Daryl Bem was my undergraduate mentor at Cornell (sigh....), and a very bright
and creative fellow, so this stuff makes me deeply sad. In response to Mike
P's question, I honestly don't know the answer. All I do know is that Daryl
has been quite consistent in his beliefs in psi: Even back in the early 1980s,
when I knew him fairly well and worked with him, he believed in ESP, or at
least attached a high a priori likelihood to it.
What always surprised me is that Daryl was an accomplished magician, and
like many magicians, was/is well aware of the human capacity for
self-deception. Ironically, he would give talks (that were quite remarkable -
I saw one in front of an audience of over 1000 at Cornell) in which he would
"punk" the audience for well over an hour, performing various mental illusions,
sensational acts of cold reading, etc., and persuading just about everybody
that he had ESP - before finally revealing at the end that he had been fooling
them.
The whole thing puzzles me. At least one scholar I greatly respect has
(tongue only partly in cheek) raised the possibility that this is all part of
an elaborate and skillfully crafted hoax - that Bem is actually a skeptic who
is trying to show how easily the academic world can be taken in by sloppy
methodology, confirmation bias, and the like. At this point, I regard this
possibilty as exceedingly unlikely, especially given that Daryl has now
invested decades in investigating this business.
...Scott
________________________________________
From: Mike Palij [[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2011 8:46 AM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: [tips] Don't Be Surprised If Your Physics Colleagues Snicker When They
Pass You In the Hall
The NY Times has an article on Daryl Bem's paper which is to appear
in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. That paper is, of course,
on PSI and how future events can reach back from the future to influence
the past. The NYT article can be read here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/science/06esp.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all
When I read what Bem has done I remind myself that though Sir Ronald
Fisher was a strong believer in Eugenics (and could entertain other nutty
ideas), he still made singificant contributions to statistics and genetics.
I wonder if anyone has conducted a case study on Bem to understand why
he believes in PSI?
-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected]
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