According to an article published in the Los Angeles Times in 2007, RationalWiki members "monitor Conservapedia. And—by their own admission—engage in acts of cyber-vandalism."
"Radin has written that fraudulent mediums were genuine and ignores skeptical literature on the subject." How many time has Radin said the exact opposite? This is a misrepresentation, even if it is a quote. Possibly a medium that Radin felt was genuine and others disputed it? Hard to say without facts.
"Radin published the book The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (1997). The book contained many errors. The British mathematician I. J. Good in the scientific journal Nature gave the book a negative review. Good discovered flaws in Radin's method for evaluating the file-drawer effect.[1] According to Victor Stenger: ¡°¡±Radin is aware of the file-drawer effect, in which only positive results tend to get reported and negative ones are left in the filing cabinet. This obviously can greatly bias any analysis of combined results and Radin cannot ignore this as blithely as he ignores other possible, non-paranormal explanations of the data. Even the most fervent parapsychologists recognize this problem. Meta-analysis incorporates a procedure for taking the file-drawer effect into account. Radin says it shows that more than 3,300 unpublished, unsuccessful reports would be needed for each published report in order to ¡°nullify¡± the statistical significance of psi. In his review of Radin¡¯s book for the journal Nature, statistics professor I.J. Good disputes this calculation, calling it ¡°a gross overestimate.¡± He estimates that the number of unpublished, unsuccessful reports needed to account for the results by the file drawer effect should be reduced to fifteen or less. How could two meta-analyses result in such a wide discrepancy? Somebody is doing something wrong, and in this case it is clearly Radin. He has not performed the file-drawer analysis correctly.[2]"
As nears as I can tell, this has been shown false, and retracted by Nature. Good did not check with Radin. He did not understand the reporting in the book.
Note also that this is the only criticism of the book, in an otherwise sort of positive review, and that the book contains extensive studies of other Psi research.
The site does not note that the book has been given awards, and backing by Nobel Laureates.
Why NOT give the article to Bem to review, or advise. He is the expert on this subject, and presumably on this testing. Or -- this is bad practice because he has a stake in turning the paper down?
We don't know why one of the critical papers was rejected. Perhaps it was not up to the standards of the journal. Other papers refuting results HAVE been published by major journals.
It does not mention Bem's scathing response to Alcock: Bem response to Alcock
Wagenmakers et al. criticized Bem's statistical methodology, saying that he incorrectly provides one-sided p-value when he should have used a two-sided p-value.[22] This could account for the marginally significant results of his experiment. Bem and two statisticians subsequently published a rebuttal to this critique in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.[23]
After evaluating Bem's nine experiments, psychologist James Alcock said that he found metaphorical "dirty test tubes," or serious methodological flaws, such as changing the procedures partway through the experiments and combining results of tests with different chances of significance. It is unknown how many tests were actually performed, nor is there an explanation of how it was determined that participants had "settled down" after seeing erotic images. Alcock concludes that almost everything that could go wrong with Bem's experiments did go wrong. Bem's response to Alcock's critique appeared online at the Skeptical Inquirer website[24] and Alcock replied to these comments in a third article at the same website.[25]
An analysis by Gregory Francis in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review suggested that the number of rejections of the null hypothesis reported by Bem (eight out of nine experiments) is abnormally high, given the properties of the experiments and reported effect sizes. He calculated that the probability of Bem obtaining such results (0.058) is significantly less than the standard criterion used in tests of publication bias (0.1). According to Francis, this suggests that Bem's experiments cannot be taken as a proper scientific study, as critical data is likely unavailable. Francis also noted that Bem's experiments meet current standards of experimental psychology. Drawing on his own analysis and studies suggesting a discrepancy between the observed and expected null hypothesis rejection rates across the field of experimental psychology, he suggests that the standards and practices of the field are not functioning properly.[33]
The publication of Bem's article and the resulting controversy prompted a wide-ranging commentary by Etienne LeBel and Kurt Peters.[34] Using Bem's article as a case study, they discussed deficiencies in modal research practice, the methodology most commonly used in experimental psychology. LeBel and Peters suggest that experimental psychology is systemically biased toward interpretations of data that favor the researcher's theory.