In his new book Rationality, Pinker is adamantly opposed to telepathy and other kinds of extra-sensory perception (ESP). His position is that they do not happen because they cannot happen. He freely admits that he pre-judges the evidence by claiming that these purported phenomena are extremely improbable, assigning them an infinitesimal “prior probability”, in the language of Bayesian statistics. He acknowledges that “believing in something before you look at the evidence may seem like the epitome of irrationality”, but he justifies his refusal to look at the evidence by classifying these phenomena as “paranormal’, lumping them together with seemingly unrelated topics like homeopathy, astrology and miracles.

He then invokes an 18th-century argument against miracles by David Hume. As Hume put it, either miracles are impossible because they “violate the laws of nature” or because “no testimony is sufficient to establish” they contradict what has “frequently been observed to happen”. In Pinker’s paraphrase: “Which is more likely – that the laws of the universe as we understand them are false, or that some guy got something wrong?”

To clinch his argument, Pinker invokes physics. He is not a physicist himself, so he relies on the authority of Sean M. Carroll, a theoretical physicist who claims that the laws of physics rule out ESP. Other physicists disagree. Pinker rounds off his discussion by quoting Carl Sagan’s mantra: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Suggested reading

Test article

By Freddie Sayers

In a recent interview in the Harvard Gazette, Pinker explains why he rejects the “primitive intuitions” that lead most people to believe in ESP. He and his fellow rationalists “unlearn these intuitions when we buy into the consensus of the scientific establishment — it’s not as if we understand the physiology or neuroscience or cosmology ourselves”.  Instead, they buy in as an act of faith.

For readers wondering how acts of faith might bias our judgements, Pinker helpfully identifies “the Myside bias” as “probably the most powerful of all the cognitive biases, namely, if something becomes an article of faith within your own coalition, and if promoting it earns you status, that is what you believe”.  This surely applies to himself.

Is Hume’s argument against miracles relevant to ESP? Hume was writing about descriptions of biblical miracles. He was right that they are not frequently observed. But is telepathy a unique miracle that is said to have happened far away and long ago? No. It is frequently observed today.

The most common type of telepathy occurs in connection with telephone calls. Research carried out in Europe and the Americas shows that most people say they have thought of someone for no apparent reason, and that person then called, or that they knew who was calling when they heard the phone, before looking at the caller ID or answering. Similar kinds of telepathy occur with text messages and emails. (I give details of these surveys and summaries of experimental tests in my book The Sense of Being Stared At).

Telepathic experiences are not an extraordinary claim, but an ordinary claim. It is Pinker who is making an extraordinary claim by asserting that telepathy cannot happen and that most people are wrong about their own experience. Where is his extraordinary evidence? He has none, and, even worse, believes he doesn’t need any.

Telepathy is frequently observed in animals. In random household surveys in the UK and the USA, roughly half of dog owners said that their dog anticipated the return of a member of the family by waiting at a door or window, in some cases more than 10 minutes in advance. About 30% of cats did the same. In many cases, people said that this happened when the person came home at a non-routine time, and by public transport or in unfamiliar vehicles such as taxis. The animals’ responses were not simply a matter of routine or hearing familiar vehicles approaching; they seemed to depend on some other kind of connection between owners and their pets.

Suggested reading

When did we give up on persuasion?

By Tom Chivers

Sceptics will reasonably ask whether people could be mistaken in making these observations. Perhaps people know who is calling because they are familiar with that person’s habits and unconsciously anticipate when they will call. Or perhaps they think of people frequently and forget all the times those people do not call. Perhaps people dote on their pets and are victims of wishful thinking, remembering when their dog or cat was seemingly waiting for them, and forgetting when it was not. Perhaps, or perhaps not.

Fortunately, science and reason provide a way forward: the scientific method. Scientists test hypotheses. Several researchers, including myself, have carried out hundreds of experimental tests of telephone telepathy to investigate whether random guessing explains the results, or whether something else is going on. For these tests, the subjects chose four people they knew well to serve as potential callers. Then, in filmed experiments, they sat beside a landline telephone, with no caller ID. For each trial, one of the four potential callers was selected at random and asked to call the subject.

