I have a pet theory (certainly unoriginal) that humans as a species feel a compelling need to indulge in some form of magical thinking in order to cope with existential horror.
A few things are simultaneously true:
1. We have a truly fantastic level of agency as actors in the world. A single human can build a house out of raw materials, write a book series with hundreds of settings and believable characters, start a war, etc.
2. In order to make the most of that agency, we need a psychological system that makes us feel empowered to use it. Having nature's most impressive brain would be pointless if we all believed everything we tried was doomed to fail anyway so we should just sit in the dirt and eat slugs.
3. We are also corporeal objects made of surprisingly fragile meat and bone subject to the careless whims of physics. Through no fault or intention of anyone, all of your agency can be completely taken in an instant. Just be standing in the wrong place when a tree branch snaps off, have one cell misdivide and become cancerous, choke on a grape.
We need 2 in order to make the most of 1. But the more we believe ourselves in control, the more horrific contemplating 3 becomes.
I often wonder if we evolved magical thinking and all of its manifestations like religion, parapsychology, destiny, fate, etc. in order to hold these three realizations in some sort of stable configuration.
“A tendency to superstition is of the very essence of humanity and, when we think we have completely extinguished it, we shall find it retreating into the strangest nooks and corners, that it may issue out thence on the first occasion it can do with safety.”
In addition to the accidental things already listed under 3, there is also the additional points that:
- Other people exist and they also have a lot of agency, the exercise of which sometimes directly interferes with your life. Not to mention how much capacity bigger entities like countries have to mess with your life it they wanted to.
- In opposition to point 1: while humans do have tremendous agency, they also have very little agency when seen against how big the universe really is. There are more stars in the sky than people on Earth, by a considerable margin. Nobody can do anything at all to influence them. Hell, we can't even manipulate the orbit of our own planet in any meaningful way. I think many of the magical thinking paradigms are ways to cope with that as well.
Ironically, scientism is also a manifestation of "magical thinking":
Going through ritualistic motions of scientific appearances without actual understanding, getting positive feedback from the multitudes being just as incompetent.
Here, with the "Telepathy Tapes", the subject matter is immediately categorized as "magic": stuff deemed to be impossible because of it "obviously/implicitly contradicting scientific knowledge".
But that contradiction doesn't really exist?
To give a decidedly clumsy, but entirely "physically possible", explanation of "telepathy": little green men from outer space might facilitate that effect using extremely advanced technology, hiding their presence and foiling attempts at getting easily understood evidence.
While such a scenario is highly inconvenient for current human academia to address, it's not "impossible" in any way?
Isn't it really "magical thinking" to assume, such "outlandish" scenarios were excluded by natural law?
Ritualistic “magical thinking” stays the same regardless of outcomes or new information. Science does the exact opposite - predictive power determines what’s true. Nobody said your alien hypothesis is impossible; just that it’s highly implausible. No predictions, no evidence, no way to test it.
So, to explain one invisible and unprovable thing for which there is zero evidence, you have invented a completely different invisible and unprovable thing for which there is also zero evidence. Great job :)
Humans make meaning, as far as we have observed we are the meaning making organ of the universe in a totally literalist physicalized sense. Stars convert mass to energy, humans convert energy to semantic meaning with high syntactic complexity, density and causal leverage.
We build the libraries, we deflect the asteroids for the foreseeable future (we really should check and see if dolphins would like thumbs.)
Flight existed before apes but - in a purely non-woo sense - a few of us gave the universe the how and why of it.
We haven't yet definitively ruled out the possibility of altering spacetime topology, or solving entropy, or plucking entities out of the light cone.
Humans tend to bring what they desire into the world. Wheat threshers, combines, tricorders, harry potter cloaks.
Listen to interviews of people who lived from the mid 1800's to the mid 1900's. They say the whole damn world changed, everything changed.
Now,
A large contingent of Humans want eternal life, want resurrection.
There is this kind of speculative naturalists pascals wager at play right now that we are losing at.
Where a certain contingent of the population simply refuses to believe that the earth could be destroyed by an asteroid, or if it was it will be part of the fulfillment of their wishes for a new heaven and earth.
But if they have the least doubt in the quite moments of the night they need to realize. That if only what we empirically observe is stable and true, then their only hope for their desires coming true might be humans making it happen. We don't know yet, we just don't know, it's early days yet, nothing or everything might be in the future.
So we really need to preserve humans so they can keep making meaning, make our existence more resilient and keep pushing the edge and expansion of knowledge.
At one point humans thought travel to the moon was impossible, some living people still do, but the very strange implications is that us and other meaning making agents might actually fill the universe with meaning, we might end up giving the universe meaning, as semantically less complex dna bootstrapped us we may bootstrap the whole universe.
I find it highly unlikely but I cannot rule it out and no one else can either. We really need to protect human and the life we can see.
My theory is that this all about "I know something you don't know." The people I have met with the most fringe theories don't have much agency in life. I suppose it could be a form of narcissism as well.
