ceckGrad

some of these papers were successfully replicated, so juxtaposing them to the ones that have not been replicated at all given the title of the page feels a bit off. Not sure if fair.

I don't like Giancotti's claims. He wrote: >This post is a compact reference list of the most (in)famous cognitive science results that failed to replicate and should, for the time being, be considered false.

I don't agree with Giancotti's epistemological claims but today I will not bloviate at length about the epistemology of science. I will try to be brief.

If I understand Marco Giancotti correctly, one particular point is that Giancotti seems to be saying that Hagger et al. have impressively debunked Baumeister et al.

The ego depletion "debunking" is not really what I would call a refutation. It says, "Results from the current multilab registered replication of the ego-depletion effect provide evidence that, if there is any effect, it is close to zero. ... Although the current analysis provides robust evidence that questions the strength of the ego-depletion effect and its replicability, it may be premature to reject the ego-depletion effect altogether based on these data alone."

Maybe Baumeister's protocol was fundamentally flawed, but the counter-argument from Hagger et al. does not convince me. I wasn't thrilled with Baumeister's claims when they came out, but now I am somehow even less thrilled with the claims of Hagger et al., and I absolutely don't trust Giancotti's assessment. I could believe that Hagger executed Baumeister's protocol correctly, but I can't believe Giancotti has a grasp of what scientific claims "should" be "believed."

Randi dedicated his time and energy to debunking shysters.

A lot of people informally call Randi himself a "shyster." But if you mean "shyster" in a legal sense, the only "shyster" Randi spent time and energy on was Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga.

When you say "shyster" you are using loaded, ambiguous language. A scholar would define his terms more clearly. You are probably referring to people like Uri Geller, who are semi-public figures that make money by making claims that are hard/impossible to verify through respectable channels. You might center your definition of "shyster" on Uri Geller or some other public figure.

I don't want to put words in your mouth. I would truly love to see your definition of "shyster," and refer to the professional community that accepts your definition. Then I would ask the professionals why Randi himself does not fit the description of "shyster."

If you believe (first) that people like Uri Geller are shysters and (second) that Randi made the world a better place by harassing people like Uri Geller, you can provide a definition of "shyster" that can be referred to the appropriate professional body -- perhaps the American Bar Association or the I.C.E.

People are extremely likely to upload footage they think is a real UFO. There isn't a shred of physical evidence for UFOS

Is there some central repository of alleged UFO evidence that every single human with a camera is given access to as soon as they get the camera? No, I don't think that's what you meant.

There is a huge amount of human-generated information, and it is ambiguous and practically impossible to process as a whole. No one person can audit all of the videos uploaded to Youtube, rumble, odysee, etc. If we want to argue about what footage has been uploaded, we have to be able to specify what body of footage we are familiar with.

I don't know your background -- people in various walks of life have very different ways of talking about evidence. In my experience of non-paranormal claims, scholars cite scholarly sources, so when I see people saying, "There is no evidence" without immediately adding a bunch of book titles and journal articles, I suspect they are commenting outside their field of expertise.

Instead of just saying "there is no evidence," which is overly broad, you could argue, "I, <insert name here>, have confidence in experts X, Y, and Z, plus committees P, Q, and R <insert websites here> and all their reports on the evidence have been negative."

that's not how a scientist defines irrationality. ... In discussions about, for example, dark matter,

I am delighted to hear that you are such an expert in how scientists define things. Can I safely assume your expertise in the history, philosophy, and practice of science is the result of graduating from one or more specialized programs? You don't have to share your own publication list -- I'm sure you have too many publications to mention here -- just tell me the basis of your academic authority and we can sort out the argument from there.

If UFOs were actually real we would have have a lot of footage of them like we have for everything else that's actually real.

Who is the "we" with access to everyone's video recording footage? I don't have access to anyone's camera footage. If I ask a big organization with lots of cameras for unfettered access to their camera footage they will probably tell me to take a long walk off a short pier.

If a large military organization has suspicious footage of unidentified objects, they probably don't share it to every outsider who asks for it.

Now, some organizations claim to have UFO footage, but I have little reason to take their claims at face value. Example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos

we would have have a lot of footage of them like we have for everything else that's actually real.

I don't have a lot of footage of narco-submarines or drug cartel headquarters. Does that mean they don't exist?

Does something stop being real when cameras stop being pointed at it?

If any of this stuff worked, there would be commercial applications by now

Criticism A: Lots of people claim to have made money off dowsing/clairvoyance for mineral exploration. Debunking them is nontrivial. McMoneagle would be a tough nut to crack.

