Only if you give me a loan to buy it along with the deed.
Not a single "psychic" has ever demonstrated any actual abilities under proper testing (where "proper" is defined as testing done carefully enough to exclude the possibility of fraud or wishful thinking on the part of the testers). Period.
Wrong.
"Not a single "psychic" has ever demonstrated any actual abilities under proper testing (where "proper" is defined as testing done carefully enough to exclude the possibility of fraud or wishful thinking on the part of the testers). Period."Wrong.
I stand by my statement. Your cite doesn't do anything to help your case:
CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing At Stanford Research Institute
Oh, puh-leaze... Puthoff is the most gullible "psychic researcher" out there. He declared Uri Gellar's spoonbending and "clairvoyance" genuine and "proven", despite the fact that fact that independent observers witnessed Gellar's "entourage" freely shuttling back and forth between the "projection" room (where they could see the "target" images) and Gellar's "isolation room" (where they could signal him). And let's not bring up the time video cameras caught Gellar manually bending a spoon when he thought that he had distracted everyone's attention (this is what Puthoff calls "rigorous controls").
But aside from Puthoff's credulity and academic sloppiness, the fact remains that one of the people hired by the government to evaluate the results of the CIA testing issued a point-by-point, scathing report on how sloppy the "testing" was. The results of the tests were so poorly handled that they invalidated any possible observations -- it would be impossible to separate the outcomes based on sloppy procedure frmo the outcomes based on "actual" ESP.
As he later wrote:
The recent media frenzy over the Stargate report violated the truth. Sober scientific assessment has little hope of winning in the public forum when pitted against unsubstantiated and unchallenged claims of "psychics" and psychic researchers -- especially when the claimants shamelessly indulge in hyperbole.It's scary that True Believers(tm) still like to fling this one onto the table as one of their "best" proofs of the existence of psychic abilities.[...]
Utts and other parapsychologists also talk about prima facie evidence in connection with the operational stories of the psychics (or remote viewers) employed by the government. Everyone agrees there is no way to evaluate the accounts of these attempts to use input from remote viewers in intelligence activities. This is because the data were collected in haphazard and nonsystematic ways. No consistent records are available; no attempt was made to interrogate the viewers in nonsuggestive ways; no contemporary systematic attempts to evaluate the results are there, etc.
The attempts to evaluate these operational uses after the fact are included in the American Institutes for Research (A.I.R.) report and they do not justify concluding anything about the effectiveness or reality of remote viewing. Some stories, especially those involving cases that occurred long ago and/or that are beyond actual verification, have been put forth as evidence of apparently striking hits. The claim is that these remote viewers are right on -- are actually getting true psychic signals -- about 20 percent of the time.
Call it prima facie or whatever, none of this should be considered as evidence for anything. In situations where we do have some control comparisons, we find the same degree of hitting for wrong targets (when the judge does not realize it is the wrong target) as for the correct targets. A sobering example of this with respect to remote viewing can be found in David Marks and Richard Kammann's book The Psychology of the Psychic (Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, 1980).
Psychologists, such as myself, who study subjective validation find nothing striking or surprising in the reported matching of reports against targets in the Stargate data. The overwhelming amount of data generated by the viewers is vague, general, and way off target. The few apparent hits are just what we would expect if nothing other than reasonable guessing and subjective validation are operating.
-- Ray Hyman, "The Evidence for Psychic Functioning: Claims vs. Reality"
I'm sorry, I specifically stated that no positive results had been shown under "proper testing". If this is your (or Puthoff's) idea of "proper testing", then I still have several nice bridges for sale.