Rating Survival Related Paranormalist Media

Rating Survival-Related Paranormalist Media

Abstract

The objective of this practice is to establish a meaningful measure which can be used by readers to rate paranormalist community media. (1) It will give people a way to tell future experiencers what to expect by assigning a value on a five-star scale. The rating is also intended to provide feedback to authors.

The Survival-Related Media Rating (SRM) Rating scale may be used by individuals who publish a review of an article, research report or audio-visual media. (For instance, SRM Rating: 2.8) Ideally, an organization will establish a publicly accessible website on which media reviews may be added with a cumulative rating.

Sponsor

Tom Butler

Co-Sponsors

None at this time

Scope

This practice is specifically written for survival-related media. It may be adapted for other subjects, especially those of concern to the paranormalist community.

Statement of Intent

Just as it is common practice for someone other than the author or publisher to review a book, other forms of media should also be reviewed. Research reports published in parapsychological journals are the most obvious application of this practice.

Most forms of media are simply published for public consumption. In some cases, a Like flag can be set, but there is typically little means by which experiencers can rate content to provide feedback to publishers or alert the next person about what to expect.

This practice is intended to provide such a means of review based on a standard rating system. The intention is to improve the quality of paranormalist media.

Problem

Collaboration between practitioners and those who would study the phenomena produced by practitioners is essentially nonexistent. The majority of those posing as parapsychologists either do not accept the existence of a psi field and psi functioning or accept psi as a purely human ability related to physical space. Very few people posing as parapsychologists study survival-related phenomena with the intention of understanding their nature, rather than disproving their existence. The result of this Academic-Practitioner Partition is a culture of science that tends to stifle the serious study of survival-related phenomena. (2)

Most parapsychological research reports are written from the viewpoint that reported survival-related phenomena are an illusion, ordinary mistaken as paranormal, human-caused artifacts, psi functioning or fraud. Authors seldom reveal this bias to the reader in a “This is what we intend to prove” format. Instead, one must be trained in the author’s field of study to be equipped to see the actual intent in the otherwise vague wording. Ignoring the need to communicate to laypeople has become part of the parapsychological culture.

Intentional Bias

Examination of the History and Talk pages of paranormal-related articles in Wikipedia will show that the dominant skeptic editors have biased those articles to make the subject appear unreal or fraudulent. (3) The public is expected to believe the online encyclopedia as truth; however, people who are familiar with this bias advise others to find a different source for the information they seek. It would be ideal for the paranormalist community if such articles were clearly identified as biased.

Current Relevance

As a survival-related field of study, transcommunication is rapidly evolving as more is understood. It is not uncommon for an article to be out of date after twelve-to-fifteen years. This is not universally true, but it would be useful to future readers if the articles were rated in terms of contemporary relevance to survival.

Author Point of View

The most important thing to know when reading an article in parapsychological publications is the point of view of the author. For instance, if the author is in the Anomalistic Psychology school of parapsychological thought, (4) the article will likely be written to explain paranormalist phenomena in terms of reductionist physical principles. This is the Physical Hypothesis.

If the author is from the Exceptional Experiences Psychology school of thought, (5) it is reasonable to expect that psi-related phenomena have been considered. From the perspective of survival, this is the Super-Psi Hypothesis. Psi functioning is important to the study of survival, but it is likely the author will have mostly ignored survival-related evidence.

Jean-Michel Abrassart stated this point very well in the 2013 inaugural issue of the Journal of Exceptional Experiences and Psychology. From the closing remarks of “Paranormal Phenomena: Should Psychology Really Go Beyond the Ontological Debate?”: (6)

This leads me to the third point, which is the researcher’s own beliefs about the paranormal. Since it could still today be detrimental for someone’s academic career to clearly state that he or she believes in authentic paranormal processes (or that psi exists), it is much easier to hide behind statements like “we won’t engage in the ontological debate” that “we will purely talk about the phenomenology of the anomalous experience” and that “all that interest us is the psychology of para-normal beliefs.” I think that this state of affairs is unfortunate. It is not conducive to a proper debate about alleged paranormal phenomena.

I advocate that psychologists studying alleged paranormal phenomena should at least be able to state what their own beliefs are on the topic they are studying. In the scientific study of religion, there is a long history of religiously committed people who have made significant scientific contributions, …. If we can imagine that a committed Christian can legitimately study personal prayer, why not a medium studying mediumship? I state the question because for example Biscop (2010) is a spiritualist medium doing anthropological work on this very subject. Similarly, to psychology of religion, it is clear that the researcher’s own beliefs about the paranormal will influence if not the research itself (with the experimenter effect) but in the least his or her conclusions. I think that transparency (stating one’s own beliefs about the subject one is studying) is preferable to staying safely outside the ontological debate.