When the phone rang, the subject said to the camera who she felt it was, for example ‘Jim’. She was right or wrong. She could not have anticipated that Jim would be calling by knowing his habits, because he was selected at random. By chance, about 25% of the answers would have been right. In fact, in hundreds of trials, the average hit rate was 45%, hugely significant statistically. You can see a film of one of these experiments and the results of many randomised experiments published in peer reviewed journals here. We found similar positive effects in experiments on email and text-message telepathy.

I have also carried out more than a hundred filmed experiments with dogs that behave as if they know when their owners are coming home. The filmed evidence showed that the dogs anticipated their owners’ arrivals even when they returned at random times, unknown to them in advance, and in unfamiliar vehicles. You can see a test independently filmed by the science unit of Austrian State television (ORF) and results of numerous tests published in peer-reviewed journals here.

Pinker is not alone in his denialist stance. He is a prominent member of an advocacy organisation called the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), which publishes the Skeptical Inquirer: The Magazine for Science and Reason. His CSI colleagues include Richard Dawkins and the philosopher Daniel Dennett. CSI’s well-funded campaigns are designed to discredit “claims of the paranormal” in the serious media and the educational system. Organised skepticism is remarkably effective, and CSI has an international network of affiliated groups, as well as many local skeptic chapters and online vigilantes, ever ready to ‘debunk’ the paranormal. (In the UK, organised skeptics use the American spelling with a ‘k’ rather than the British spelling ‘sceptic’ to indicate their affiliation with the American Skeptic movement.)

Suggested reading

How science has been corrupted

By Matthew Crawford

With their support, Pinker thinks he has bought into the “consensus of established science” — but this consensus is sometimes illusory. His understanding of scientific consensus is not based on empirical data, such as surveys of scientists’ opinions worldwide or on experimental research, but rather on the beliefs of his CSI colleagues. He puts his faith in a denialist coalition in which rationality is unfortunately scarce. Their echo chamber is now greatly enlarged through Wikipedia. CSI encourages groups like ‘Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia’ to train committed skeptics as editors and administrators.

Dogmatic skeptics currently control practically all the Wikipedia entries on subjects they regard as ‘paranormal’ as well as the biography pages of those who research these taboo topics, including me. The Wikipedia entry on parapsychology portrays the entire subject as ‘pseudoscience’. The entry on pseudoscience defines it as “statements, beliefs or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method”.

By this criterion, Pinker is a practitioner of pseudoscience. He makes statements that claim to be scientific and factual but which violate the scientific method by ignoring the evidence. His particular kind of pseudoscience is especially damaging. As a professor of psychology at Harvard, he models dogma and prejudice in the heart of the scientific establishment.

How different from one of his predecessors at Harvard, William James, who was refreshingly open-minded and curious about experiences that could not be readily explained. If Steven Pinker is prepared to defend his views on telepathy in a public debate, chaired by UnHerd, I would be happy to argue that it is more rational and scientific to look at the evidence than to ignore it.

The dream tended to be structured around me trying to catch them out. I would stand at the corner of a building and very quickly stick my head around the corner – quickly enough, I hoped, to find them still motionless, surprised by my stealth. But they were always too quick for me, always one step ahead. I could never expose this plot. But nor could I discount the possibility that it was nonetheless true.

This strange dream was, I suspect, partly inspired by a woman I met in Hinchingbrooke Hospital, where I helped out on the psycho-geriatric ward during my university holidays. The woman in question believed that her body was hollow and completely filled with urine. She would only sleep upright, for fear that she would drown. When encouraged to lie prone she would begin to panic, coughing and spluttering, with genuine fear in her eyes.

It wasn’t that she was stupid; in fact, far from it. She was still able to complete The Times’ crossword, for instance. But however much I tried to reason her out of her belief – genuinely held, I was convinced of that – she had a considered response. It drove me to distraction that I wasn’t able to find a way through her inter-locking explanations. Surely reason could expose such an obviously mistaken view of the world? But as hard as I tried, I was never able to puncture it. At turns angry and frustrated, I eventually gave up and spent my days holding her hand and talking with her about her grandchildren.

Suggested reading

We need Scepticism more than ever

By Freddie Sayers

Both of these memories returned to me after reading Freddie Sayers’ recent piece on the importance of scepticism. He was, of course, completely correct that to uphold a critical approach that requires us not to accept arguments on face value. But what happens when scepticism starts to challenge the very fabric of our lives, when it becomes so all-consuming that even the generally agreed mechanisms of explanation are themselves called into question?