It can be, depending on your thought process while playing. If you're indulging in feeling like your willpower can affect what cards get drawn, then yes. If you're just thinking about betting strategy and your opponents, then less so.
My own magical thinking indulgence is fishing. I'll tell myself dumb stuff like "the next cast will be the one". I think any sort of gambling-like experience where random chance is heavily involved can be an outlet for magical thinking, healthy or otherwise.
Blocked & Reported (the podcast) did two episodes on this [1] and [2] that breaks down most of the controversy. This has completely ruined me on anything even adjacent to this, like whether Koko the gorilla could actually communicate.
This is what I was taught once upon a time -- that scientists acknowledged she could sign "food" and "thank you" and such, but is this language?
But this doesn't hold up. Nobody but her handler could interpret the signing even for basic gestures. Identical signs were often interpreted differently depending on the context. Similarly, unrelated gestures were given the same translation, also in context.
No reason to suspect any malfeasance or anything; the interpreter (as in the telepathy tapes and FC) is most likely acting in good faith and just unaware how much weight they are giving to their own mental model of the subject.
Sure. But often one of the two sides has an obvious agenda.
I thought of James Randi and "spoon bender", Uri Geller. I suppose if you're cynical enough you can presume that both are desperate for airtime, self-promotion and we should therefore be skeptical of both.
Randi though for me has much less to gain in exposing frauds.
An ideal listen for anyone looking to sharpen their critical thinking. The reasoning moves are subtle, and it’s easy to miss the small leaps and omissions that reveal how persuasive but unsound arguments work.
If you want to test your logic radar, keep a Reasoning-Error Bingo Card handy — here are some of the most common moves to watch for:
- Anecdotal Evidence as Proof – moving personal testimonies presented as sufficient evidence.
- Cherry-picking – highlighting the few “hits” or successful moments and ignoring null or failed sessions.
- Facilitator/Ideomotor Bias – unacknowledged influence of helpers who already know the answers.
- Lack of Experimental Control – demonstrations without blinding or verification procedures.
- Equivocation on “Spelling” and “Communication” – shifting definitions of what counts as independent expression.
- Over-extension/Universal Claim – extrapolating from a handful of cases to “all nonspeakers.”
- Appeal to Emotion and Narrative Framing – using distressing or inspiring stories to disarm skepticism.
- Appeal to Authority – invoking credentials, research funding, or famous supporters in place of data.
- Confirmation Bias/Omission of Counter-Evidence – excluding decades of research debunking similar methods.
- Shifting the Burden of Proof – implying critics must disprove telepathy rather than producers proving it.
- Quantum-Language Hijack – invoking “quantum entanglement” or “energy fields” as pseudo-explanations.
- False Dichotomy (“open-minded vs. materialist”) – framing skepticism as moral or emotional failure.
- Paradigm-Appeal Fallacy – claiming we’re witnessing a scientific “revolution” instead of providing data.
- Ambiguous Success Criteria – redefining what counts as a correct answer or “connection.”
- Halo Effect through Compassion – moral halo from helping disabled children transferred to truth of the claim.
Ironically, in trying to transcend “materialism,” the series repeats Descartes’ old mistake — treating mind and matter as mutually exclusive instead of as aspects of a single natural order. That move saddles them with the same impossible burden Descartes faced: explaining how an immaterial mind could causally interact with the physical world on top of everything else they need to prove.
I had a realization that logical biases and fallacies form well-known patterns only at uni and only on my own.
I then had a much worse realization - that most people still don't know about them and that they don't care.
You can't make people care, that only comes when they are the ones getting hurt by others being manipulated. But you can give them tools to know what they should care about when that happens.
They do care to push back though! It's just that there's much more of a market for wishful pseudoscientific bullshit than for careful, history and evidence based sceptical bashing of hopes. Just another example of how broken our information ecosystem is.
I learned about TT from my favorite podcast the SGU, where it was placed in the historical context of the FC controversy and then roundly debunked.
The Ganzfield experiments have been reproduced 78 times by 46 researchers and this review article concludes that anomalous cognition meets the standards of proof: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11134153/
The president of the American Statistical Association has reviewed the evidence for psi and said: “Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well-established”
Of course you don’t believe it because you listen to a podcast about skepticism so it’s a dogma for you, you’ve drawn your conclusion without even considering the evidence. Skepticism is a religion as much as Catholicism in Galileo’s time.
> For months, I was puzzled as to why a great number of listeners wholly ignorant of the autistic experience were so enamoured by The Telepathy Tapes. ... I feel I’m finally starting to understand. Moving forward, the series has expressed a desire to explore the wider nature of consciousness and explore topics outside of the autistic community.
It's right there in the name -- Telepathy. It's not a show about autism, that's just a means to the end. It's a show about the paranormal and it appeals to people that want to learn about the paranormal.
The fact the the author has this 'revelation' about the true appeal at the end is strange. it'd be like having a big breakthrough that "i though people were watching The X-Files because they were all interested in learning about FBI bureaucracy, but it turns out people are interested in aliens!"
