The Enduring Legacy of Parapsychologist J.B. Rhine

It was a PSYCHIC VISION

You’ve got the SECOND SIGHT

YOU CAN SEE THE

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I can see it!

I can see it!!

What do I do with it?

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… abstract it and encapsulate it, I think

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Hit on 17.

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flower everything GIF

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I tried reading it, but my inner Carl Sagan was tut-tutting too much, and kept distracting me. All I see is a long, wordy argument that there is an invisible, intangible dragon in the garage.

Honestly, part of the fun of being a Happy Mutant is digging into the weird and the woo, but I prefer the weirdness and paradoxical that doesn’t involve some sort of undiscovered, unobservable phenomena.

I’m going to consider this an example of how to convincingly argue the unprovable and shift the burden of proof on the skeptics, rather than actually proving the woo. Filing next to the homeopathy proof.

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And that doesn’t involve smear jobs against dead people who devoted their lives to de-bunking parapsychology grifters. Nothing wonderful about that (contrast with Pesco’s fun cryptid articles), and definitely not something that does any credit to this site’s reputation.

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Oh joy; this, again.

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“First Sight means you can see what really is there, and Second Thoughts mean thinking about what you are thinking."
Terry Pratchett

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A part of me is saying “Ew. Just ew.” Probably because I still have images of Bill Murray’s character in Ghostbusters using woo to, well, woo.

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PREVIOUSLY ON BOING BOING

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On the contrary, I predicted it.

I must have ESP.

And now I’m off to Vegas!

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Mmm, apple doughnut.

Homer Simpson Donut GIF

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To put it in the immortal words of a bowl of petunias:

Oh no, not again.

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I loved this stuff as a kid. I even have a 1st edition of Rhine’s New Frontiers of the Mind. And, as has been said above, sadly, it’s a bunch of leprechaun dung. I dunno. Maybe it’s the focusing power of wildfires in the arctic circle, record-breaking mass-extinctions, and the ever present threat of fascism, but there’s very little room in my life these days for magical thinking. What brain juice I have these days is split between trying to figure a way out of these messes, and finding what joy and safety I can in the day to day.

Magical thinking has been shown, in the current ecosystem, to be a gateway to some really dark ways of thinking. Conspiracy-theory brainworms that eat families. Racist-nationalist ideologies that eat nations. The idea that the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many. That amassing ones and zeroes is more important than feeding families and providing healthcare. That we should sacrifice the well being of every man, woman and child alive today to maximize the possibility of the happiness of future simmed consciousnesses*.

Maybe we’ll get back to a place in the future history of our people where we have the luxury of believing in reptilian hollow-earth-dwelling, baby-stealing, moon-landing-faking pod-people, but we are severely overdrawn on that account at the moment, and need to be stashing away in the savings account of objective reality.

Such as it is.

*I swear I did not make that up. Look up Longtermism

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I wish I could have gone to the beach when the moon’s song was out, and then to that lawyer I heard about. But I was unaware that there were no children in the house. If there had been, then I would have arrived here in the same place. The eelskin trunk was a bit more expensive, but the widespread stanning of the other worlds has kept me with it. I’m being told I’m lucky because although the car has run 200,567 miles already, it still picks up Jupiter when the wind is right.

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Came to say this, thank you.

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At least they haven’t pinned it to the top like they did the disgusting and factually baseless attack posted on James Randi shortly after his death. This is really disappointing.

ETA: Limiting replies to every 4 hours. I wonder why?

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