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I tentatively disagree that religion count as a falsified belief. This sounds nit-picky but I think indicates a substantial meta-level difference in our prior, i.e. the extent to which we think the average person is or isn't crazy.

The religions are contradictory. The behavior of the founders (moreso the more recent the religion) maps onto random guys creating cults today in great detail. People express belief in their particular religion being true, the particular founder or books being right, in young earth creationism, in Islamic medicine, in miraculous healing, etc. They do so at least as fervently as they do belief in psychic powers. You can try to make up a naturalistic version of religion that, while improbable on its face, doesn't get much of a further penalty from the evidence (simulator deism, whatever) but that doesn't rescue the accuracy of the masses.

On direct causes, consider sleep paralysis and alien abductions. Drug use can create experiences interpreted as religious or psychic or whatever, and various biological conditions can do likewise. False memories can be cultivated by therapists or group efforts (there was an interesting book by a Harvard researcher studying people who claimed to have been abducted). The formation of urban legends by the telephone effect and optimization for good stories is well-documented. Exposed frauds are pretty common, and frauds have to be more common than exposed ones, probably far more given the scarcity of debunking resources. These things vary from culture to culture, e.g. fan death giving an indication of how much people can shape their experiences and beliefs to fit memes floating around.

I looked through much of the heuristics and biases literature and was profoundly disappointed with what I found. Since then I've been skeptical of claims that the average person is highly susceptible to false beliefs.

Psychology research tends to be bad. Most of the effects claimed don't exist (far more for repeatedly replicated experiments done by independent groups), and the effects that do exist are mostly greatly exaggerated in their effect sizes and generalizability. That is also true of heuristics and biases. And yet surveys (the basis of these "lots of people believe in ESP" claims) reveal that people have lots of demonstrably false beliefs, often strong beliefs, especially on topics where they get little feedback. Bryan Caplan has many such: basic facts about the economy, demographics, toxicology, risks of death. People believe having sex with virgins cures HIV, despite the absence of any actual documented examples. They form superstitions about homeopathic placebos and acupuncture.

People do not get feedback about their capricious/subtle psi beliefs (healing that heals amputees does get enough negative feedback that it's a rare belief), and can get utility out of believing they have psi or that the world is magical, indeed will often go out of their way to protect the belief.

Recently, quantum stuff in biological systems generally. Only important to note because various proposed psi mechanisms involve quantum computation going on in the brain, which until recently seemed rather implausible but is now a serious possibility.

I contest. Biological systems are hot and noisy, and quantum effects are at the wrong scales in nervous systems. Second, quantum computation!= telepathy, ESP, telekinesis, etc. Usually these arguments are of the form "QM and ESP are mysterious, and could be related" or "this interpretation of QM assumes nonlocal effects, or even nonlocal effects driven by magic consciousness, so there's a proof of concept for nonlocal ESP". These are nonsense. I would want to see an example of a good argument for quantum computation-psi connections.

Given that the methods used are practically designed so as to minimize any psi phenomena, e.g. taking away any real incentives for humans to use psi (with a few exceptions like a few of Bem's experiments), why should we have a wide prior for psi effect sizes? E.g. Ben Goertzel's analogy to experimentation on the alleged existence of "falling in love" comes to mind. I can't find it but it was on his "Multiverse According to Ben" blog. Might you explain more why you think a wide prior seems good?

Claims of psi powers tend to expand to fill the gaps of observation and alternative explanation. E.g. flying witches in Africa, jinn turning people into animals, etc. Claims that psi is small seem to be a "God of the Gaps" side-effect of modern recording technologies and other developments, rewriting the prior ex post. Repelling bullets, visible healing, visible telekinesis, and similar dramatic powers have often been claimed as effects "in the wild" but they always retreat from sight. We have casinos, the stock market, and similar opportunities for precognition, telekinesis could show up in sporting events, etc, etc.

E.g. Ben Goertzel's analogy to experimentation on the alleged existence of "falling in love" comes to mind.

Actually, all sorts of nifty research on falling in love has been performed with useful predictions about oxytocin levels, fidelity, various sorts of future self-report, divorce, frequency of sex, etc, etc. Experiments in the lab can do quite a lot to distinguish couples in love or not, and to increase or decrease it. That's more of a rhetorical trick, insofar as we use "falling in love" in a lot of signalling games and to some extent we're unwilling to identify it with any natural kinds that actually exist.

