Dean Radin

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Dean Radin
Born1952 (age 71–72)
Education
BS in
Electrical Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • Master's in
    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • PhD in
    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
OccupationParapsychologist
Musical career
GenresClassical
Instrument(s)Violin

Dean Radin (

Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing.[3]
Radin's ideas and work have been criticized by scientists and philosophers skeptical of paranormal claims.
statistical errors and ignored plausible non-paranormal explanations for parapsychological data.[8]

Education

Following a career in classical violin, Radin went on to earn an

better source needed
]

Parapsychology

Radin was elected president of the Parapsychological Association in 1988, 1993, 1998, and 2005, and has published a number of articles and papers supporting the existence of paranormal phenomena, as well as two books directed to a popular audience: The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds.[10] Radin believes that parapsychology is as repeatable as any scientific discipline, but that it is also, as paraphrased by sociologist Erich Goode, "elusive, subtle and complex", a field of study that is "difficult to replicate" and that "our understanding of it is incomplete".[11]: 157 

Radin's paranormal claims have been rejected by those in the skeptical and mainstream scientific communities, some of whom have suggested that Radin's beliefs embrace pseudoscience and that he misunderstands the nature of science.[11]: 158 [12][13] The physicist Robert L. Park has written "No proof of psychic phenomena is ever found. In spite of all the tests devised by parapsychologists like Jahn and Radin, and huge amounts of data collected over a period of many years, the results are no more convincing today than when they began their experiments."[13]

Chris French criticized Radin for his selective historical overview of parapsychology and for ignoring clear evidence of fraud. French recounts that the medium Florence Cook was caught in acts of trickery and two of the Fox sisters confessed to fraud, but that Radin did not mention this fact.[14] Radin has claimed the results from parapsychological research are as consistent by the same standards as any other scientific discipline, but Ray Hyman has written that many parapsychologists disagree with this, openly admitting that the evidence for parapsychology is "inconsistent, irreproducible, and fails to meet acceptable scientific standards".[15]

Radin and his colleagues have suggested that small-scale studies have produced a "genuine

ghosts) because they block such signals due to the process of latent inhibition.[20][21]

Books

While Radin's books have been reviewed favorably by groups that give general reviews such as

skeptics
, as cited below, have often been negative.

The Conscious Universe

A critical review of The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (1997)[24][b] was published by the British mathematician I. J. Good in Nature. Good wrote about flaws in Radin's method for evaluating the file-drawer effect. He stated that the book avoided mentioning the evidence of fraud in parapsychology.[8] Radin replied to Good in a follow-up letter in the correspondence pages of Nature, saying that Good in his review had misinterpreted a reference to a probability value. Good replied, saying that most readers would not arrive at the same interpretation of what Radin had written noting that readers would be surprised to learn that by "more than a billion trillion", Radin meant more than 10100". Further, Good noted that the file drawer effect does not account for intentional fraud, as was very probably the case with prominent ESP proponents such as Samuel Soal, nor is there any real means of estimating such "intellectual, observational or ethical lapses" within ESP.[25] In 2002, Victor J. Stenger gave a criticism of The Conscious Universe that aligned with Good's arguments that Radin did not perform the file-drawer analysis correctly, made fundamental errors in his calculations, and ignored non-paranormal explanations for the data.[5]

The book was reviewed by the philosopher and skeptic Robert Todd Carroll in a thirteen-page chapter-by-chapter critique which noted how Radin had not cited the skeptical literature on the subject of parapsychology. Carroll stated that Radin had ignored "the many hoaxes and frauds that dot the landscape in the history of psi research."[26]

Supernormal

Radin's book Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities (2013), argues support for psychic phenomena, linking them to the siddhis from yoga-related legends.[22][27] Publishers Weekly has reviewed it, saying of the book, that it is "unfocused and opaque at times" but "nevertheless an admirable attempt to bridge the gap between the scientific and the spiritual realm".[22] The anonymous review by Kirkus Reviews gave it a positive review saying "certainly not for everyone, but a smart reminder that we haven’t got the whole scene covered".[23]

Dale DeBakcsy, writing for the Skeptical Inquirer, a bimonthly American general-audience magazine published by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, reviewed Supernormal and criticized the work as "misrepresenting report data, lowering success criteria, and playing a somewhat loose game with how rigorously confidence information is presented". Debakcsy examined Radin's claim that a meta-analysis of forced choice recognition published in parapsychological literature showed that Psi effects were present above chance to a probability of 1015 to 1, noting that the study also reported that results varied wildly with an extremely unusual standard deviation, such that they dropped 10% of the most extreme variations which reduced the effect size. According to DeBakcsy, Radin chose not to report those variations.

