GARY OLSON—Finally, what McDonell avoids saying (or thinking?) in Quiet Street, is that those making decisions are doing so on behalf of the predator, capitalist-imperialist system. They are absolute moral monsters, psychopathic war criminals who — in a just world, would be standing in an international tribunal docket. So, on the one hand, while I welcomed McDonell’s seeming attempts at self-awareness, I also found them stunning in their naiveté.
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BRUCE LERRO—Gender studies show that women are more superstitious and have a greater belief in the paranormal than do men. I think this has to do with women having less control over their lives and needing some method of making their world seem more predictable. Vyse tells us that in childhood and early adolescence boys and girls do not differ in their locus of control. In college, however, women begin to show a greater external locus of control than men. People in the soft sciences are more likely to be superstitious than people in the hard sciences. The latter probably use the scientific method as part of their work more frequently.
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BRUCE LERRO—Stage magic is an old practice in which skilled sleight-of-hand is involved in deceiving an audience into making errors in perception. The range goes from simple card tricks to escaping locked jails to the feats of Houdini. Stage magicians are so good they have convinced PhD physicists under laboratory conditions that paranormal effects are real. For instance, that they can bend spoons and read pictures sealed in envelopes. Cold readings are a judgment about a stranger based on a combination of reading body language, knowledge of rhetorical techniques, behind the scenes investigation into a person combined with knowledge of how to create atmospheric effects.
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BRUCE LERRO—Standards for getting information in the mass media are lower than for professional publications. Programs about the paranormal are notorious for editing out disconfirming evidence. Paranormal topics are a thriving business. Mass media has a stake in keeping its businesses alive. They would lose money if they revealed the truth of scientific research. In drug studies, research supported by pharmaceutical companies reports more positive results than research supported by public funds. Once a study is submitted for publication, a journal has an incentive to publish positive results. There is a publication bias for positivity.
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JOSUE MICHELS—n age of relative freedom took a major setback on August 25, the day the European Union’s draconian Digital Services Act (dsa) went into force. In the future, this measure could be used to ban articles such as this one. But much more than banning “disinformation” and “hate speech,” the law is set to ban any illegal content, services or activities. While the dsa is combating some filth and corruption American companies allow and promote, it is also setting the scene for a system of absolute state control over the Internet.