> It's right there in the name -- Telepathy. It's not a show about autism, that's just a means to the end.
It has to be both. If it was just about "hey, look random fortune tellers are telepathic, let's watch 500 hours of video about it" that won't go anywhere. It would be dismissed right off the bat. But it has to be something like autism. Everyone has someone in their family or acquaintance circle who has autism nowadays. Some are non-verbal and it's sad and frustrating not being able to talk with them. Aha, but what if there was a way? - Telepathy to the rescue. So it's like a necessary two part thing.
What I don't like is that these things ignore the individual. Rather than dealing with "this is a nonverbal person, they likely have limited understanding" people that believe this garbage think "oh, this is a magic guru with super powers and wisdom beyond comprehension".
That becomes dangerous when it comes to watching these individuals. No, they really don't know to not play in the street. They don't know not to eat the berries. They aren't connected with animals and don't know some can hurt them.
He brought ESP up in his paper about the Turing Test. My understanding is that it is possible counter argument to his proposed machine intelligence.
Belief in ESP back then is more understandable since they didn't have the experiments that disproved it, or the knowledge of biology that doesn't show a mechanism.
> Belief in ESP back then is more understandable since they didn't have the experiments that disproved it, or the knowledge of biology that doesn't show a mechanism.
IMO, quite the opposite. They had more than sufficient knowledge about biology to entertain hypotheses about how it could work in theory, e.g. electrical signals leaking from the brain, etc. And there was plenty of "science" purporting to show an effect, if not the mechanism. OTOH, every generation since before time immemorial[1] has been burned by people making and profiting from these and similar claims. So just paying attention to what the old timers tell you, and keeping tabs on claims as you age, remembering how they pan out, can go a long way to honing one's B.S. detector. (This current ESP fad and the "tests" used to prove it seems to mirror identically a similar wave of claims I remember hearing about on the news and TV talk shows as a kid in the 1980s.) But some generations get carried away more than others, perhaps because of excessive optimism during periods of rapid technological advancement. Even stone cold geniuses can be too credulous; being optimistically credulous may even positively correlate with success in advancing fields of endeavor.
I listened to the first episode of the Telepathy Tapes, but then I read this article[0] and watched this video[1] of someone using a spellboard with their child and felt like Telepathy Tapes had deceived me.
I hope the people facilitating communication in the podcast aren't faking the communication as obviously as in that Instagram video, but the rest of the article showed specifics of the podcast where it feels like the host is using "sleight of hand" to present evidence in an overly strong way.
FC is always fake even thought the facilitator usually believes earnestly that it is real. It works partially through the ideomotor effect where the facilitator subconsciously makes physical queues to the letter they are thinking of next. There are plenty of tests where the facilitator is blind to a piece of information that the subject of facilitation can see and the FC always fails this test.
Are you serious? That video is nothing like the tests in the telepathy tapes, they have kids who don’t need to be touched at all and spell completely independently.
I hate this whole “skeptic” culture so much, it’s just as religious as the people who believe things without evidence. You have a preconceived agenda about things you were told are wacky and you don’t even bother to review the evidence before drawing a conclusion.
There is more rigorous peer-reviewed, published evidence for psychic abilities than most sociological and biological fields.
The Ganz experiment has been reproduced 78 times by 46 different researchers, but sure it’s all fake and a blogger and an one obviously fake strawman instagram video are suddenly enough evidence for the skeptics who constantly demand the highest standard of academic rigor from the other side.
I was curious and read through the paper you linked. Here's my shot at rational thinking. A few things stood out:
1. Arbitrary prior
In the peer-review notes on p.26, a reviewer questions the basis of their bayesian prior: "they never clearly wrote down ... that the theoretical GZ effect size would be "Z/sqrt(N) = 0.1"
The authors reply: "The use of this prior in the Bayesian meta-analysis is an arbitrary choice based on the overall frequentist meta-analysis, and the previous meta-analyses e.g. Storm & Tressoldi, 2010."
That's a problem because a bayesian prior represents your initial belief about the true effect before looking at the current data. It's supposed to come from independent evidence or theoretical reasoning. Using the same dataset or past analyses of the same studies to set the prior is just circular reasoning. In other words, they assumed from the start that the true effect size was roughly 0.1, then unsurprisingly "found" an effect size around 0.08–0.1.
2. Publication bias
On p. 10, the authors admit that "for publication bias to attenuate (to "explain away") the observed overall effect size, affirmative results would need to be at least four-fold more likely to be published than non-affirmative results."
A modest 4x preference to publish positive results would erase the significance.
They do claim "the similarity of effect size between the two levels of peer-review add further support to the hypothesis that the 'file drawer' is empty"
But that's faulty reasoning. publication bias concerns which studies get published at all; comparing conferences vs. journals only looks at already published work.
Additionally, their own inclusion criteria are "peer reviewed and not peer-reviewed studies e.g., published in proceedings excluding dissertations." They explicitly removed dissertations and other gray literature, the most common source of null findings, further increasing the prior for the true publication bias in their dataset.
