Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 11:46, 22 April 2007

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Evidence presented by Nealparr

The term pseudoscience is often applied to parapsychology without a source matching the claim

I should start by saying that I don't have the time to go through all the histories of all the articles to find examples of individual editors applying the term pseudoscience to parapsychology without sourcing. Since I'm just looking for a statement from the committee that can be referred to in the future (saying hopefully something along the lines of "when applying the term pseudoscience to parapsychology, the statement should be well attributed and well sourced"), I hope that elaborate evidence isn't needed. Hopefully the following examples that it has happened will suffice. Please let me know if it doesn't.

The worse example that I've seen of unsourced labeling of pseudoscience on parapsychology would be this edit by an anonymous user.

The article I've recently worked on where the term pseudoscience was improperly attached to parapsychology is the List_of_pseudosciences_and_pseudoscientific_concepts where I pretty much had to beg for a source to be added that actually said "parapsychology".

The category of pseudoscience is sometimes applied to parapsychology without a source matching the claim

An example of the pseudoscience category being applied to parapsychology unsourced: There's numerous other examples, but they all look pretty much like this for the category addition.

Categories are difficult to source. I'm well aware of that. But I believe that an association to pseudoscience should be sourced in the article itself. There was a straw poll on the talk page of parapsychology discussing this very thing. At the time, I also mistakenly thought that adding the category as related to the topic was alright. This is before I read the guidelines on how the term pseudoscience should be used at Misplaced Pages. I now feel that in order for the pseudoscience category to be applied to an article, there should be a sourced statement about pseudoscience in the article itself (there sometimes are, but not always).

At the time of the category debates, and to this date, the statement in the second paragraph of the article, "The field is regarded by critics as a pseudoscience," goes unsourced.

Parapsychology is not an obvious pseudoscience

Still writing this.

Evidence presented by User:JzG

Inappropriate advocacy

In the original request, Tom Butler says this: "This is not about an editor misbehaving in Misplaced Pages. This is just a turf war between people who think these subjects should be honestly presented and people who are offended by any suggestion of something outside of mainstream science."

This exemplifies the problem perfectly. To represent this as a turf war is factually wrong - WP:NPOV is canonical policy, and pro-science editors have repeatedly referenced this policy. Moreover, to represent the dispute in terms which imply that sympathetic portrayal of paranormal subjects is "honest" and scientific realism is some kind of religious doctrine which is "offended" by that is both grossly offensive to the other parties in the dispute, and an implicit repudiation of WP:NPOV. It is akin to portraying the Biblical inerrantist view as "honest" in creationism and the scientific rationalist perspective as being offended by this "truth".

WP:NPOV allows for minority and fringe views to be described, but not in terms which obscures the fact that they are minority or finrge views, per Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience. We are al aware that some people believe Elvis was abducted by aliens, that does not mean we should document that theory as fact and discount scientific rationalist dissent as simply editors who are "offended" by the notion that it goes against science.

Emotional investment

Butler describes this edit as "disgusting". it was an autobiographical edit, and the subject changed "his contract was not renewed" to "he left". The cited source, an interview with the subject, says this:

Dean: Well, I was expecting to get a continuation contract. Every six months you'd get a new contract. Then one day I got a separation contract, and I said, what is that? They said that the university has decided it no longer wants to engage in the research you're doing.

I listened, looked at my boss, and I said, they can't be serious. You can't not renew somebody's contract because you don't happen to like the topic of the research-- because that's a violation of rule number one of academic freedom, which is not just the principle, it's actually written down as part of the rule. You can't do this. So when I protested they immediately changed their tune. And every time they raised another issue I challenged that, and they kept changing it, over and over and over. Finally it became very clear that they wanted me out no matter what. So I figured, well, they don't want me here, I don't want to stay, and so I left.

In other words, he didn't leave, his contract was not renewed, precisely as the article suggests. But the content dispute is immaterial: the language used to describe Minderbinder's conduct here, which appears entirely in line with WP:ATT, WP:NPOV and WP:BLP, suggests a level of emotional investment in the content by Butler at least which is not conducive to neutrality.

Parapsychology and pseudoscience

It is asserted by some of the parapsychology proponents that the basis of the dispute is the characterisation of parapsychology as pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is defined as any body of knowledge, methodology, belief, or practice that claims to be scientific but does not follow the scientific method. Parapsychologys is defined as the study of any phenomena that cannot be explained by natural law (Britannica). These definitions inherently conflict. Parapsychology is vigorously asserted to be scientific by its Misplaced Pages proponents, per statements in this arbitration case. A core principle of the scientific method is controlled, independently repeatable exeriment, also falsifiability.