The careful, methodical, empirical steps of the scientific method were unconvincing to the woman who believed she was filled with urine. She was surrounded by scientific equipment and various monitors. But all of these were a deception, she believed. In colloquial terms, we generally describe those who are distanced from rational explanation as “mad”. But to reach for this word hardly solves the matter.

Yes, many brilliant people are called mad when they first question received authority. But it is also the sort of thing said by conspiracy theorists the world over. From people who think lizards control the world to those who believe the Covid vaccine is a way to implant microchips, the language of scepticism is often employed to justify their doubt that things are really as presented. “You don’t question things enough,” they say. “You are too credulous.” This is both the language of genuine intellectual inquiry, and yet also that of the mad and the bad.

Scepticism turns out to be a remarkably tricky business. Generally speaking, we imagine some boundary beyond which scepticism should not pass, or some format that limits the sceptic’s operation. For Freddie, that format is the scientific method. But there have been many who would even apply scepticism to that methodology. And indeed, if we challenge the scientific method to justify itself, we might reasonably ask that it does not do so in its own terms: the scientific method cannot supply its own justification without circularity.

More from this author

Why the new inquisition came for David Hume

By Giles Fraser

Something other than itself is required as a means of justification. And this introduces the idea that, with radical scepticism, the questions never end. As Wittgenstein famously asked, at what point is the spade turned, and solid ground is revealed? At what point do the questions run out? Steady on, we say. There must be a point at which the questions end. But isn’t this precisely the kind of limit about which the sceptic complains?

You may think that these questions are a bit odd. Indeed, they are. And I will return to that. But it is worth noting that modern philosophy begins at precisely this point. Most university philosophy courses begin with Descartes and his methodology of radical doubt. Doubt anything that can be doubted, he argues, and see what survives. His famous answer to this was that the only thing you have left is the “I” – even when you doubt something, there has to be something doing the doubting. Doubt requires a doubter. Cogito, ergo sum. This is one of the most influential sentences of modern thought. And it is because modern philosophy begins at this point that the “oddness” of radical scepticism begins.

Because, whether or not you agree with Descartes, the Cogito method still leaves a lot more to establish, not least the existence of other people beyond myself. I may know I exist. But do I know that you do? Descartes used God to fill that gap. He believed that God, whose existence could be rationally demonstrated, would not deceive us, therefore guaranteeing a kind of bridge from my existence to that of others. But, in time, the God answer proved to be unconvincing. I suspect this was what was behind my dream. I had been reading too much Descartes and swallowed his methodology of radical doubt. Through the lens of his universal scepticism, the world seemed like a very odd place indeed.

To complicate matters, there are occasions where we can’t really know another person’s thoughts and feelings. I currently have a headache. But others may suspect I am claiming to have a headache to get out of the washing up – and they have no way to check if I am telling the truth. My pain is not accessible to others in ways that make Descartes’ challenge about the existence of other minds seem credible. At the very least, it feels like the basis on which radical doubt may have some purchase. This is why thinkers like Wittgenstein talk a great deal about pain.

Can radical scepticism be refuted? The person who, to my mind, has done most to examine this question is the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, who passed away a few years ago. Cavell thought the sting of scepticism can be removed, but not using Descartes’ framework. He argued that Descartes began in the wrong place and so set off on an impossible quest. For Cavell, the constant “how do you know?” of the radical sceptic is a question that is in search of the wrong sort of answer. This is because human beings do not begin as individual units, ontologically distanced from each other. Our individuality is a derivative concept, one that takes shape over time.

Suggested reading

Don't censor the lockdown sceptics

By Douglas Murray

Instead, the original basis for human life is community; or, at least, a sense of togetherness. The mother breastfeeding her child is in no doubt that her baby exists, and nor does it make any sense for the child to doubt the existence of the mother. Doubt, if it enters the picture, comes much later. What comes first is not a kind of intellectual certainty about others, but an implicit acknowledgement upon which everything else is based. This is crucial. Doubt and scepticism only make sense if there is an already basic understanding of human identification. We begin with the acknowledgment of others – and only after that do we begin to ask whether, for instance, a person is telling us the truth about their inner life.