4. My analysis
With the already tiny effect size they report of Z/sqrt(N) = 0.08 (CI .04-.12) on p.1 and p.7, the above issues are significant. An arbitrary prior and a modest, unacknowledged publication bias could easily turn a negligible signal into an apparently "statistically significant" effect. And because the median statistical power of their dataset on p.10 is only 0.088, nearly all included studies were too weak to detect any real effect even if one existed. In that regime, small analytic or publication biases dominate the outcome.
Under more careful scrutiny, what looks like evidence for psi is just the echo of their own assumptions amplified by selective visibility.
I listened to a few episodes on a recommendation. The episodes lead you to believe that the host is some agnostic person that's just curious about these reports. They are not as the original lead is from another superstition believer podcast.
They also present the cameraman as a token skeptic, who is of course quickly swayed into belief.
They lean heavily on a host of tricks with long histories of non-reproduction when tested rigorously.
A "scientist" (known crackpot and woo believer) is employed to make the experiments sound. And their terrible academic reputation was explained away using conspiratorial arguments.
I found TT wholly unconvincing and consider it a scam to get people to pay for the actual evidence. I won't pay of course and confidently assume it to be poor based on the publicly available material.
I can chime in to say: the scientific method, so far, cannot explain consciousness, and that the whole materialistic basis for physics is facing a crisis in the face of quantum mechanics, etc. Most of us have utmost confidence in a method that so far has nothing to say whatsoever about the most important quality of our existence: that we are aware.
The "scientific method" doesn't explain anything. It's a method for evaluating claims people make.
The fact that there is no scientifically verifiable theory of consciousness has no bearing on the science that helped people create, say, my computer monitor.
I haven't watched the TT but anecdote. One of our friends has an autistic child, but fairly high functioning. When he was about 6 or 7 one morning this child complained he didn't want to go to a weekly playground and told his mom the slide was broken and it wouldn't be fun. Mom said what are you talking about - when they arrived, the slide was literally broken. The friend said there was no possible way he should have known that (I don't know the details) but this child does not have a phone and is under non-stop supervision.
Of every story you've ever heard about this child, this singular event is your evidence for telepathy? Shouldn't that alone be strong evidence against your interpretation?
I'm reminded of the anecdotal, arbitrary miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospels of the New Testament. An omniscient, all-powerful son of god chooses to prove his infinite power by providing wine at a party.
Or maybe there was another, much more likely and mundane explanation.
No it's not, it's just anecdata. That's a common thing in HN. Yes it absolutely does not rise to the level of "the truth". I just thought it would be interesting to share.
There are other possibilities, the most likely being that the slide was already in the process of breaking when the child used it last, and he noticed that before others did.
Selection/confirmation bias. Think of all the times the child told their mother some other random things which turned out not to be true. Those incidents don't stick out because children say nonsense all the time.
I have a pet theory (certainly unoriginal) that humans as a species feel a compelling need to indulge in some form of magical thinking in order to cope with existential horror.
A few things are simultaneously true:
1. We have a truly fantastic level of agency as actors in the world. A single human can build a house out of raw materials, write a book series with hundreds of settings and believable characters, start a war, etc.
2. In order to make the most of that agency, we need a psychological system that makes us feel empowered to use it. Having nature's most impressive brain would be pointless if we all believed everything we tried was doomed to fail anyway so we should just sit in the dirt and eat slugs.
3. We are also corporeal objects made of surprisingly fragile meat and bone subject to the careless whims of physics. Through no fault or intention of anyone, all of your agency can be completely taken in an instant. Just be standing in the wrong place when a tree branch snaps off, have one cell misdivide and become cancerous, choke on a grape.
We need 2 in order to make the most of 1. But the more we believe ourselves in control, the more horrific contemplating 3 becomes.
I often wonder if we evolved magical thinking and all of its manifestations like religion, parapsychology, destiny, fate, etc. in order to hold these three realizations in some sort of stable configuration.
“A tendency to superstition is of the very essence of humanity and, when we think we have completely extinguished it, we shall find it retreating into the strangest nooks and corners, that it may issue out thence on the first occasion it can do with safety.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
That is funny because the occult/mystical system of Anthroposophy is built on the foundations of a Goethean approach to science.
In addition to the accidental things already listed under 3, there is also the additional points that:
- Other people exist and they also have a lot of agency, the exercise of which sometimes directly interferes with your life. Not to mention how much capacity bigger entities like countries have to mess with your life it they wanted to.
- In opposition to point 1: while humans do have tremendous agency, they also have very little agency when seen against how big the universe really is. There are more stars in the sky than people on Earth, by a considerable margin. Nobody can do anything at all to influence them. Hell, we can't even manipulate the orbit of our own planet in any meaningful way. I think many of the magical thinking paradigms are ways to cope with that as well.
Enter: the enduring appeal of superheroes.
