>>538All fair points, and I understand where you're coming from. I don't particularly want to turn this into a debate thread, and I would lose anyway by having no actual evidence, but there was one point I want to comment on, because it probably looks like I'm just weaseling out of making a real argument.
> If it keeps working then there is a point at which it merely being coincidence becomes an untenable hypothesis. This is, again, how science works.But see, I've seen this claim made a bunch of times: Once you've seen it work again and again to the point where it's way past just improbable and into the realm of significant, that's at least strong though circumstantial evidence that something is going on, right? But these claims are there and nobody believes them because the guy could have just faked the whole thing. In fact someone presenting evidence like this would generally be assumed to be a total quack, because the field is considered a joke by the scientific community.
So I'm actually not sure what evidence you would have accepted when you asked for some. Videos can be and are faked just as easily as data points in someone's research. It's not like you could make a mountain explode or something because that's already too improbable to be worked with. Less huge events are also easily faked. Even if I had provided something, would you have accepted it, and on what grounds? What would have been enough for you?
I haven't exactly been playing with this for years. Reading yes, but I only started trying to use it a few months ago, so I don't exactly have a ton of personal records, nor anything convincing.
The problem is anything I could have produced would still be judged by the bias of the person reading. Scientific facts are proven by multiple people or labs producing the same result, or as you corrected me, the results being within an expected range or having expected attributes. But what if all of those labs were faking it? Highly unlikely, but your so called fact wouldn't actually be true. But thousands of people have claimed to produce magical results, and there are even videos (though I put less stock in those). But those must all be fake, so it doesn't matter, according to just about everyone. I can't even tell you which ones aren't fake, just that I think there's too much for too long to be just a joke.
We aren't going to have any facts until the topic is taken seriously and approached by more respectable researchers who, more importantly, know what they're doing. I don't see that happening any time soon. It would also be more easy than not to get negative results because you or your test subject just weren't good at it, and whether or not someone is performing properly is pretty much impossible to determine until a result happens, therefore biasing the experiment towards failure. That's why I think it's mostly useless to argue about this.
As for my, well, beliefs on the matter, think of it this way. At this point I have seen enough circumstantial evidence that I've decided to perform experiments and research this field, and am keeping an open mind to it. I won't presume to tell you what is or isn't true, only the mindset I'm working with. And for people who ask, I'll pass around my reading materials and conclusions I've made within the context of those materials. I'm not trying to tell you that my research is finished and magic is definitely real for so and so reasons, only that my intuition tells me it's worth investigating so I'm giving it a serious shot.