Collaboration

As a matter of practical community interaction, there is an Academic-Layperson Partition that tends to suppress the exchange of information between the Ph.Ds. trained in research and the laypeople who produce the phenomena to be studied. (2)

Some people who have worked with paranormalist phenomena for many years have accumulated considerable practical experience, often arcane knowledge about the phenomena and how they are best produced and examined. Paranormalist Ph.Ds. tend to assume knowledge based on literature reviews that typically exclude lay reports.

The consequence of research without community collaboration is too often misleading media that serves the skeptics better than the paranormalist community.

Trusted Advisors

People are conditioned to trust scientists and tend to do so without question. In practice, the reality of the paranormalist community is that ideologies tend to bias expected rational thought. Thus, many people posing as scientists do so under the false cloak of authority as they comment on aspects of paranormalist phenomena about which they have no training or in-depth understanding. In many respects, academics are not as rational and well-informed as lay-practitioners.

Ethics

Perhaps the most important indicator of the intention and point of view of the author is whether the subject and practitioners were treated in an ethical manner. The separation between academics and laypeople tends to make it okay for researchers to mistreat laypeople and mislead them about the author’s intentions. Of course, this should cause people to question the author’s work.

Practice

To provide an easy to administer method, this practice includes the recommendation that a standard review and rating system be adopted by the community. This may also include a short-written review.

Possible Format

The public is conditioned to use a five-star rating system. The recommendation here is a one-to-five-star score derived as the average rating for supporting categories. The categories need to be standardized. If a reviewer wishes to add or delete a category, the recommendation here is for the reviewer to use the standard format and add a note to include the additional rating. In the future, that added feature might be incorporated into the practice.

Program Aided Format

Review and rating plugins are available for online content management systems but may require modification to make them suitable for multiple reviews on a single page. Such a program might be applied thus:

Title: Research Report
Author: Author 1; Author 2
Publisher: Paranormalist Journal

SRM Rating: 2.8

Comment: (100 Words)

Rating Components:

Intentional Bias:   3
Current Relevance:  4
Survival Point of View:  1
Collaboration:  1
Ethics:  5

Manual Format

Most people commenting on media will not have access to a rating and review system templet. Two recommended manual notation formats are:

SRM Rating: 2.8
SRM Rating: 2.8 (Bias – 3; Relevance – 4; Survival – 1; Collaboration – 1; Ethics – 5)

(It is a good idea to include a link to the practice. For now, it is https://ethericstudies.org/practice-srm-media-review/.)

Implementation

Practices are intended to be developed and maintained by a small group of people who represent the interests of the community. They are intended to be living documents. That is, it is expected that they will be updated as circumstances change and with more understood about the reason they exist. All practices have the same maintenance concerns.

A possible solution to the development and maintenance issues is for one person (or organization) to agree to act as a chairperson for a practices committee. His or her duties would include maintaining an online forum, such as a wiki, on which other volunteers might edit practices via a consensus approach like that used in Wikipedia. Of course, a major difference would be that the wiki would be closed to all but the volunteers vetted by the Chair.

Until such a capability exists, practices maintained at ethericstudies.org/category/practices/ should be considered drafts and should not be considered widely accepted.

In the meantime, the rating system is still useful as a tool for expressing a reviewer’s opinion about items of paranormalist media. You are invited to use it.

Example Application

See Opinion 4 Failure to Replicate Fallacy

Reference

Butler, Tom. “Paranormalist Community.” Etheric Studies. ethericstudies.org/paranormalist-community/.
Butler, Tom. “Open Letter to Paranormalists: Limits of science, trust and responsibility.” Etheric Studies. ethericstudies.org/open-letter-to-paranormalists-science/.
Butler, Tom. “Concerns with Wikipedia.” Etheric Studies. ethericstudies.org/concerns-with-wikipedia/.
“What is Anomalistic Psychology?” Goldsmiths, University of London. 2015. gold.ac.uk/apru/what/.
Simmonds-Moore, Christine. “What is Exceptional Psychology?” Journal of Parapsychology, 76 supplement, Pages 54-57. 2012.
Abrassart, Jean-Michel. “Paranormal Phenomena: Should Psychology Really Go Beyond the Ontological Debate?” Journal of Exceptional Experiences and Psychology, 1-1, 2013. academia.edu/3715042/Paranormal_Phenomena_Should_Psychology_Really_Go_Beyond_the_Ontological_Debate.