't, they feel that ideally as a sensitive human being you've got to treat them as a sensitive human being. Unfortunately, you're in a catch-22 situation. If you really let them be part of the process and stuff like that, you're opening the door to, you know, I could, even I could get away with anything under those conditions. They're gonna give me the keys to the storeroom, okay? Why had I been willing to give Tim's PK ability to benefit a doubt when evidence was against doing so? In considering this question, I discovered two aspects of my relationship with Tim which may have contributed to my apparent reluctance to recognize that Tim's claims were false. Firstly, I was biased towards liking Tim both initially and as our relationship developed. Secondly, I was biased towards believing him. So this is how she explains that. I can find out if you're interested. So what we're talking about always throughout this course and using the framework is how to make sure you've got good evidence or to be sure you have good evidence before you begin thinking about it. So I go back to one of my favorite people, Claude Bernard was a very important person in medicine in the beginnings of medicine and he helped establish the experimental basis for medicine and his book, I'm trying to remember, an introduction to medical research or something like that, it's in paperback and Dover and it's my favorite book. Many other things. He was well ahead of his time and this is a quote I love of his which I think is very central to this course. A good method promotes scientific development and forewarns men of science against those numberless sources of error which they meet in the search for truth. This is the only purpose of the experimental method. Think about that. A second quote from the book which clinches it for me. If the facts used as a basis for reasoning are ill-established or erroneous, everything will crumble or be falsified and it is thus that errors in scientific theories most often originate in errors of fact and again, as I say, it's a recurring theme in this course and it's the garbage in, garbage out and it's the basis for several things I've been pointing out here. Okay, and it's what Staniewicz would call contaminated mind-wear and once you have in your memory and everything else, you have contaminated mind-wear your thinking, unfortunately, is going to be very, very problematic. Another thing related to this is Richard Feynman and in his fascinating book, Cargo-Caltz Science, Feynman said this, the first principle of science is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. Keep that in mind. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's not easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that. So that's the other important thing. Now we jump to some psychology here also related to the fact that good mind-wear there is having good mind-wear, good knowledge, good facts as well as being able to know when to allocate your precious cognitive resources is the best thing you can do in trying to think correctly about duties, claims. These are two psychologists who have a long history of studying logical thinking and stuff like that. They say when an argument is compatible, its conclusions seem probable and it is unlikely that there will be a fallacy in it. Hence there is little justification for engaging in the mentally costly deliberative search of memory. In contrast, when an argument is incompatible its conclusion seems improbable and it is likely that it contains a fallacy. Classically there is a good reason to devote extra mental effort mental work needed to find a fallacy. Now this could be very controversial actually. What is the definition of compatible? Compatible is that when someone comes up to you and says look I just did an interesting experiment where I tested therapeutic touch and it doesn't work. There is a young girl at the time Emily Rosie may have heard about her and she did as a science fair project at her school she was 11 or 12 I think, 12. She tested some therapeutic touch people to see whether in fact they could detect when they couldn't see where a hand was here or over here. I just because they claim they can feel hours around the body. With the science fair project she showed that they couldn't do it apparently. Well this is compatible with apparently the JMA and a lot of other skeptics, skeptical scientists and medical people who don't believe in therapeutic touch. And until Emily Rosie's science fair project got published as a JMA paper. So it means compatible with withdrawal or anything? Yeah, that's right. That's what compatible means. Is that a kind of awkward razor? What's that? Is that similar to awkward razor? We'll know what he's saying. I understand what he's saying is that look when someone comes along with a proposition a statement that's consistent with what you already believe or know you don't spend much time thinking about it you don't waste your time thinking about it. But if someone comes along with something that is incompatible with what you know so if Emily Rose had tested those people in her little experiment and they had come out with the, since she came out saying they body, it worked. They can detect where my hand is better than chance. She would have gotten flack from everyone. Every skeptic in the world would have turned their experiment in part, which is very easy because no experiment is perfect. And she's a little girl at a science fair and it was just a very simple experiment but it was so pleasing that it did come out the way a lot of people wanted to come out that the Journal of the American Medical Association even published it. They're very tough at what they published. They're very incompatible with their viewpoint. So this is it. But this can be a dangerous approach but yet there are sins to this. They want to make a point that in fact if we're always questioning everything the same way we never get to the day. And in fact there's some sense to doing that but you also got to realize there's some problems with it. But anyways I'm pushing that issue there. I've used that to get into this. Here's a foster of science. We will, as a result of belief perseverance, I mentioned this earlier, belief perseverance which is a psychological term, we'll taint our perception of