[John Freestone]

Originally Posted by Brutha

Even if you make 1.000.000 tests of persons who claim to be psychic and none of them actually is psychic you still have no evidence for the theory that no psychics exist.
It's a big error to confuse the two things.

Yes, I understand the argument. It is a kind of philosophical argument of an extreme nature, though, and those are not always very useful in making practical decisions and assessing evidence. It is extreme in the sense that we could test, as you say, a million claims, not have any positive result, and number 1 000 001 could be psychic. However, I can cancel the extreme argument by use of another. How many possible phenomena could we test for in investigating life? Let's start at A - Aliens, Buddhism, Catholicism, Dendritic Superlativism (that is a name I just made up off the top of my head; it means that the trees are superconscious organisms on planet earth)...Zen....now, let's go through the alphabet again, since we've forgotten the Akashic Record, Abraham (various), Abracadabra (well, it might work)... So in a mathematical sense, you're right, but there are other considerations. In order to decide whether something exists (or rather, to form some kind of working knowledge of an answer - we don't even have to decide), we need to be a bit smarter than just keep throwing our line out in the same direction forever, never getting a fish. It would be a very foolish person who ignored this principle.

For millenia people in the western world only observed white Swans. They even used "Seeing a black Swan" similar to we use "When pigs fly" today.
Once Australia got discovered people finally saw Black Swans and the theory that there every Swan is white got refuted.
Lack of evidence for a theory "there are black Swans" is qualitivly different from evidence for the opposite "there are no black Swans". I took the Black Swan example from Nassim Taleb. If you want to learn more about the real world implications of it I highly recommand his talk.

I wonder why, other than his argument that long odds are more unpredictable than short odds, and that history can show surprising turns, he is a skeptic, and many of the things he talks about in that lecture are reminders of what happens in belief systems like psi. He criticised religion. He talked about the error of people seeing pattern in random events. Personally, I also found him very difficult to follow, a poor speaker, and thought some of his points were ridiculous and others self-contradictory, but nowhere in that lecture did he say that because the future is more unpredictable than we tend to think (and he was talking mostly about wars, recessions and the like, although he did mention computers as a 'black swan') we can have a bit more faith that after decades of psychic research, the really good evidence is just around the corner.

Similarly lack of evidence for the theory "there are psychics" is qualitivly different from evidence for the opposite "there are no psychics".

Agreed. However, every time you look for a black swan and fail to find one, it is still evidence that there are no black swans. There is a difference between having built up a body of evidence and not having disproved. Only a fool reads about a confident 'psychic' failing to demonstrate their abilities and completely ignores that in their thinking, just shrugs and goes, it'll be the next one!

If you come to your conclusion based on faulty reasoning that's pseudoscience.

Well, there's something else we agree on then. Science doesn't prove things. That might be one of your mistaken ideas, that we're seeking proof for things. It builds evidence for theories, and they always remain probabilistic. Science has never proved anything. It talks about proof a lot, but in reality it is a bit like a court of law - beyond reasonable doubt. After thousands of failed experiments, and none that are beyond reasonable doubt, it is reasonable to assume that psychic ability is an illusion.

That is one half of the evidence, however; the other is that science has meanwhile built up a confident body of real evidence for the alternative theories, as mentioned earlier. Put the two things together and it seems crazy to insist that just because we can't see every eventuality, pigs still might fly tomorrow. Ok. They might, but big deal! THEY NEVER DO!