Debakcsy also criticized Radin's characterization of the results of a free-response experiment conducted at Princeton. Radin cited a test subject's response when asked to describe the future location of a distant agent:

"A rather strange yet persistent image of [the agent] inside a large bowl—a hemispheric indentation in the ground of some smooth man-made materials like concrete or cement. No color. Possibly covered with a glass dome. Unusual sense of inside/outside simultaneity. That’s all. It’s a large bowl. If it was full of soup [the agent] would be the size of a large dumpling!"

Radin wrote that the subject's response "successfully" described the actual randomly selected location of the distant agent: the

Radio telescope at Kitt Peak. Debakcsy noted that there are several radio telescopes at Kitt Peak, such as the Very Long Baseline Array, but that telescope does not match the description given. DeBakcsy contends that, while the ARO 12m Radio Telescope has some similar characteristics, it also differs in several aspects from the subject's description. DeBakcsy further commented that, considering this is the best example out of 653 possible other tests made at Princeton, it is quite poor. Noting the spread of meta-analyses of the same studies (where the individual studies are weighted differently), have wildly varying odds returned (from trillions to one, to indistinguishable from chance), DeBakcsy argues that this undermines the reliance on meta-analysis in the work since they lack standardization.[28]

Other books

Notes

  1. ^ See also Quantum mysticism and Quantum mind
  2. ^ In Great Britain this book is titled The Noetic Universe.

References

  1. ^ a b Haraldsson, Erlendur. "History of the Parapsychological Association Presidents". Parapsychological Association. Archived from the original on February 19, 2003. Retrieved January 30, 2010.
  2. ^ "Institute Staff". Ions. Institute of Noetic Sciences. Retrieved October 20, 2013.
  3. ^ "Explore Editorial board". Retrieved June 19, 2010.
  4. ISBN 0900458747
    .
  5. ^
    Stenger, Victor J. (2002). "Meta-Analysis and the Filedrawer Effect". Skeptical Inquirer
    . 12. Retrieved October 24, 2013.
  6. ^ a b "Entangled Minds by Dean Radin - Book Review". The Skeptic's Dictionary. Retrieved 2014-08-09.
  7. ISBN 978-0313392610
    .
  8. ^
    S2CID 2001477
    .
  9. ^ "Author Listings: HarperCollins Publishers". HarperCollins. Retrieved 2014-07-12.
  10. ^ "Dean Radin". Archived.parapsych.org. Archived from the original on 2014-02-09. Retrieved 2014-07-12.
  11. ^
    ISBN 9780226051796
    .
  12. ISBN 978-1405181228
    . Retrieved October 22, 2013.
  13. ^
    ISBN 0-19-860443-2
  14. ISBN 978-0313392610
    . Retrieved October 22, 2013.
  15. ^ Ray Hyman (July 2008). "Anomalous Cognition? A Second Perspective". csicop.org. Retrieved 2014-07-12.
  16. PMID 16822164
    . Retrieved 14 July 2014.
  17. ^ Wilson, David B.; Shadish, William R. (2006). "On blowing trumpets to the tulips: To prove or not to prove the null hypothesis--Comment on Bösch, Steinkamp, and Boller" (2006). Psychological Bulletin 132: 524-528.
  18. ^ a b "From Mind to Matter: Data analysis challenges psychokinesis". Science News. 2006-07-19. Retrieved 2014-07-12.
  19. National Public Radio
    . The 'Quantum Entanglement' Of Love: So how do you explain this? No one really knows. But Radin and a few others think that a theory known as "quantum entanglement" may offer some clues.
  20. ^ Blum, Deborah (2006). "Team won't give up the ghost"[dead link]. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Monday October 30. p. 26
  21. ^ Radin, Dean. Entangled Minds, Paraview Pocket Books, New York, 2006
  22. ^ a b c "Nonfiction Book Review: Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities by Dean Radin". Publishers Weekly. 16 July 2013. Retrieved 2014-07-23.
  23. ^ a b Love, Robert (2013-07-16). "SUPERNORMAL by Dean Radin". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved 2014-07-24.
  24. ISBN 978-0061778995
    .
  25. S2CID 5349010
    .
  26. Carroll, Robert T. "The Conscious Universe by Dean Radin - Book Review". The Skeptic's Dictionary
    . Retrieved January 30, 2010.
  27. SF Gate
    . Retrieved 2014-03-29.
  28. ^ * Dale DeBakcsy (January 2014). "When Big Evidence Isn't: The Statistical Pitfalls of Dean Radin's Supernormal". csicop.org. Retrieved 2014-07-12.

External links

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