Notably, entering as our supernatural folk heroes started to fade in the mass communication age.
Interesting note. I love the term 'existential horror' and whole idea that we indeed suffer without some kind of magic/agency.
Seriously. This post is like 2 months at therapy
Ironically, scientism is also a manifestation of "magical thinking": Going through ritualistic motions of scientific appearances without actual understanding, getting positive feedback from the multitudes being just as incompetent.
Here, with the "Telepathy Tapes", the subject matter is immediately categorized as "magic": stuff deemed to be impossible because of it "obviously/implicitly contradicting scientific knowledge".
But that contradiction doesn't really exist? To give a decidedly clumsy, but entirely "physically possible", explanation of "telepathy": little green men from outer space might facilitate that effect using extremely advanced technology, hiding their presence and foiling attempts at getting easily understood evidence.
While such a scenario is highly inconvenient for current human academia to address, it's not "impossible" in any way? Isn't it really "magical thinking" to assume, such "outlandish" scenarios were excluded by natural law?
Ritualistic “magical thinking” stays the same regardless of outcomes or new information. Science does the exact opposite - predictive power determines what’s true. Nobody said your alien hypothesis is impossible; just that it’s highly implausible. No predictions, no evidence, no way to test it.
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So, to explain one invisible and unprovable thing for which there is zero evidence, you have invented a completely different invisible and unprovable thing for which there is also zero evidence. Great job :)
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> ᴡʜᴀᴛ ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʜᴀᴘᴘᴇɴᴇᴅ ɪꜰ ʏᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴅɴ'ᴛ sᴀᴠᴇᴅ ʜɪᴍ?
> "Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?"
> ɴᴏ
> "Oh, come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact."
> ᴛʜᴇ sᴜɴ ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ ɴᴏᴛ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʀɪsᴇɴ
> "Really? Then what would have happened, pray?"
> ᴀ ᴍᴇʀᴇ ʙᴀʟʟ ᴏꜰ ꜰʟᴀᴍɪɴɢ ɢᴀs ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ɪʟʟᴜᴍɪɴᴀᴛᴇᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ
Just finished hogfather and loved it.
I enjoy mythologies and partake in magical thinking. Religion is a tool, you can use on yourself.
I don't mind 3. Two is a bit over the top, I feel. When I was atheist I didn't need such tools or believe everything would fail.
A different data point.
Humans make meaning, as far as we have observed we are the meaning making organ of the universe in a totally literalist physicalized sense. Stars convert mass to energy, humans convert energy to semantic meaning with high syntactic complexity, density and causal leverage.
We build the libraries, we deflect the asteroids for the foreseeable future (we really should check and see if dolphins would like thumbs.)
Flight existed before apes but - in a purely non-woo sense - a few of us gave the universe the how and why of it.
We haven't yet definitively ruled out the possibility of altering spacetime topology, or solving entropy, or plucking entities out of the light cone.
Humans tend to bring what they desire into the world. Wheat threshers, combines, tricorders, harry potter cloaks.
Listen to interviews of people who lived from the mid 1800's to the mid 1900's. They say the whole damn world changed, everything changed.
Now,
A large contingent of Humans want eternal life, want resurrection.
There is this kind of speculative naturalists pascals wager at play right now that we are losing at.
Where a certain contingent of the population simply refuses to believe that the earth could be destroyed by an asteroid, or if it was it will be part of the fulfillment of their wishes for a new heaven and earth.
But if they have the least doubt in the quite moments of the night they need to realize. That if only what we empirically observe is stable and true, then their only hope for their desires coming true might be humans making it happen. We don't know yet, we just don't know, it's early days yet, nothing or everything might be in the future.
So we really need to preserve humans so they can keep making meaning, make our existence more resilient and keep pushing the edge and expansion of knowledge.
At one point humans thought travel to the moon was impossible, some living people still do, but the very strange implications is that us and other meaning making agents might actually fill the universe with meaning, we might end up giving the universe meaning, as semantically less complex dna bootstrapped us we may bootstrap the whole universe.
I find it highly unlikely but I cannot rule it out and no one else can either. We really need to protect human and the life we can see.
That need is not a cause, it's a reason. The cause is mental variation we have as a species and which is never openly talked about.
My theory is that this all about "I know something you don't know." The people I have met with the most fringe theories don't have much agency in life. I suppose it could be a form of narcissism as well.
Is a game of poker magical thinking?
It can be, depending on your thought process while playing. If you're indulging in feeling like your willpower can affect what cards get drawn, then yes. If you're just thinking about betting strategy and your opponents, then less so.
My own magical thinking indulgence is fishing. I'll tell myself dumb stuff like "the next cast will be the one". I think any sort of gambling-like experience where random chance is heavily involved can be an outlet for magical thinking, healthy or otherwise.
Blocked & Reported (the podcast) did two episodes on this [1] and [2] that breaks down most of the controversy. This has completely ruined me on anything even adjacent to this, like whether Koko the gorilla could actually communicate.