In other words, the problem with my dream was that it converted something that is constitutive of the human condition, our living alongside others, into a hurdle that needs to be overcome intellectually. To put it simply: in real life, trust necessarily precedes doubt. Not a credulous trust in arguments that demonstrate the other’s existence, but a recognition that something other than intellectual arguments is the basis of human solidarity.

All of this may seem unnecessarily abstract. But, in fact, it can be remarkably straightforward. As Freddie rightly points out, David Hume acknowledged that “amidst all of your philosophy, be still a man”. In other words, scepticism is a human activity and one that must operate on the basis that common humanity provides. Too many thinkers, and philosophers especially, have not appreciated the wisdom here, and have tried to construct all knowledge on the basis of reason alone.

For all its apparent attractiveness, this way madness lies. For without this basic acknowledgement of shared humanity, nothing can ever be known with certainty. And this opens up a gap between the day-to-day operation of human life — chatting in the street, going about our shopping, even making love — and the increasingly bizarre questions that philosophers ask each other. To quote Hume at length:

“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? … Since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras.

“I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”

“Testing is a double-edged sword,” he began, “we’ve done more testing than anybody else. Here’s the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down please! They test and they test… we’ve got another one over here! The young man’s ten years old, he’s got the sniffles, he’ll recover in about 15 minutes. It’s a case!”

Here's Trump at his Tulsa Rally downplaying the coronavirus as the "sniffles," and admitting: "I told my people, slow the testing down!"pic.twitter.com/VOy6jsFAYI

— Bill Maxwell (@Bill_Maxwell_) June 21, 2020

It drew laughs from the audience, but condemnation from commentators, conservative and Democrat alike. Can you imagine saying something so stupid? Having already played down the need to wear a mask at his non-socially-distanced rally, at a time when multiple states are seeing alarming surges in Covid-19 case numbers, he appears both to diminish the importance of testing (which we know correlates with fewer deaths) and equate the disease with a case of “the sniffles”. Cynical. Reckless. Anti-science.

This apparent embrace of full-on Covid denialism doesn’t even seem to make sense as a political strategy. The percentage of American voters who describe themselves as “not worried at all” by coronavirus, the hard-cores, is stable at around 13% — and only 24% of Trump voters. That’s around 26 million adults: enough to half-fill a lot of stadiums over the campaign but nowhere near enough to win a general election. Add in the fact that Republican states are only now starting to get hit hard by the virus, and it seems distinctly like, having already shattered any remaining reputation he had for competence, Covid-19 will finally consign Donald Trump to electoral oblivion.

Except… what if it doesn’t? Is there a way that Covid-19 could become a net positive for Donald Trump — one that could even help carry him to re-election in November?

Suggested reading

How Trump is fixing the vote

By Justin Webb

To find out, let’s go back four years ago to Philadelphia, when Hillary Clinton formally accepted the Democratic nomination. One line of her speech, part of a central credo section setting out what she believed, was received with a particularly rapturous cheer, both in the hall and online, for days afterwards: “I believe in science,” she declared, drawing a key distinction with her opponent, who on climate and much else, apparently didn’t.

Those four words encapsulate what many Democrats passionately believe is their mission in 2020, even more so than in 2016: to keep alive the flame of Enlightenment rationality and science against the threat of fake news and a dangerous post-truth President. It is a core part of what they will be campaigning for in this election.

In 2016, of course, this framing back-fired. The internal epistemology of the Clinton campaign, with all its data and ‘evidence-led’ policy plans, was almost unfalsifiable: to reject it was to be provably either bad or stupid. But, as the eventual defeat made painfully evident, that account of truth, and the world-order that went along with it, fell short on issues like culture and identity and meaning that are just as real to many voters as economics or science. In his intuitive, brazen way, Trump targeted this weakness and gleefully promised to bring the whole tilting edifice crashing down.

In the four years since that crash, the Democrats’ claim to be the sole keepers of the flame of Enlightenment rationality has got weaker, not stronger. The intersectional identity politics that animates their activist wing — gender pronouns, cancel culture, statue-toppling — seems even less rational than in 2016. The foot-washing and genuflection accompanying the recent BLM protests (not to mention the free pass given to protestors ignoring social distancing) has only added to the atmosphere of religious fervour surrounding the progressive movement.

