This article would be much better if it took seriously the numerous objections to Bem's work, namely the marginal nature of the statistics, the poor controls, and the lack of any replication.

Bem himself said, “I’m all for rigor, but I prefer other people do it. I see its importance—it’s fun for some people—but I don’t have the patience for it.”

The paper with its extremely marginal results seems like an obvious example of p-hacking, the standard trick scientists use to pull a paper out of empty data. Can you refute the statistical analysis that seems to show this?

And there are many other practical arguments.

53% would be a big edge at the gaming table.

So why isn't there even one gambler who exhibits an edge over chance this way? People care about money at least as much as pornography...

Famous gamblers like Nick The Greek never beat the odds - they made all their money by playing games where the odds were in their favor with rich people, so the rich people could say, "I lost $100k to Nick the Greek!"

There is a very good reason that people are very skeptical about precognition: because we have very very good reasons both theoretical and practical to suppose that the future is not predetermined but unwritten.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.

Parapsychology is over 130 years old. In those last 130 years, we have completely revolutionized our understanding of all other sciences. There are simple experiments that any high school student can do without much trouble that show the limits of classical mechanics or chemistry or the existence of DNA.

But in that 130 years, parapsychology hasn't produced even single replicable result.

And look at all the comments here. Not one actually does any analysis! They're just empty talk about skepticism.

Well, if someone promised results for 130 years and never delivered anything except teasing and hints, you'd be skeptical too.

I don't expect to change anyone's mind here. People don't believe in parapsychology because they carefully studied peer-reviewed papers!

Thanks for reading.