From: Damien Broderick (thespike@satx.rr.com)
Date: Fri Dec 30 2005 - 16:19:43 MST
At 05:30 PM 12/30/2005 -0500, Jeff Medina wrote:
>[Richard's] claims and
>implications (that she wasn't highly regarded among parapsychologists,
>and that only worked on parapsychology during the early 80s) are
>demonstrably false, and very easily so. Her CV, publication list, and
>various other relevant data are readily available on the web.
>
>To save the trouble of everyone browsing through susanblackmore.co.uk
>on their own (but you can verify all I say below at that site), here's
>a quick overview of the facts, which demonstrate how very wrong your
>suggestions are:
>
>## Susan Blackmore has nearly 50 (fifty) essays in peer-reviewed
>journals on parapsychology, not including reprints, to her credit,
>over 20 (twenty) book contributions, and 5 related books.
Nope. Take a closer look. A large number of those essays and book
contributions are think-pieces, not reports on experiments, and the books
mostly deal with NDEs--which have no more relevance to parapsychological
claims than do reports of blindsight.
This is not to disparage Dr Blackmore's acuity (and ingenuity with memes),
although it seems to have come unstuck very badly in the notorious Sargent
affair, where her apparently unsubstantiated and dubious suspicions
effectively ruined the man's career. As I said in my 1992 book on
parapsychology, Dr Sargent "abandoned psychical research, following
published claims in 1987 of fairly rudimentary `carelessness and cheating'
as far back as 1979, criticism he denies bitterly: `I don't care whether
people think I'm a fraud or not, but object very strongly to anyone
believing that I might be a stupid one'."
Damien Broderick
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