Suggested reading

The woke have no vision of the future

By John Gray

If anything, the language of Enlightenment rationality is now more commonly invoked by those fighting on the other side of the culture wars — in 2018 Jordan Peterson and his ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ group famously claimed it as a defence against progressive tendencies towards humbug and censorship. Last week, Peterson’s friend and fellow IDW thinker the evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad made the argument in an interview with me that in a choice between Trump and Biden, he considers Trump to be the rational choice, on the grounds of resisting the fundamentalism of social justice warriors with something like low common sense. Whether or not you like his argument, the fact that he has arrived at that point is notable.

Interview

How Covid-19 could get Trump re-elected

By Gad Saad

It might seem overgenerous to associate Donald Trump with any coherent philosophy. Elements of Paranoid Narcissism and Nietzschean will-to-power have been detected. But alongside these we should include Scepticism: a tendency to question things that orthodoxy holds to be unquestionably true. This is itself a key strand of Enlightenment thought, and represents an allegiance to doubt that progressive idealists are distinctly less interested in, with their righteous certainties and plans to remake the world from first principles. Of course you can have too much Scepticism – some climate-sceptics, Euro-sceptics, Covid-sceptics are no longer rationally scrutinising and are simply following a different faith — but you can also have too little, and the progressive side of recent culture wars is vulnerable to that charge. Trump’s Scepticism has been politically effective.

So we entered this weird election cycle with both sides, if not necessarily the candidates themselves, already making different claims to be the defenders of common sense, keepers of the flame of Enlightenment rationality in a world gone mad.

Against this background, Covid-19 erupted. The different attitudes quickly started aligning with the political parties: Democratic governors were much more activist in response, issuing blanket stay at home orders (although it was primarily Democratic states that were initially hit), while Republican governors took their lead from a sceptical and chaotic President and have generally tried to minimise restrictions.

It is not yet clear exactly where, between these two poles, wisdom lies. While it is right to accuse the President and some Republicans of nonchalance and inconsistency, the progressives have been guilty of the same didacticism and lack of humility that put voters off last time. The official IHME models and forecasts, produced with all the spurious precision and data-richness that graduate progressives find so enthralling, have been woefully wide of the mark; arguments in favour of a more moderate policy response have been dismissed as irresponsible anti-science (with censorship duly enforced by the tech platforms); and states have rushed to close schools and other parts of society before evidence has proved them to be vectors of the disease (even the Norwegian prime minister now says she regrets closing schools). On these points and many more, while claiming the language of science, progressives have shown a shortage of, even hostility to, scientific scepticism.

Interview

How Covid-19 could get Trump re-elected

By Camilla Stoltenberg

So although Trump’s speech in Tulsa was typically free-wheeling and borderline incoherent, the target of his lampooning was well chosen. He is right that the emphasis on case numbers is misleading, as they are entirely contingent on testing (Oxford’s Prof Sunetra Gupta made the same complaint to us) so while many states have seen surges in case numbers, we have not generally seen surges in numbers of deaths (and the overall daily deaths continue to fall nationwide). He’s also right that for children Covid-19 is a very minor disease and often symptomless — and that the relative safety of anyone under retirement age has been bizarrely downplayed by the liberal media which sees its responsibility as only reinforcing the risks. This is fertile territory for Trump, even more so for its capability to outrage everybody.

If (and, yes, it’s a big if) the apparent second surges of Covid-19 turn out to be not too bad and overall deaths continue to decline over the summer, and if there is no big second spike in October, then Donald Trump’s scepticism would likely become more acceptable — and popular — as the months go by. Right now, only 13% of Americans are ‘not worried at all’ by the virus. But, equally, only 21% are ‘very worried’: that’s a lot of people in between, and they would surely become more relaxed if the pandemic dwindles.

An election campaign culminating in September and October in which Democrat voices are endlessly finger-wagging and calling for further restrictions, six months after the peak and with deaths right down, while Trump is promising freedom and a return to the ‘old normal’, sounds like a fight he is aching to have. Not even Make America Great Again – just Make America Normal Again.

As it stands, Trump sounds increasingly unhinged, is facing a tanking economy and couldn’t look less like a president who is about to be re-elected. But it’s worth bearing in mind that if the pandemic goes his way, Covid-19 could just about turn from being the thing that killed off his presidency into a re-animating mission that goes to the heart of Democrat epistemological overreach and puts him squarely back in the game.