Criticism B: If an oil company is using an alleged clairvoyant such as McMoneagle, they are not likely to be candid and are not likely to cooperate with debunkers.

Criticism C: The market is frequently unfair and genuine working inventions don't always get to market.

Randi dedicated his time and energy to debunking shysters.

That's not how I see Randi. I see him as a profoundly dishonest person who claimed to be doing debunking when in fact he was not.

Debunking is great, but it requires actual attention and critique. Randi customarily dismissed weird claims and claimed that they had "failed his test." In fact he had not tested them; he had not done anything more than glance at them and toss the letters in his outbox or his trash.

For example, it is very weird to claim a human can go indefinitely without food. If presented as a miracle, this claim is called "inedia." Randi received letters from presumably delusional or dishonest people who claimed to be able to live without food in a miraculous sense. Randi claimed that he had debunked these claims but he never investigated them. If he had actually taken the trouble to debunk these claims, he would have been a real debunker. Because he dismissed the claims out of hand and declared victory, he was a charlatan. Randi was very willing to have CSICOP collect donations for his cause, but he did very little actual debunking.

If an honest debunker -- someone like Feynman -- had been approached by such a claim, Feynman would have met the claimant, said a lot of rude things, and written something informative. He might have actually taken some numerical measurements. That is the sort of debunking I would pay money for.

On very rare occasions, Randi tried to do some real debunking. The results were not what I would call satisfactory. His colleagues at CSICOP (later CSI) were a little more diligent, but not very good at debunking. An example is the Demkina case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natasha_Demkina

CSI/CSICOP was supposed to be providing a team of experts, but they bumbled around like the Keystone Cops. CSICOP, to me, seems to have the same problem as allegedly "Christian" churches -- the preachers talk a lot, claim to embrace lofty ideals, collect monetary donations, and nothing useful happens. I don't believe these self-proclaimed "Christians" are worthy of the name -- why would I believe that self-proclaimed "skeptics" are worthy of the name?

I don't know whether IONS is mainstream; it is not a university. It is at:

https://noetic.org/about/origins/

Rupert Sheldrake is certainly not mainstream, but he has earned quite a few academic qualifications:

https://www.sheldrake.org/about-rupert-sheldrake/biography

However, any organization that dares to mention parapsychology as worthy of study puts a target on its back. The people who imitate Randi will automatically label it as too far outside the mainstream to be taken seriously.

Parapsychology is not my field of academic credentials, so I will not be taking up the cudgels to defend it -- or Mitch Horowitz-- here. However, skepticism and logic are supposed to be within my bailiwick, so I ought to take up the cudgels against those who present illogic as logic and those who decry logic as illogic. Mitch Horowitz is not exactly a legendary logician, but Randi was a positively harmful influence on logic, so I feel justified in pointing out that Randi was a force for irrationality.

Scepticism is not the psychological disposition to treat the increasingly implausible with the same equanimity as the increasingly plausible.

Okay, maybe that is a fair description of skepticism, but you're stating it as if you're an authority. I don't know that you're an authority on skepticism.

The sceptic is under no obligation to ignore decades or centuries of science, nor be partisan to no established body of knowledge.

I don't think there is any authority figure who can say what skeptics are obliged to do or not to do.

Sceptics are at their very best profoundly partisan to such bodies of knowledge,

I have no reason to believe you know what the "best" sort of skeptic is.

This is an article in praise of gullibility as the highest form of scepticism, a very common attempted rebuke to sceptics when one has failed to meet the reasonable standard of evidence they demand.

I don't think you are reading the article correctly. I don't expect you to justify your interpretation to me, but I wonder whether you have a method to justify your interpretations to anybody. Maybe you are a very systematic and logical debunker, and you can justify your debunking calculations to your peers. If that is so, you should be a university professor or a think-tank principal investigator. You could share your debunking methods with the world that needs them.

It is also a subtle ad-hom,

I think you are misreading that.

The principled and knowlegable sceptic, who is not credulous nor obnoxious, not paranoid nor overly trusting -- this is a person in 2025 who would give no time to "parapsychology"

Well, maybe you really are qualified to decide which skeptics are principled and well-informed. If you really are qualified, you should be teaching others to be skeptics. If your methods really are so foolproof, you could purge the world of superstition.

But maybe you are not qualified to speak as if you were an authority on who is a skeptic and what methods are skeptical methods.