Weird Studies/Skepticism

07 Apr 2022 12:47 - 16 Dec 2022 12:22
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    • Weird Studies Episode 108: On Skepticism and the Paranormal mostly about the book The Trickster and the Paranormal, by George Hansen. For me, this wins the book-I-would-be-most-embarassed-to-be-caught-reading prize, out of all the things discussed on WS so far. IOW, I had trouble with this episode due to what I guess is lingering scientism.
    • Distinguishing between true skepticism (which means assuming no axioms), and the Skepticism™, the James Randi/CSICOP variety, which is more like materialist fundamentalism (they didn't use that term). Robert Anton Wilson as a good avatar of the first kind.
    • Science vs. Scientism. Their description of science was pretty good, a few quibbles (like, not all science is lab science, repeatability is important but not always achievable eg as in cosmology). Also a good appreciation of science as a culture, which is absolutely true (their agenda, though, is to say that because science is a particular culture, it is not as universal as it pretends to be. That's more questionable).
      • This is one spot where I had a strong disagreement -- their idea (implied at least) that the culture of science is accidental, that science ignores UFOs because of cultural biases that are arbitrary, and could at least in theory be changed. This seems quite wrong to me -- science is radically a culture, and a science with a different culture wouldn't be science. The book seems to acknowledge this, at least some of the time.
      • Also note that their other big point (see below) -- that paranormal phenomenon tend to be singular, to be anti-structural and anti-regular -- well, that explains why science avoids them, because science is definitionally no good at that kind of thing.
    • They paint skeptics like CSICOP as marginal to real science, patrolling the borders. I think that's pretty right, except that they seem to imply this shouldn't be happening, my inclination is to treat it as just a part of the necessary culture of science, its one way of reinforcing its worldview and its rule. But it is very true that whatever CSICOP does is kind of fringe; real scientists are in their laboratories or trying to wring statistical significance from their data, and do not spend time worrying about UFO believers, let alone arguing with them.
      • Huh just noticed an analogy to my tedious fights with wingnuts hobby – I'm hardly a mainstream liberal, but I seem to have chosen a role where I patrol the boundaries of political discourse and try to fight off the enemies of the liberal order. And I unavoidably take on some of their characteristics.
    • Paranormal events have something about their nature that makes them ungraspable by the methods of science and rationality. But that doesn't mean they aren't real, and to claim otherwise is scientism, which is obnoxious or intellectually imperialist or something like that. CSICOP and similar organizations patrol the borderlands of science but can't help take on some of the aspects of the phenomenon they aim to exclude from reality.
      • Science studies phenomenon that are repeatable and rule-governed, that's just what it is good for. It's a bad tool for understanding the inherently unique, which includes personal experience and the paranormal.
    • It's funny but the view of the paranormal these guys have almost seems like it would pass through a science filter with no problems at all. If such experiences are flukes and unrepeatable, well, then science can't say much about them, for or against.
    • There's a real difference in attitude; science tries hard for legibility, repeatability, explanation. But it can't encompass everything and a certain type of mentality is concerned with avoiding being labeled, of existing outside the realms of repeatability and normality. I can appreciate that, but you can't have a science of it, or if you can, you have to deal with the inherently reflexive self-undermining nature of the enterprise.
    • Freud v Jung, Freud's quote about the "black mud tide of occultism". Very telling. I suppose with my background I am much more of a Freudian, but his attitude is collapsing and in the weird new world we need Carl:
    • Freud said to me, “My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.” . . . In some astonishment I asked him, “A bulwark against what?” To which he replied, “Against the black tide of mud”— and here he hesitated for a moment, then added— “of occultism.” C. G. Jung, Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken, 1963
    • JFM: the experience of a ghost is real, when someone says its a product of carbon monoxide or banging pipes, that's a causal explanation, which misses the point, the reality is in the experience.
    • Also says elsewhere that the overwhelming testimony of personal experience with ghosts, UFOs, etc has to be valid because democracy.
      • That sounds snide, but it's accurate ... and I find myself in disagreement, I am perfectly happy to be an aristocratic snob when it comes to epistemology. Maybe that makes me an asshole, putting ideology ahead of people's lived experience.
    • But OK, point taken that there is no principled way for science to say that "paranormal experiences aren't real", because they are very real as experiences, there's no denying that. Science has no good way to talk about experience, weird or otherwise, and should remain silent, ruling in its own magisterium of the publicly observable and repeatable.
    • But then you can't have it both ways. If paranormal experiences are inherently subjective and personal, then any attempt to make a science of parapsychology is doomed to failure. That may explain why it seems so cringe to me, the internal contradictions are kind of obvious. It's trying to mix science and something else, more like personal spirituality, and they don't mix very well.
    • Random personal note: for a time I actually worked at SRI, the research lab where a ton of parapsychology research was done: Parapsychology research at SRI - Wikipedia However, I was there decades later and in the AI/bioinformatics department which had a much different agenda.
    • Weird doppelganger story – point being, doesn't matter about supernatural causes, reality is inherently weird, and skepticism can't touch it. JFM: this means reality itself is a miracle? Point with boiling point of water and miracles seemed very confused.
    • Quote from Crowley from Magick Without Tears resonated – the infinite improbability of these particular circumstances. Every phenomenon is equally improbable, so everything that exists does so by means of coincidence.