new data. So this would be like our new terminology we talked about in this course. This is like saying contaminated mind wear because of belief perseverance, I'm sorry, perseverance. We'll taint your perception of new data. It's another way of saying that however whatever your background, whatever knowledge you have is going to color it, you can't help it. You always got to approach any new data. I mean I'm doing something with in terms against the background of what you already know. So by the same token however, belief perseverance will serve to color our perception of new data with our pre-existing beliefs when our pre-existing beliefs are accurate. So what he's saying simply is that look if you have mistaken beliefs and you take in new data and you assimilate it to those mistaken beliefs you're going to be wrong. You're just increasing your... On the other hand, he says that's a good-bad feature of it of our belief perseverance but on the other hand, at the same token if in fact your beliefs prior to encountering new data are correct. When you encounter a new data and the token in terms of your color beliefs you're going to be even more correct, right? So he wants you to point out that there's another side to the coin and I'm pointing this out for another reason. How many of you have heard of a read St. Matthew? There are several sources for this but this is famous. According to the Gospel, according to St. Matthew for unto everyone that hath shall be given you've heard this before and he shall have abundance but from him that hath not shall be taken away even at which he hath. This is the principle of Republican economics. Rich should get richer and the poor should get poorer. This is the basis of it, right? This is died by the idea why they don't want any more tax proposals that are going to touch that very rich up to 1% of the wealth we were very wealthy. It's a religious gospel with them apparently. Anyways, this is a famous thing. It's called sometimes it's used in sociology by Merton. He called it many years ago. He was a sociologist of science in the good sense. There are sociologists of science now who are really anti-science. Anyway, Merton applied to call it the Matthew principle. The Matthew principle he wanted to show how fame gets about them. If you become famous very early in science that makes it easier to become even more famous if you very, very begin your career without even knowing about you it's going to be much harder as you progress in your career to get more and more into the backwaters and become unknown. That's the Matthew principle. The idea of the Matthew principle is that things develop. Those who settle an advantage are going to have even more advantages. It's going to multiply. It's going to get worse. That's the idea of the Matthew principle. It's used a lot of ways. It's used by psychologists of reading to try to show that early getting kids to begin reading very early early is a very helpful one. So children who grew up in families where they're encouraged to read and stuff very early gather certain kinds of modules in their mind and stuff like that to make it easier to now read new things and read better things. They get better and better and better. Whereas if you start off in a disadvantaged environment where there are no books and no one encourages you to do that you get worse and worse as you go up the educational scale. That's called the Matthew principle and is applied to reading. But as we see it's also applied to how come scientists and smart people go badly wrong. I will term the idea of knowledge projection. Here's how Keith Sandvich puts it in his book who is rational. This argument that in a natural ecology where most of our prior beliefs are true projecting our beliefs onto new data will lead to faster accumulation of knowledge. I will term the knowledge projection an argument. So that in the natural state of things if most of your prior beliefs about this situation are true beliefs you will accumulate more and more new data which will be consistent with the true beliefs and you'll be even smarter. Best knowledge projection which in the aggregate might lead to more rapid induction of new true beliefs may be a trap in cases where people in effect keep reaching into a bag of beliefs that are largely false. Using these beliefs to structure the evaluation of evidence more quickly adding incorrect beliefs to the bag for further projection. So if you're starting with false beliefs and you start going further you're going to build up even a bigger get more and more into a situation you believe in falsely. Without going further you can begin thinking how you can apply it to scientists who go astray. Within their disciplinary matrix they've already built up to other scientists and through a whole matrix, this matrix they built up a body of beliefs well tested over and over again of good information. So when they account to new information new experiments they can simulate that new stuff the new information to the old stuff tweak the old stuff so it's even better and they're a total amount of information of useful and good information and correct information is even bigger. On the other hand that same thing goes with the person's people start with wrong information. Now when a scientist is in his matrix and he steps out of that matrix begins looking at spiritual media and stuff like that the only information available is the stories not scientific information by people who believe that they do see spirits and these spirits really can do what they claim or if they start to work with Geller they step out of their physics laboratory and work with Geller the only thing they can see is that and they've heard stories about it that's why they go to see Geller that this guy can bend metal with his mind so they're already starting with a basis of wrong beliefs they're already getting the idea that this guy really can bend metal with his mind they start that way and then as they accumulate they only get worse and worse deeper and deeper into puplu so they're in trouble so this is called the Matthew effect when we apply it to why scientists go astray and again I quote from who is rational by Keith knowledge projection from an island of false beliefs might explain a phenomena of otherwise intelligent people