Davide Piffer



Davide Piffer is a racist Italian parapsychologist crank who claims to have psychic powers, including precognition, ESP and psychokinesis.🇱🇮

Piffer also holds controversial views on race and intelligence, is associated with the alt-right HBD blogosphere and is the cofounder of the OpenPsych pseudojournals with Emil Kirkegaard. In 2016 he co-wrote a paper that was presented at the London Conference on Intelligence.

Piffer has a BA in Anthropology and MSc in Evolutionary Anthropology. He is currently a PhD student in Psychology at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. And he blogs at topseudoscience an appropriate name since he's a pseudoscientist himself.

As of 2019, Piffer contributes to the pseudoscientific open access Psych journal.

ESP and psychokinesis
Piffer has defended both ESP and psychokinesis, writing on OpenPsych "I think I possess both PK and ESP" and says to have created "clarvoyant experiments" to test them. These claims are dubious, since ESP and psychokinesis are pseudoscience.

On Facebook, Piffer promotes the psychic-fraud Uri Geller.

Curiously, after RationalWiki documented Piffer supports these crackpot beliefs, Emil Kirkegaard quickly rushed to delete Piffer's ESP and psychokinesis thread on the OpenPsych forum, presumably embarrassed. However, archived screenshots remain.

Piffer believes that this RationalWiki page being created the same day as he deleted his Twitter account was not a mere coincidence, but proof of his psychic abilities ("superpowers").

Race and Intelligence
Piffer has published in several legitimate peer-reviewed academic journals including Thinking Skills and Creativity, Creativity Research Journal and ' However, his credibility is undermined by the fact he has published in the far-right pseudoscholarly Mankind Quarterly, which critics (such as the SPLC) describe as white supremacist, the controversial journal ' (that has a history of allowing racists to publish in) as well as set up his own pseudojournals (bogus peer-review) i.e. OpenPsych. The main reason Piffer founded OpenPsych with Emil Kirkegaard was because peer-reviewed journals were rejecting his submissions on race and intelligence. In 2015, a reviewer rejected Piffer's manuscript without opportunity for revision, while another noted the "paper is full of poorly justified conclusions". In response, Piffer maintains his submission was not published because of either a "hidden agenda" or "closed minded attitude". The HBD blogger RaceRealist88 would go on to allege a left-wing bias in academia that downplays or denies "racial differences in intelligence [exist]" because Piffer's manuscript was rejected.

Piffer is a research fellow of the Ulster Institute for Social Research, a racist institute founded by Richard Lynn that publishes racist pseudoscience; he identifies as a proponent of hereditarianism, e.g. writing in a Mankind Quarterly paper: "Finally, this  is  the  first  study  to  provide  systematic  (albeit preliminary) evidence that differences between countries and races in IQ and educational attainment are related to genetic factors."

Racism
Piffer has described black African immigrants in Italy as "gorillas".

Italy is in deep shit and we still have to use hotels to quarantine gorillas getting off the boat, as if we didn't have enough infected at home.