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The Crisis of Professional Skepticism


Leading skeptics fail the test of “extraordinary evidence”

This proved to be bad judgment.” Leaving aside the visiting skeptic’s nearly vaudevillian supposition that Pearce repeatedly crawled through a ceiling space to peek at cards through a trapdoor over the lab [7], consider the appalling cynicism of Gardner’s riposte. Rather than honoring Feynman’s arch imperative to disprove one’s favored hypotheses, CSICOP’s executive director, Lee Nisbet, told Science magazine in 1977: “We feel it is the duty of the scientific community to show that these beliefs are utterly screwball.” The article’s declarations are often worded evasively and referenced tautologically, e.g., “It was revealed that Rhine’s experiments into extrasensory perception (ESP) contained methodological flaws”—this is footnoted to a book called Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction: Where Real Science Ends .

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