Dean Radin
| Putting the psycho in Parapsychology |
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| Men who stare at goats |
| By the powers of tinfoil |
Dean Radin is a parapsychologist and pseudoscience promoter.
He is a member of the Institute for Noetic Sciences and former president of the Parapsychological Association. In addition to his books, he has become popularly associated with the Global Consciousness Project.
He is also one of the chief editors of Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, a pseudojournal run by Elsevier.[1]
Pseudoscience[edit]
Radin published the book The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (1997). The book contained many errors. The British mathematician I. J. Good in the scientific journal Nature gave the book a negative review. Good discovered flaws in Radin's method for evaluating the file-drawer effect.[2] According to Victor Stenger:
Radin is aware of the file-drawer effect, in which only positive results tend to get reported and negative ones are left in the filing cabinet. This obviously can greatly bias any analysis of combined results and Radin cannot ignore this as blithely as he ignores other possible, non-paranormal explanations of the data. Even the most fervent parapsychologists recognize this problem. Meta-analysis incorporates a procedure for taking the file-drawer effect into account. Radin says it shows that more than 3,300 unpublished, unsuccessful reports would be needed for each published report in order to “nullify” the statistical significance of psi.
In his review of Radin's book for the journal Nature, statistics professor I.J. Good disputes this calculation, calling it "a gross overestimate." He estimates that the number of unpublished, unsuccessful reports needed to account for the results by the file drawer effect should be reduced to fifteen or less. How could two meta-analyses result in such a wide discrepancy? Somebody is doing something wrong, and in this case it is clearly Radin. He has not performed the file-drawer analysis correctly.[3]
Radin has written the results from psi research are as consistent by the same standards as any other scientific discipline but according to Ray Hyman many parapsychologists such as Dick Bierman, Walter Lucadou, J.E. Kennedy, and Robert Jahn, openly admit the evidence for psi is "inconsistent, irreproducible, and fails to meet acceptable scientific standards".[4] Radin has written that fraudulent mediums were genuine and ignores skeptical literature on the subject. He mentioned the Fox sisters in his publications but did not mention that they publicly confessed their spirit communications were fraudulent.[5] Radin's woo book Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities (2013) was published by Deepak Chopra.
Publications[edit]
- Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities (2013)
- Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (2006)
- Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul: Living With Guidance (2001), with F. Holmes Atwater, Joseph McMoneagle, Skip Atwater
- The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (1997, HarperCollins, ISBN 0061778990). Note: in Great Britain this book is entitled The Noetic Universe.
External links[edit]
- Dean Radin homepage
- Robert Todd Carrol on Radin:
- Articles: What if Dean Radin is Right?
- Reviews: The Conscious Universe, Entangled Minds
References[edit]
- ↑ http://www.explorejournal.com/content/edboard
- ↑ I. J. Good. (1997). "Where has the billion trillion gone?". Nature 389 (2): 806–807 can be found free online here
- ↑ Victor Stenger. (2002). Meta-Analysis and the Filedrawer Effect. Skeptical Inquirer. Volume 12.
- ↑ Ray Hyman. (2008). Anomalous Cognition? A Second Perspective. Skeptical Inquirer. Volume 32.
- ↑ Chris French. Missing the Point? in Stanley Krippner, Harris L. Friedman. (2010). Debating Psychic Experience: Human Potential Or Human Illusion?. Praeger. pp. 149-150