Daryl Bem Proved ESP Is Real - Which means science is broken. (?)

https://redux.slate.com/cover-stories/2017/05/daryl-bem-proved-esp-is-real-showed-science-is-broken.html

Very long read.

I havent read the article yet but i noticed Bem is a social psychologist and thought this topic might be relevant

https://www.templeofthejediorder.org/forum/Philosophy/118323-peer-review-in-the-social-sciences#284719

I wouldnt say science is broken but id definitely say that studies arent always as scientifically rigorous as they are made out to be.

EDIT
id also say that ive experienced so many moments of what could be called "esp" that i dont need a study to tell me theres something to it. I know that people can share thoughts and that attention can be percieved because ive experienced it. Thats not scientific though, so i dont expect anyone else to believe me

I wouldnt say science is broken but id definitely say that studies arent always as scientifically rigorous as they are made out to be.

EDIT
id also say that ive experienced so many moments of what could be called "esp" that i dont need a study to tell me theres something to it. I know that people can share thoughts and that attention can be percieved because ive experienced it. Thats not scientific though, so i dont expect anyone else to believe me

Might be worth reading the article then

So I read the whole thing.

I'm not sure for what purpose you posted it John (if any particular purpose).

Having done a lot of reading in the field of psychology there is this push and pull between opinions even on subjects that are not nearly as controversial... there are two particular researchers I have in mind who wrote many an essay to the other, each reading the other's results differently. On their topic I'm still nowhere sure which one is the more likely. And also, having conducted small research experiments in social psychology myself, I can see how easy it would be to unwittingly lead your data somewhere.

By the end of the article, the fact that Bem's research was about ESP was really sort of a sideline.. the real story is in how much we can rely on scientific research results. In an ironic sort of way, the 'scientific method' is not always as scientific as it should be...

And as for do I believe in ESP? I'm not more convinced now than I was before I read the article. Maybe his results have a completely different explanation? No idea...but possible.

No particular purpose. I found it interesting and thought someone else might too.

Like any other experiment in the social sciences, it is going to be tough to maintain the scientific method when you're dealing with human subjects. There are way too many variables to control among the subjects and the researchers themselves. Scientific method relies on making an experiment repeatable and coming up with the same results over and over. This is next to impossible when you are dealing with human subjects that could be untruthful, trying to please the researchers by giving the "correct" answer, and researches that are subjects to confirmation bias.

This isn't like chemistry or physics or even biology for that matter, where we can conduct experiments that produce consistent results and more easily control very specific variables. Social sciences will always have a much larger margin for error simply because they involve humans as the variables.

Senan wrote: Like any other experiment in the social sciences, it is going to be tough to maintain the scientific method when you're dealing with human subjects. There are way too many variables to control among the subjects and the researchers themselves. Scientific method relies on making an experiment repeatable and coming up with the same results over and over. This is next to impossible when you are dealing with human subjects that could be untruthful, trying to please the researchers by giving the "correct" answer, and researches that are subjects to confirmation bias.

This isn't like chemistry or physics or even biology for that matter, where we can conduct experiments that produce consistent results and more easily control very specific variables. Social sciences will always have a much larger margin for error simply because they involve humans as the variables.

Yes... there is a suggestion that it impossible for psychology to be a true science because psychology is by its very definition the study of the self, and one cannot be truly objective.

Since all of the difficulties you are naming here, Senan, also apply to medicine, would you call that a social science, too, with similarly questionable scientific rigor? Controlling variables doesn't mean eliminating them, it means being mindful of them. If you account for all the potential sources of error, your total "margins" of error might get enormous, but at least the results your reviewers would get might just be within those same margins. Intellectual honesty and transparency are quintessential hallmarks of science. Undue confidence is not. If you as a researcher either ignore important variables knowingly, or fail to mention them in your paper by mistake, that's what makes the results irreproducible. If the margins are understated, to get a result that deviates well beyond them is trivially easy, and that is so with history to no smaller extent than with chemistry.
Science is not a subject, it is an approach, a way of figuring things out. Its domain is all of our shared reality, no matter how obscure the causes of the final observables are.
But yes, I agree. Science is difficult. To account for variables one left uncontrolled retrospectively is boring and taxing, and there are plenty very difficult ones to account for particularly when dealing with humans, as you said. There is of course an easy, lazy way out by just not accounting for them at all. It is however, as I said, a way out.

Some branches of psychology seem to be less prone than others: personality psychology for instance, and behavioral genetics and IQ studies. Even so, the "replication crisis" has been seen to apply to all the sciences, even physics (though seemingly to a lesser degree, I would guess Gisteron might have input on that?) and biology. Economics and political science. Even in medicine. Some say ESPECIALLY in medicine because the monetary incentive is so big.

We're potentially entering into a new era of understanding about how to perfect the process of scientific inquiry.

EDIT
NOT in before Gisteron dammit

Dumb question for OP: what's the actual peer-reviewed journal study that this article talks about? I'd rather read the method and data than this confirmation bias-laden piece.
Just because we call a field pseudoscience doesn't preclude it being true. Parapsychology by definition is pseudoscience because if it had the required repeatability and falsifiability, it would be psychology or physiology.