Anomalous Experiences and the Crisis of Skepticism

Why we need better skeptics

I am sharing portions of a talk I delivered on October 8, 2022, at the Helen Mills Theater in New York City. A video of the full talk is also linked within.

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“I’m concerned about the paucity of intellectual excellence, or even legitimacy, within the skeptics’ community today. We need skeptics. I want skeptics to look at Daryl Bem’s precognition experiments, for example, and say, ‘Where is there a problem? Was there a flaw in the methodology? Was there a flaw in meta-analysis?’ Not violating their own rules of the road then changing the subject, which is nonsense. That’s what we have in politics. Do we need more of that?…

“All of us in this room are possessed of the basic psychological language that might explain why somebody wants to smash Galileo’s telescope. We all get it. We don’t like our paradigm upended. I don’t my paradigm upended…I don’t want to wake up Thursday morning and find out that I’ve dedicated my life to an illusion. I understand how painful and how emotionally difficult that is for a person. I also understand that people who are possessed of a materialist outlook — and when I say materialist, I mean basically the philosophical belief that matter creates itself —are hanging onto a point of view that, while it’s triumphant, is probably in its last generation of dominance. And I get it. I’m not unsympathetic to that position.

“But even still, it’s difficult for me to understand the utter shallowness and incapacity to engage data within that community. I could come up with all the armchair psychoanalysis on earth, but still I hit a wall and I hit my limits. And I’m concerned about it because we in the seeking community have made considerable strides. There are great barriers. The materialist point of view is dominant in most media, in most of academia, and I’m not unrecognizing of that. Standard Victorian Christianity was not going to go suddenly away when Darwin’s theories gained acceptance. So, the cultural dominance is a very real issue. But I think they are faced with a situation where they are running out of excuses for their paradigm and it’s drawing to a close…