Open Questions

Open Second Sight

Why It Is Open The entire evidentiary record for second sight is testimonial, collected by folklorists across three centuries of Highland tradition. No experimental or quasi-experimental protocol comparing a claimed seer's forewarnings to ordinary hit or miss chance has ever been devised, so there is no data from which any verdict could be drawn either way.

What Would Settle It A prospective, blinded elicitation study: predictions attributed to second sight logged in advance, scored against subsequent events by an independent judge, and compared to a stated chance baseline.

Expertise Needed Folklore studies; parapsychology; statistics

Question posed in The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, Robert Kirk.

Open Apparitions and Crisis Apparitions

Why It Is Open The 1889-1894 Census of Hallucinations argued that apparitions coinciding with a real death occurred more often than chance, but the finding rests entirely on retrospective self report gathered by volunteers approaching people they knew, against a chance baseline its own authors had to construct. No prospective, controlled test of crisis apparitions has been conducted since.

What Would Settle It A prospectively registered study defining in advance what counts as a qualifying apparition and a chance baseline independent of the reporting population, run forward in time rather than reconstructed from memory.

Expertise Needed Statistics; survey methodology; history of psychical research

Question posed in Report on the Census of Hallucinations, Henry Sidgwick, Eleanor Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore, Alice Johnson.

Open The Global Consciousness Project

Why It Is Open The network and its archive are not in dispute, but three analytic decisions are made by people with access to the data: which events count as globally attended, where each analysis window begins and ends, and which statistic to compute. The central criticism is that this freedom is sufficient to generate the reported result from structureless data, and it cannot be tested from the published analyses alone.

What Would Settle It An outside party defining a list of events and window boundaries in advance, lodging it, and the project running the analysis once against that list without modification.

Expertise Needed Statistics; pre-registration methodology

Question posed in The Global Consciousness Project, Roger D. Nelson (Global Consciousness Project).

Open Feeling the Future

Why It Is Open Bem, Tressoldi, Rabeyron and Duggan report a small overall effect across ninety experiments and argue that bias-correction methods do not remove it. Critics answer that the correction methods available cannot distinguish a genuine small effect from a literature filtered by what got written up, particularly where many of the constituent studies were not pre-registered. The dispute is about the adequacy of the statistical tools, and it is live in the wider methodology literature and not only in parapsychology.

What Would Settle It A registered-report replication series of adequate power, with the analysis plan lodged in advance and a commitment to publish, run by laboratories on both sides.

Expertise Needed Meta-analytic methodology; statistics; experimental psychology

Question posed in Feeling the Future: A Meta-Analysis of 90 Experiments on the Anomalous Anticipation of Random Future Events, Daryl J. Bem, Patrizio Tressoldi, Thomas Rabeyron and Michael Duggan.

Open Feeling the Future

Why It Is Open Bem, Tressoldi, Rabeyron and Duggan report a small overall effect across ninety experiments and argue that bias-correction methods do not remove it. Critics answer that the correction methods available cannot distinguish a genuine small effect from a literature filtered by what got written up, particularly where many of the constituent studies were not pre-registered. The dispute is about the adequacy of the statistical tools, and it is live in the wider methodology literature and not only in parapsychology.

What Would Settle It A registered-report replication series of adequate power, with the analysis plan lodged in advance and a commitment to publish, run by laboratories on both sides.

Expertise Needed Meta-analytic methodology; statistics; experimental psychology

Question posed in Feeling the Future: A Meta-Analysis of 90 Experiments on the Anomalous Anticipation of Random Future Events, Daryl J. Bem, Patrizio Tressoldi, Thomas Rabeyron and Michael Duggan.

Open Second Sight

Why It Is Open The entire evidentiary record for second sight is testimonial, collected by folklorists across three centuries of Highland tradition. No experimental or quasi-experimental protocol comparing a claimed seer's forewarnings to ordinary hit or miss chance has ever been devised, so there is no data from which any verdict could be drawn either way.

What Would Settle It A prospective, blinded elicitation study: predictions attributed to second sight logged in advance, scored against subsequent events by an independent judge, and compared to a stated chance baseline.

Expertise Needed Folklore studies; parapsychology; statistics

Question posed in The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, Robert Kirk.

Open Apparitions and Crisis Apparitions

Why It Is Open The 1889-1894 Census of Hallucinations argued that apparitions coinciding with a real death occurred more often than chance, but the finding rests entirely on retrospective self report gathered by volunteers approaching people they knew, against a chance baseline its own authors had to construct. No prospective, controlled test of crisis apparitions has been conducted since.

What Would Settle It A prospectively registered study defining in advance what counts as a qualifying apparition and a chance baseline independent of the reporting population, run forward in time rather than reconstructed from memory.

Expertise Needed Statistics; survey methodology; history of psychical research

Question posed in Report on the Census of Hallucinations, Henry Sidgwick, Eleanor Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore, Alice Johnson.

Open Feeling the Future

Why It Is Open Bem, Tressoldi, Rabeyron and Duggan report a small overall effect across ninety experiments and argue that bias-correction methods do not remove it. Critics answer that the correction methods available cannot distinguish a genuine small effect from a literature filtered by what got written up, particularly where many of the constituent studies were not pre-registered. The dispute is about the adequacy of the statistical tools, and it is live in the wider methodology literature and not only in parapsychology.

What Would Settle It A registered-report replication series of adequate power, with the analysis plan lodged in advance and a commitment to publish, run by laboratories on both sides.

Expertise Needed Meta-analytic methodology; statistics; experimental psychology

Question posed in Feeling the Future: A Meta-Analysis of 90 Experiments on the Anomalous Anticipation of Random Future Events, Daryl J. Bem, Patrizio Tressoldi, Thomas Rabeyron and Michael Duggan.

Open Second Sight

Why It Is Open The entire evidentiary record for second sight is testimonial, collected by folklorists across three centuries of Highland tradition. No experimental or quasi-experimental protocol comparing a claimed seer's forewarnings to ordinary hit or miss chance has ever been devised, so there is no data from which any verdict could be drawn either way.

What Would Settle It A prospective, blinded elicitation study: predictions attributed to second sight logged in advance, scored against subsequent events by an independent judge, and compared to a stated chance baseline.

Expertise Needed Folklore studies; parapsychology; statistics

Question posed in The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, Robert Kirk.

Open The Global Consciousness Project

Why It Is Open The network and its archive are not in dispute, but three analytic decisions are made by people with access to the data: which events count as globally attended, where each analysis window begins and ends, and which statistic to compute. The central criticism is that this freedom is sufficient to generate the reported result from structureless data, and it cannot be tested from the published analyses alone.

What Would Settle It An outside party defining a list of events and window boundaries in advance, lodging it, and the project running the analysis once against that list without modification.

Expertise Needed Statistics; pre-registration methodology

Question posed in The Global Consciousness Project, Roger D. Nelson (Global Consciousness Project).

Open Apparitions and Crisis Apparitions

Why It Is Open The 1889-1894 Census of Hallucinations argued that apparitions coinciding with a real death occurred more often than chance, but the finding rests entirely on retrospective self report gathered by volunteers approaching people they knew, against a chance baseline its own authors had to construct. No prospective, controlled test of crisis apparitions has been conducted since.

What Would Settle It A prospectively registered study defining in advance what counts as a qualifying apparition and a chance baseline independent of the reporting population, run forward in time rather than reconstructed from memory.

Expertise Needed Statistics; survey methodology; history of psychical research

Question posed in Report on the Census of Hallucinations, Henry Sidgwick, Eleanor Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore, Alice Johnson.