[1] https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-210-facilitatin...
[2] https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-242-the-telepat...
Of course Koko could communicate. The beef is over whether she engaged in true use of human language.
> Of course
This is what I was taught once upon a time -- that scientists acknowledged she could sign "food" and "thank you" and such, but is this language?
But this doesn't hold up. Nobody but her handler could interpret the signing even for basic gestures. Identical signs were often interpreted differently depending on the context. Similarly, unrelated gestures were given the same translation, also in context.
No reason to suspect any malfeasance or anything; the interpreter (as in the telepathy tapes and FC) is most likely acting in good faith and just unaware how much weight they are giving to their own mental model of the subject.
A podcast manages to convince you, but you cannot tell what exactly the issue is that renders "anything even adjacent" logically impossible?
What about the possibility of being fooled the other way around, along with the majority? Truth isn't decided by majority vote after all.
Sure. But often one of the two sides has an obvious agenda.
I thought of James Randi and "spoon bender", Uri Geller. I suppose if you're cynical enough you can presume that both are desperate for airtime, self-promotion and we should therefore be skeptical of both.
Randi though for me has much less to gain in exposing frauds.
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An ideal listen for anyone looking to sharpen their critical thinking. The reasoning moves are subtle, and it’s easy to miss the small leaps and omissions that reveal how persuasive but unsound arguments work.
If you want to test your logic radar, keep a Reasoning-Error Bingo Card handy — here are some of the most common moves to watch for:
- Anecdotal Evidence as Proof – moving personal testimonies presented as sufficient evidence.
- Cherry-picking – highlighting the few “hits” or successful moments and ignoring null or failed sessions.
- Facilitator/Ideomotor Bias – unacknowledged influence of helpers who already know the answers.
- Lack of Experimental Control – demonstrations without blinding or verification procedures.
- Equivocation on “Spelling” and “Communication” – shifting definitions of what counts as independent expression.
- Over-extension/Universal Claim – extrapolating from a handful of cases to “all nonspeakers.”
- Appeal to Emotion and Narrative Framing – using distressing or inspiring stories to disarm skepticism.
- Appeal to Authority – invoking credentials, research funding, or famous supporters in place of data.
- Confirmation Bias/Omission of Counter-Evidence – excluding decades of research debunking similar methods.
- Shifting the Burden of Proof – implying critics must disprove telepathy rather than producers proving it.
- Quantum-Language Hijack – invoking “quantum entanglement” or “energy fields” as pseudo-explanations.
- False Dichotomy (“open-minded vs. materialist”) – framing skepticism as moral or emotional failure.
- Paradigm-Appeal Fallacy – claiming we’re witnessing a scientific “revolution” instead of providing data.
- Ambiguous Success Criteria – redefining what counts as a correct answer or “connection.”
- Halo Effect through Compassion – moral halo from helping disabled children transferred to truth of the claim.
Ironically, in trying to transcend “materialism,” the series repeats Descartes’ old mistake — treating mind and matter as mutually exclusive instead of as aspects of a single natural order. That move saddles them with the same impossible burden Descartes faced: explaining how an immaterial mind could causally interact with the physical world on top of everything else they need to prove.
This should be taught in primary school.
I had a realization that logical biases and fallacies form well-known patterns only at uni and only on my own.
I then had a much worse realization - that most people still don't know about them and that they don't care.
You can't make people care, that only comes when they are the ones getting hurt by others being manipulated. But you can give them tools to know what they should care about when that happens.
> skeptics generally don’t care to push back
They do care to push back though! It's just that there's much more of a market for wishful pseudoscientific bullshit than for careful, history and evidence based sceptical bashing of hopes. Just another example of how broken our information ecosystem is.
I learned about TT from my favorite podcast the SGU, where it was placed in the historical context of the FC controversy and then roundly debunked.
https://www.theskepticsguide.org/
I am eternally grateful for the SGU.
Our escape to reality indeed
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It’s not pseudoscientific, it’s one of the most rigorously studied topics in academia and has pushed the standard for psychology research: https://www.deanradin.com/recommended-references
The Ganzfield experiments have been reproduced 78 times by 46 researchers and this review article concludes that anomalous cognition meets the standards of proof: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11134153/
The president of the American Statistical Association has reviewed the evidence for psi and said: “Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well-established”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/202...
Of course you don’t believe it because you listen to a podcast about skepticism so it’s a dogma for you, you’ve drawn your conclusion without even considering the evidence. Skepticism is a religion as much as Catholicism in Galileo’s time.
>Skepticism is a religion as much as Catholicism in Galileo’s time.
I think you must be using your own unique definition of skepticism because it's nothing like that.
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> For months, I was puzzled as to why a great number of listeners wholly ignorant of the autistic experience were so enamoured by The Telepathy Tapes. ... I feel I’m finally starting to understand. Moving forward, the series has expressed a desire to explore the wider nature of consciousness and explore topics outside of the autistic community.