In parapsychology, although a claim is certainly made to following the scientific method, both controls and repeatability are often lacking (, many others echoing the same comment). Or to put it another way, the problem with studies of psi is that "one anomaly is replacing another. This seems to be a general strategy in the literature of the anomalous." . Therefore, it is not a failure of WP:NPOV to characterise parapsychological topicsprovided reliable sources can be cited. In many cases, as implicitly acknowledged by the sources, there is no unequivocal statement that such-and-such a parapsychology topic is pseudoscientific - because the subject is not just rejected, it is considered ignorable - for the most part the scientific journals do not characterise pseudosciences as pseudoscientific, they simply ignore them.

To categorise parapsychology as science is certainly problematic: a source commonly cited, the admission by AAAS of one parapsychology research group in the 1960s, is questionable and may constitute original research. In the 1960s all sorts of whacky stuff got funded and investigated - for example, remote viewing, something which there is little doubt would now be completely rejected for official funding. The intellectual climate in the 1960s was greatly different to what it is now, and more importantly the few serious investigations undertaken back then have tended to reinforce the mainstream view that parapsychology is untestable and thus not scientific. Many strange phenomena inexplicable by conventional understanding in the 1960s are now well understood through the development of quantum theory and other modern mathematical and physical modelling techniques.

It is not reasonable to characterise parapsychology as science without evidence that it is considered scientific by at least a reaosnable minority of the scientific establishment. I have yet to see any evidence that it is so. At best it might be characterised as fringe science but even that may be misleading since, for example, serious scientific endeavours are being made in the area of cold fusion. Perhaps the proponents could cite the papers on parapsychology which have been published recently in influential journals such as Nature. Two articles in SciAm and 79 in Nature have mentioned parapsychology since these journals went online, and the overall tone varies from sceptical to derisive. The most visible recent discussion was inrespect of the closure of the Princeton lab earlier this year (The lab that asked the wrong questions, Nature, Feb 2007). This from the director:

It was Jahn's decision to close the lab. He set out to prove the existence of the effect and, at 76, believes the work is done. But such tiny deviations from chance have not convinced mainstream scientists, and the lab's results have been studiously ignored by the wider community. Apart from a couple of early reviews (R. G. Jahn Proc. IEEE 70, 136–170; 1982 and R. G. Jahn and B. J. Dunne Found. Phys. 16, 721–772; 1986), Jahn's papers were rejected from mainstream journals. Jahn believes he was unfairly judged because of the questions he asked, not because of methodological flaws.

However:

The difficulty is that it's virtually impossible to prove that such subtle effects aren't caused by some flaw in the methods or equipment. A recent meta-analysis (H. Bösch et al. Psychol. Bull. 132, 497–523; 2006) combined 380 studies on the phenomenon, often termed psychokinesis, including data from the PEAR lab. It concluded that although there is a statistically significant overall effect, it is not consistent and relatively few negative studies would cancel it out, so biased publication of positive results could be the cause.

All this is, of course, original research by me :-) However,the overall tone is clear: parapsychology is considered ignorable by the mainstream scientific community and to characterise it as science is plainly contentious. So the debate should be between category:fringe science and category:pseudoscience, with independent sources, not Misplaced Pages editors' personal beliefs, defining the outcome. That outcome is likely to be different between different articles.

Evidence presented by user:davkal

Misrepresentation of sourced information

A fundamental problem in this dispute consists in editors refusing to provide sources or providing sources that do not support the contention they are sources for. An example of this is the unsupported claim by user:Minderbinder that Dean Radin's contract was not renewed and his revert of the supported claim that Dean Radin left his employment of his own accord. The source for this claim, which User:JzG cites in full above and which is the only source provided in the article, states clearly that Radin did in fact leave of his own accord. That is, the source, which is an interview with Radin, concludes with the words "so I left", and while the source does mention the initial attempt by his employers to not renew Radin's contract it is clear that this decision was reversed - "so when I protested they immediately changed their tune" - and after further difficulties which are not described in detail Radin decided to leave.

We have here, then, a clear case where an edit supported by a source (Radin left) was changed to something unsupported by the source (Radin's contract was not renewed), but which is more in line with the editor's personal dislike for anything and anybody associated positively with the paranormal. To make matters worse, however, this type of misrepresentation of source information is cited by supporting editors as an example of good practice, and: a) the complete failure of the source actually to support the claim is ignored; b) the source is described as if it did in fact obviously support the claim - when this is clearly not true; c) a number of Wiki rules are then cited as if the fundamental point here was not simply an accurate representation of the source but some other various Wiki policies; and d) any editor disputing such claims is then accused of breaching/failing to understand these other rules.

I know of no way to resolve this type of misrepresentative editing. One could edit war and get blocked, one could report the incident but many times an admin will support the misrepresentation (as user:JzG does above) because it better reflects their POV, or one could simply allow vast amounts of incorrect information to remain in Wiki. The above may be a trivial example, but it represents something ubiquitous in paranormal articles in Wiki and these are places where, in my opinion, the rules governing all aspects of good conduct on Wiki have completely broken down. If an admin can cite such a clear breach of the fundamental basis for an accurate Wiki as an example of good practice then I don't know where we can go from here.Davkal 11:46, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

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