Mainstream Media Debunks ESP with a Study that Doesn't Have Anything to Do with ESP

Imagine you are taking a quiz on the latest on scientific results or edge philosophical thinking, and you were asked the following multiple-choice question.

Recent scientific experiments provides evidence for which of the following:

      A)   Countless parallel universes.

      B)   Artificially intelligent robots are on the verge of sentience.

      C)   The world as we know it is actually a simulation (like in The Matrix).

      D)   Mild forms of telepathy between minds.

Recently there have been various articles posted on A, B, and C (and especially A).  While such articles in the mainstream press don’t provide much in the way of concrete evidence, they often give sympathetic views of such speculations.  Nothing wrong with being open minded.  And even if we’re a long way from real evidence on the table, the ideas are interesting and provocative, and likely to attract readers.  Nothing much wrong with that either.

But there is evidence on D.  You can find some papers published in refereed journals here.  Skeptic Richard Wiseman has even admitted that by the conventional standards, some forms of telepathy could be accepted as real..  (However, Wiseman doesn’t believe that such phenomenon should be held to merely conventional standards.) So how does the mainstream press handle that one?

David Metcalfe and Dean Radin have recently posted an interesting recent case on their blogs.  They reference a recent study conducted at the University of Melbourne examining people’s ability to process certain types of perceptions that occurred below their threshold of immediate awareness.  For example, the reactions of participants who were asked questions about pictures when certain details in the background were changed.  The authors of the paper speculated that the results could give some insight into people who believe they are experiencing a sixth sense.

However, as Metcalfe and Radin note, the authors did not attempt to test anything like anomalous transfer of information (like telepathy).  They did not cite any of that literature.  Whatever its merits, the study does not tell us anything about the extant literature on such examples of psi as ganzfeld, card guessing, or dream telepathy.

Yet this seems to be cited all over the place as (yet another) demonstration that ESP is pure bunk.  Here is an example in  National Geographic by Susan Brink.  She even posts a picture of Dr. Rhine of Duke University who famously conducted ESP card experiments, as if the study at University of Melbourne had something to do with Rhine.  George Dvorsky at io9 does the same thing with headline that says: "Breaking: ESP still bullshit, say scientists."   Here’s a video at Discovery News, again pushing the conclusion that this study means claims of ESP is bunk.

As one of the commenters at io9 put it, citing this study as evidence against ESP "amounts to saying there are no UFOs because some can be ascribed to aircraft lights."

You can see here how this ripples across multiple websites.  It’s as if everyone’s just cutting and pasting each other without bothering much to read the article or think about it too much.

It’s so interesting.  There appears to be a lot of hostility across the web for claims for telepathy, as well as ignorance of the research.  In much of mainstream media, the bar for matters of psi appear to be absurdly high.  But for the other topics, such as multiple universes, not so much.

What gives?  What’s the answer here?