It's right there in the name -- Telepathy. It's not a show about autism, that's just a means to the end. It's a show about the paranormal and it appeals to people that want to learn about the paranormal.
The fact the the author has this 'revelation' about the true appeal at the end is strange. it'd be like having a big breakthrough that "i though people were watching The X-Files because they were all interested in learning about FBI bureaucracy, but it turns out people are interested in aliens!"
> It's right there in the name -- Telepathy. It's not a show about autism, that's just a means to the end.
It has to be both. If it was just about "hey, look random fortune tellers are telepathic, let's watch 500 hours of video about it" that won't go anywhere. It would be dismissed right off the bat. But it has to be something like autism. Everyone has someone in their family or acquaintance circle who has autism nowadays. Some are non-verbal and it's sad and frustrating not being able to talk with them. Aha, but what if there was a way? - Telepathy to the rescue. So it's like a necessary two part thing.
What I don't like is that these things ignore the individual. Rather than dealing with "this is a nonverbal person, they likely have limited understanding" people that believe this garbage think "oh, this is a magic guru with super powers and wisdom beyond comprehension".
That becomes dangerous when it comes to watching these individuals. No, they really don't know to not play in the street. They don't know not to eat the berries. They aren't connected with animals and don't know some can hurt them.
I was interested to learn recently that Alan Turing believed telepathy was a real thing. At least that is what someone wrote.
He brought ESP up in his paper about the Turing Test. My understanding is that it is possible counter argument to his proposed machine intelligence.
Belief in ESP back then is more understandable since they didn't have the experiments that disproved it, or the knowledge of biology that doesn't show a mechanism.
> Belief in ESP back then is more understandable since they didn't have the experiments that disproved it, or the knowledge of biology that doesn't show a mechanism.
IMO, quite the opposite. They had more than sufficient knowledge about biology to entertain hypotheses about how it could work in theory, e.g. electrical signals leaking from the brain, etc. And there was plenty of "science" purporting to show an effect, if not the mechanism. OTOH, every generation since before time immemorial[1] has been burned by people making and profiting from these and similar claims. So just paying attention to what the old timers tell you, and keeping tabs on claims as you age, remembering how they pan out, can go a long way to honing one's B.S. detector. (This current ESP fad and the "tests" used to prove it seems to mirror identically a similar wave of claims I remember hearing about on the news and TV talk shows as a kid in the 1980s.) But some generations get carried away more than others, perhaps because of excessive optimism during periods of rapid technological advancement. Even stone cold geniuses can be too credulous; being optimistically credulous may even positively correlate with success in advancing fields of endeavor.
[1] 1189 to be specific: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1189 Skeptics since at least the time of the Romans have lamented magic grifts.
I listened to the first episode of the Telepathy Tapes, but then I read this article[0] and watched this video[1] of someone using a spellboard with their child and felt like Telepathy Tapes had deceived me.
I hope the people facilitating communication in the podcast aren't faking the communication as obviously as in that Instagram video, but the rest of the article showed specifics of the podcast where it feels like the host is using "sleight of hand" to present evidence in an overly strong way.
[0] https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the-telepathy-tapes-...
[1] https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_-ln0iO6i6/
FC is always fake even thought the facilitator usually believes earnestly that it is real. It works partially through the ideomotor effect where the facilitator subconsciously makes physical queues to the letter they are thinking of next. There are plenty of tests where the facilitator is blind to a piece of information that the subject of facilitation can see and the FC always fails this test.
I would guess it is hard on facilitators once they're caught out.
Nobody likes their beliefs to be shattered, especially when it is so brutally caring.
Are you serious? That video is nothing like the tests in the telepathy tapes, they have kids who don’t need to be touched at all and spell completely independently.
I hate this whole “skeptic” culture so much, it’s just as religious as the people who believe things without evidence. You have a preconceived agenda about things you were told are wacky and you don’t even bother to review the evidence before drawing a conclusion.
There is more rigorous peer-reviewed, published evidence for psychic abilities than most sociological and biological fields.
The Ganz experiment has been reproduced 78 times by 46 different researchers, but sure it’s all fake and a blogger and an one obviously fake strawman instagram video are suddenly enough evidence for the skeptics who constantly demand the highest standard of academic rigor from the other side.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11134153/
> There is more rigorous peer-reviewed, published evidence for psychic abilities than most sociological and biological fields.
If this proved that such things were real, there would be a corporation exploiting it by now.
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I was curious and read through the paper you linked. Here's my shot at rational thinking. A few things stood out:
1. Arbitrary prior
In the peer-review notes on p.26, a reviewer questions the basis of their bayesian prior: "they never clearly wrote down ... that the theoretical GZ effect size would be "Z/sqrt(N) = 0.1"
The authors reply: "The use of this prior in the Bayesian meta-analysis is an arbitrary choice based on the overall frequentist meta-analysis, and the previous meta-analyses e.g. Storm & Tressoldi, 2010."