The evolutionary and anatomical picture for psi powers adds additional burden I don't follow, might you flesh this out more?

Where is the animal psi? What organs do it? How do the inputs affect human responses and behavior? How did the capacity evolve in the first place, and if it did evolve, why didn't it keep doing so?

It is well-known that psi seems to be react in agentic ways to attempts to experiment on it. This is really weird and seems to indicate flaws in the research rather than that psi is actually an agentic process that is trying to stay on the verge of detectability.

Well, it seems that way to pro-psi researchers, but it's not so different from research into unrelated bogus phenomena where researchers are motivated to keep trying different angles of attack, e.g. cross-country international development models in economics.

Best not to get into it, at least on a public forum.

This is the Goertzel piece.

I updated my post on this with numbers and links for several more of the attempted replications.

Looking back at this exchange, I want to note that you were able to invert the public empirical data on this question, along with the several other errors elsewhere in this thread, despite (or because of) the overconfidence of your initial claims. Similar things have happened when you have stuck your neck out on decision theory for attentive experts to chop off. You should generalize and a) put more effort into disconfirming your ideas; b) reduce your confidence in seemingly crazy contrarian views backed by vague impressions (lacking good metadata, for instance) from wide-ranging reading.

This video has Samuel Moulton discussing an unpublished, unregistered failure to replicate Bem's work.

Try Google Scholar, and papers citing Bem. In my article I mentioned and linked one apparent replication that turned out not to be one. I described the Wiseman paper's saga. Here's something claiming to be another failure to replicate, conducted at a UFOlogy event, and citing another failed replication (although maybe not a closely-matched one).

If you were hanging out at psychic blogs they might have been stretching the definition of replication to mean anything supporting time-traveling ESP (regardless of whether it uses the same procedures, gets the same results, was written after Bem, or was pre-registered), or they might have access to work that has not yet been put up on the internet in working paper or publication form.

ETA: The wikipedia article on Daryl Bem says that at least one of the Wiseman-registered studies has now replicated something from Bem, but doesn't identify the study or provide a source for the claim.

Thanks, I'd appreciate that. I'd also love to hear about other kinds of evidence that are approximately as convincing as replicated big journal studies. I don't expect that evidence to exist or else I'd have updated already, but if it does that information is valuable.

One common error made by skeptics is to say that the low prior on psi means that after a Bayesian correction any individual experiment or paper isn't enough to drive belief in psi, so it is "not scientific evidence." That's overstatement: if psi were real one would combine the odds ratio of multiple experiments (insofar as they were honest and independent) and overcome that, so the individual pieces would have to be published to accumulate that evidence. It's partly driven by scientific etiquette: the reason one can't aggregate studies like that is because there are systematic errors, bias, and fraud. Given the sheer extent of those observed in the record, it's very hard for a set of experiments to provide decisive evidence without some extraordinary evidence supporting their quality and honesty. Jaynes has an impressively thorough discussion of these issues in his probability textbook. The linked paper critiquing Bem didn't make that error.

Looking at the exchange you mention here are links to the continuation:

http://dbem.ws/ResponsetoWagenmakers.pdf http://www.ruudwetzels.com/articles/ClarificationsForBemUttsJohnson.pdf

Part of the argument was over whether to expect effect sizes to be miniscule if psi exists (Bem argues that existing research has already disconfirmed big psi effects, so that the penalty for that should be incorporated into our beliefs prior to his experiments, rather than the odds ratio stemming from the experiments. The rest was over whether Bem engaged in data-mining. Bem denies it, but has also written guides to students advocating intensive data-mining, and there are various suspicious elements in the paper that suggest it.

Both sides here seem to understand the statistics under discussion well enough, the back-and-forth is about psi and Bem's methods or honesty, i.e. flaws in the experimental design, data mining, deception, or luck/file drawer/publication bias effects. Failures to replicate will indicate one or more of those (replications will have to be tested for systematic flaws in the replication package, of course).

Also, follow the links to the two blog posts mentioned at the bottom of this.