The Importance of Replication

One of the most important things in science is the ability to replicate one's findings. Replication by other, independent labs and researchers is a key means for being able to show that results were not a fluke or due to an error caused by the initial scientist. The more people who care replicate the same results, the more secure one's conclusions are. One of the most important things which characterize pseudoscience and paranormal beliefs is the utter failure to reliably replicate anything at all.

Ronald Bailey writes in Reason:

Most studies of paranormal effects ... find that they are not very robust; research results are often on the knife-edge of statistical significance, and can appear and disappear capriciously. There is also the believer effect: researchers who believe in the paranormal regularly find effects, while those who are skeptical do not. Perhaps science has an explanation for believers in psychic phenomena—excess dopamine in their brains causes them to overidentify patterns in random data. To be fair, non-believers in psychic phenomena also find what they expect to find. But then again, they are not making claims about extraordinary phenomena.

What would convince skeptics that there are paranormal phenomena like remote viewing and clairvoyance? In a word, "replication." One may be skeptical that photons can act like waves, yet the double-slit experiment showing this effect can be replicated on demand by anybody. If just thinking at them could reliably bend photon beams for all researchers, then there really would be something to study. Until experimental replication without a lot of fancy statistical massaging occurs regularly, research on the paranormal will and should remain on the fringes of science.

To say that paranormal research is on the "fringes" of science is actually being rather generous - research on psychics and the like has been going on for about a century now and absolutely nothing of real substance has been produced. Experiment after experiment refuses to reveal any psychic or paranormal powers - but we do find lots of fraud and mistakes. At some point, we should be allowed to say that there just isn't anything there to find. There really isn't anything to distinguish psychic research from research into phrenology and N-rays.

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