That's a problem because a bayesian prior represents your initial belief about the true effect before looking at the current data. It's supposed to come from independent evidence or theoretical reasoning. Using the same dataset or past analyses of the same studies to set the prior is just circular reasoning. In other words, they assumed from the start that the true effect size was roughly 0.1, then unsurprisingly "found" an effect size around 0.08–0.1.
2. Publication bias
On p. 10, the authors admit that "for publication bias to attenuate (to "explain away") the observed overall effect size, affirmative results would need to be at least four-fold more likely to be published than non-affirmative results."
A modest 4x preference to publish positive results would erase the significance.
They do claim "the similarity of effect size between the two levels of peer-review add further support to the hypothesis that the 'file drawer' is empty"
But that's faulty reasoning. publication bias concerns which studies get published at all; comparing conferences vs. journals only looks at already published work.
Additionally, their own inclusion criteria are "peer reviewed and not peer-reviewed studies e.g., published in proceedings excluding dissertations." They explicitly removed dissertations and other gray literature, the most common source of null findings, further increasing the prior for the true publication bias in their dataset.
4. My analysis
With the already tiny effect size they report of Z/sqrt(N) = 0.08 (CI .04-.12) on p.1 and p.7, the above issues are significant. An arbitrary prior and a modest, unacknowledged publication bias could easily turn a negligible signal into an apparently "statistically significant" effect. And because the median statistical power of their dataset on p.10 is only 0.088, nearly all included studies were too weak to detect any real effect even if one existed. In that regime, small analytic or publication biases dominate the outcome.
Under more careful scrutiny, what looks like evidence for psi is just the echo of their own assumptions amplified by selective visibility.
Reminds me of how in the early 1980s we used my great-grandmother's Ouija board to spook ourselves to no end.
It was telling us names, giving us addresses, and all sorts of serious stuff you wouldn't expect adolescents to make up.
PSA the appeal is the only perplexing part,
and ITT many of us agree, it's not perplexing, it's just humans engaging in the same magical thinking and coping strategies we always to.
The "telepathy" is 100% a fabrication of parents desperate to believe their situation and kids are something other than they are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOdZtFWvwL0
I listened to a few episodes on a recommendation. The episodes lead you to believe that the host is some agnostic person that's just curious about these reports. They are not as the original lead is from another superstition believer podcast.
They also present the cameraman as a token skeptic, who is of course quickly swayed into belief.
They lean heavily on a host of tricks with long histories of non-reproduction when tested rigorously.
A "scientist" (known crackpot and woo believer) is employed to make the experiments sound. And their terrible academic reputation was explained away using conspiratorial arguments.
I found TT wholly unconvincing and consider it a scam to get people to pay for the actual evidence. I won't pay of course and confidently assume it to be poor based on the publicly available material.
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Sounds like schizophrenia.
It is very like schizophrenia.
In fact, I doubt most accounts of voices in our minds could be technically considered schizophrenia by any scientific measure of the brain.
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Can you give an example of what kinds of thoughts are "meddled" with?
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I can chime in to say: the scientific method, so far, cannot explain consciousness, and that the whole materialistic basis for physics is facing a crisis in the face of quantum mechanics, etc. Most of us have utmost confidence in a method that so far has nothing to say whatsoever about the most important quality of our existence: that we are aware.
The "scientific method" doesn't explain anything. It's a method for evaluating claims people make.
The fact that there is no scientifically verifiable theory of consciousness has no bearing on the science that helped people create, say, my computer monitor.
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Consciousness is the inflection upon the potential of existential being. One might say existential reality peering back upon itself.
Awareness is merely a temporal feedback in the higher order cognitive biotechnology.
Awareness is the tip of consciousness. Consciousness is programmable, can be manipulated, augmented, even inhibited. All with or without awareness.
I haven't watched the TT but anecdote. One of our friends has an autistic child, but fairly high functioning. When he was about 6 or 7 one morning this child complained he didn't want to go to a weekly playground and told his mom the slide was broken and it wouldn't be fun. Mom said what are you talking about - when they arrived, the slide was literally broken. The friend said there was no possible way he should have known that (I don't know the details) but this child does not have a phone and is under non-stop supervision.
Of every story you've ever heard about this child, this singular event is your evidence for telepathy? Shouldn't that alone be strong evidence against your interpretation?
I'm reminded of the anecdotal, arbitrary miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospels of the New Testament. An omniscient, all-powerful son of god chooses to prove his infinite power by providing wine at a party.
Or maybe there was another, much more likely and mundane explanation.
No it's not, it's just anecdata. That's a common thing in HN. Yes it absolutely does not rise to the level of "the truth". I just thought it would be interesting to share.
There are other possibilities, the most likely being that the slide was already in the process of breaking when the child used it last, and he noticed that before others did.
Selection/confirmation bias. Think of all the times the child told their mother some other random things which turned out not to be true. Those incidents don't stick out because children say nonsense all the time.
Or, perhaps the slide was cracked the previous week and now had completely failed.
My pre-adolescent child says all sorts of things, occasionally some of them turn out to be true!