Here's a depressing way to start your week, courtesy of The New Statesman:
.."psychic schools have never been so busy, and it's not the Doris Stokes brigade who want to learn, but the young, the prosperous and the educated. Stephen Armstrong uncovers a paranormal boom."
If you don't know who Doris Stokes is, that's probably a good thing; those familiar with the name are more likely to have enrolled in the aforementioned schools. Plus, The New Statesman piece deals with the situation in England. But things aren't much better this side of the pond.
Earlier this year came the results of a Gallup survey by Bryan Farha at Oklahoma City University and Gary Steward Jr. of the University of Central Oklahoma that found a positive correlation between belief in the supernatural and higher education among Americans.
...the new survey reveals college is not necessarily a path to skepticism in these realms.
While 23 percent of college freshmen expressed a general belief in paranormal concepts--from astrology to communicating with the dead--31 percent of seniors did so and the figure jumped to 34 percent among graduate students.
"As people attain higher college-education levels, the likelihood of believing in paranormal dimensions increases," Farha and Steward write.While 23 percent of college freshmen expressed a general belief in paranormal concepts--from astrology to communicating with the dead--31 percent of seniors did so and the figure jumped to 34 percent among graduate students.
If that's not annoying, I don't know what is. Here's more from The New Statesman.
We are in the College of Psychic Studies, founded in 1884 by the spiritualist movement with support from Arthur Conan Doyle, and in all its 122 years the place has never been busier. Ten years ago, according to the "Spiritual Journey" tutor Kay Stirling, it was offering around 12 courses to a slow trickle of students. In the past few years, the trickle has swelled to a river.
...
"Until about five years ago, most of the people interested in psychic phenomena were basically of a certain type," says Craig Hamilton-Parker, who runs the online Elysium Academy Psychic School, based in Stansted, and also practises as a medium. "You could call them the Doris Stokes brigade. They were usually over 50, might well have had a loved one who had died and were very keen to know what was on the other side. Over the past few years, however, we've had so much interest from people in their twenties or thirties who want to use skills such as aura reading, psychic abilities, mediumship and clairvoyance in their personal lives to help with relationships and careers and are unlikely to be wanting to contact and speak to the dead."
These students are part of a new, prosperous, younger generation whose desire for the psychic skills of mediumship and tarot reading sits comfortably alongside a range of other lifestyle choices, such as reading self-help books, going to the gym and dressing for success. Generation X-Files, if you will. In April, Selfridges made a play for their custom by introducing the first psychic concession in a leading British department store, the Psychic Sisters.
There is some solace in the knowledge that the best educated Americans -- assuming that members of the National Academy of Sciences are among the best educated in the country -- are almost all non-believers. But clearly something's wrong if college students become more gullible, not less, as they approach graduation.
This isn't about C.P. Snow's two cultures. A skeptical mindset is just as important for students of literature and the social sciences as it is for biologists and physicists. History and current events must be approached not with a completely open mind, but one that starts with appropriate degrees of confidence and doubt. Otherwise, you end up with a citizenry that believes whatever authority figures say is true, rather than evaluating their trustworthiness based on past performance.
Hmmm. Suddenly, the last five and a half years are beginning to make a lot more sense.
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So this school offered 12 courses only, then had to increase its curriculum because of increased demand. Funny, wouldn't a psychic school be increasing their offers BEFORE the trickle turned to a flood? Wouldn't they be buying up real estate in anticipation of all these new supersticious graduates, say, 10 years ahead of time? How do they grade the students? 8/10 for proper placement of the crystal ball; D for deception...
However, I suspect that the media has a hand in this degrading of positive skepticism. X-files sure, but also Mindfreak, Chriss Angel's show on the US's A&E cable channel. I know people who believe that he bends magnetic fields with his mind, permitting him to walk on water and to levitate. He's using handycams to great persuasive illusionary effect.
Such shows will only reinforce these superstitious beliefs, blurring reality from entertainment, and leading those predisposed to such ideas to these psychic schools.
Proving the empiricle observation that there is a "sucker born every minute."