who get caught in a domain-specific web of falsity and because of projection tendencies cannot escape they cannot escape otherwise competent physical scientists who believe in creationism and indeed such individuals often use their considerable computational powers to rationalize their beliefs to ward off the arguments and skeptics this is another point which I should have made that I will make now I could have made earlier but I'll make it now is that one of the ways, in fact there's a book called Who's Stupid Wife's Not People Can Be So Stupid that was the title of a book that a collection of articles by experts on this by Robert Sternberg I think we're about 10 years old now and then no less than 10 years old and Sternberg got these experts, different people in different fields of psychology to write what their analysis of how it could be that smart people could be so stupid and then he asked me to read all of the chapters that have been accumulated and write an overarching chapter at the beginning of the book and see if I can put together all the theories that the other people had and write a chapter and I did, so I write the introductory chapter of that book, it's the wrong one and I concluded that smart people can be wrong and stupid just because they're so smart which is the basis of this thing as well in other words, they can now starting with the wrong basis of information if they now have brains and intelligent the kind of smartness to be able to do it they can use that basis to very cleverly argue for their physician which is wrong and make it even worse so one of the ironies of that smart people can be so stupid just because they're so stupid isn't there a similar type of thing that they may even be arrogant about I'm so smart that for somebody's not capable of fooling me that could be, yes could be what Kathy is saying which is a good point is that there's also a motivational part a self-importance aspect to this, that I am so smart, you know my self-image is so smart that it's unlikely no one's going to be able to fool me because physicians and deceivers of all kinds scammers love that kind of thing turns out that the famous book on con artists was written during the 30s by David Maurer called The Big Con and later was republished as the American Conference Man he was a professor at University of Louisville and Professor of English was interested in the language of the underworld and as he wrote several books on the argot as he calls it of pickpockets and the different language that housebreakers had each subgenre of outlaw had a different kind of language and he called the argot and he wrote books on them to compile them as an English professor who's interested in that but one day he used to be on some Sundays while he was resting at home and he would drive up to the street and come in the front door and say hey, we've got to talk to you you've got the language while you've been publishing on language of different kinds of criminals and stuff like that but you missed us because we don't ever get caught we're the conference men they're very proud of themselves and they're con artists and as they talk to them and try to teach them about their language they talk a lot about what they do so you got very fascinated in the psychology of how they do it and it goes on that way and in his book The Big Con which is still a fascinating book to read he shows that the most easiest of people that other conference men can most fool are other conference men because they know how the guy's mind works too, they can take advantage of it and also conference men think they're the cream of the crop, they're so smart that they can't be fooled that makes me more vulnerable to another con artist by the second most successful people to be con, I think it was clergymen and then bankers anyway okay, I got five minutes so less the Matthew effect is and what is implied by the term false beliefs false belief are they trying to imply that there are such things as true belief or I mean would not go down that path just in philosophy it's justified true belief, but Ray would you if you have by the, would you mind just focusing on the replicability thing that's my last lecture but I'm not in my last lecture oh no, then I misunderstood this is the next to the last lecture I thought this lecture was the importance of replicability okay, so I'm not there yet don't rush me maybe I'm just reading the lecture 9 it says the importance of that's lecture 10 well, not in the handout that means you misprinted it no, the importance of replicability is the last lecture, which is next what's that? replicability in the 9 also oh, what they did was I had a heading for each pair of lectures and that was the heading for the pair of lectures they've reedited this I can show you my original one okay, so I'm always right I believe you okay, so I have one minute, two minutes three minutes, okay so we've covered a lot of ground in some ways in some ways, not so much maybe but everything is pointed to making sure we've got good data and the reasons why we want to make that why it's hard to get good data and some of the reasons are because we are cognitive misers and the other reasons are because of the lack of adequate mindware or having mindware that's contaminated in other words so from there I'm going to go just one step further because we've been talking as if you can do an experiment that's going to give you adequate data, good data and it turns out that's not true a single experiment, no matter how good it is even though there are people that can talk about crucial experiments and stuff like that there's no such thing because as I said at the beginning science is inductive and it's a probabilistic thing and the best experiment in the world could have unanticipated reasons why it is wrong and also just by fluke things can be wrong but because of our auxiliary conditions initial conditions you can't handle everything a single experiment by itself is not sufficient to give you the kind of data you want this is the importance of replicability and I'm going to get to that next lecture and show you how pseudo-replicability I think I'll call it I just made up that word can create a whole field which has lasted for over 150 years or so called parapsychology that's the week of next