Not to mention certain organizations that should be promoting science and education, but instead promote pseudoscience and magical thinking:
Atlanta zoo hires psychics to postdict panda pregnancy
"History and current events must be approached not with a completely open mind, but one that starts with appropriate degrees of confidence and doubt. Otherwise, you end up with a citizenry that believes whatever authority figures say is true, rather than evaluating their trustworthiness based on past performance."
yes yes
There is culture in many fields that espouses the "open mind" and give every idea a fair hearing and listen to all sides.....
But not all sides carry equivalent weight. Two surgeons may disagree on a technique and have legitimate claim to be heard. The opinion of a practitioner of therapeuatic should have no such claim.
The other problem in believing "authority figures" is that there is a tendency to treat as authority figures those who have little or no authority in a given area.
An erudite astronomer probably as no more authority in evaluating cardiac procedures than I do.
Who are the authorities and how you judge "authority" is as much an area for skepticism as the ideas they propose.
Hey, as a young professional type in the UK, I have absolutely no problem with this. While they're off learning to read tea leaves, I'll be getting my MBA and running unopposed for the top jobs.
In the kingdom of the blind...
This rings uncomfortably true for me. I'm still surprised fairly often by how much new agey woo and vague supernatural mumbo-jumbo is given credence by friends of mine who are generally educated, articulate, informed people of above-average brightness. I've been surprised since college by this, in fact.
I strongly suspect this is, counterintuitively, linked with the greater tendency to reject traditional religious beliefs among those with higher educations. Still feeling the need to "believe in something," they turn to beliefs which seem more liberal and less dogmatic and authoritarian. And which are vague and non-binding enough to be comfortably ignored when the chips are down and rationality has to be brought into play, another pattern I see in these folks.
Conversely, in less educated and more religious populations (and I'm pretty sure there's a solid statistical correlation there... anyone able to confirm?), psychic and other new agey beliefs are regarded by many as satanic and anti-christian.
As I alluded to above, I think these beliefs tend to be pretty shallow and have not a whole lot of practical effect on how young educated people live their lives, aside from some of them wasting a little money and time. But I don't really have anything beyond anecdotal evidence for that.
I don't think that our universities are actively training students in new aged thinking, so it must be happening more on a student peer level. I'd be curious to look at the correlation between christian and new aged beliefs. Namely, I'm curious to see if these newly hatched new-agers are just people who dropped christianity and then felt the need for something else to fill their "spiritual void". I'd assume that people who were more long-term non-theists would be less accepting of new aged beliefs.
So basically you heap scorn and ridicule on these schools simply because you have no doubt whatsoever that psi phenomena are all entirely bogus, nonsense, chicanry, wishful thinking and delusion. Despite the millions of first-hand accounts and the thousands of successful psi experiments, and the meta-analyses demonstrating that psi effects are significant across the total set of experimental studies.
So why then do you write a blog called "The Island of Doubt"? How about "The Island of CSICOP Dogma" or "The Island of James Randi Acolytes" instead?
1. There are no proven psi phenomena. It appears for now they are all wishful thinking and bogus nonsense.
PUH_LEEZ. Even one successful occurence of true psi phenomena would change the world as we know it. Simply put no experiement that works the way you would do an experiment in the 5th grade ever works or produces anything remotely amazing. It all falls within natural laws.
You know it's simple. Find someone with psi ability. Get some people to set up a controlled experiment and prove your case. Simple. Argue all day if you like but prove your case.
There are no proven psi phenomena. It appears for now they are all wishful thinking and bogus nonsense.
I have referenced over twenty studies and meta-analyses on my blog demonstrating the scientific reality of psi phenomena.
Your problem is that you reject the data without examining the science.
You know it's simple. Find someone with psi ability. Get some people to set up a controlled experiment and prove your case. Simple. Argue all day if you like but prove your case.
It's already been done, on British national TV. No doubt your confirmation bias will kick in and move the goalposts yet again. . .
It's only confirmation bias mope if one finds the evidence compelling and ignores it anyway.
Don't you even realize that you are suffering the same thing youa ccuse others of doing? How does that escape you?
The 2 studies you have listed are not science. Theya re not reproducible. They are not credible. You act as if people are just unaware or using a prior bias. Can you not understand that these 'scientific' ideas fail because they are simply pseudoscientific crap?
Produce results and the world listens. Tell people you dog has esp and people bend spoons with air and you are quite simply an imbecile.