I've tracked down the "100 studies" to a 2014 article by Cardinal and Falvey that merely asserts this without attribution. Requests to the Cardinal and Falvey for a citation have gone unanswered. I've corresponded with Becca Cramer and she's admitted that she didn't actually find over 100 studies and that this was mere hearsay (it's become a powerful meme in the FC/Telepathy World). Ms. Cramer has fixed her "I found over 100 studies" lines in her Medium and Substack posts, but we still hear her confidence voice asserting this on the Telepathy Tapes Talk Tracks--which continues to seriously damage her credibility.
Cramer also still leads one of her Medium posts with the line:
"What would you do if you saw a video of someone reading their mother’s mind, from the other room? A young man named Akhil is doing just that."
And implies this can be seen in the Telepathy Tapes library for $9.99 - of course, there's no such video available. All the videos of Akhil (or anyone else for that matter) have his mom right next to him, cueing and prompting answers that he's supposed to gather telepathically. The rest of her piece is an exercise in creative writing as she tries as hard as she can to frame straightforward cueing and prompting as some convoluted, impossible explanation next to ... well, telepathy.
And now, true to form, she's opening a paid walled garden where people who are "open-minded" can talk about these ideas in a private Discord etc. Whether intentional or not, it's clear that she doesn't want to actually engage in transparent, good faith debate that gets us to a more nuanced, rigorous, shared understanding. Her tactics of choice are intellectually dishonest and logically fallacious so-called "reporting", straw man arguments, (attempting to) shut down discussion, and hiding in an echo chamber of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning.
I'm fascinated (and also profoundly disturbed) by this story, not least because it hits at our zeitgeist where critical thinking and motivated reasoning seem to be duking it out everywhere, and people who Do Not Understand How Things Work (at best, the proverbial "right twice a day broken clocks" or "swivel-eyed loons") are in the highest positions of power muddying the waters of consensus reality.
All that said, thanks, Zaid, for following this story.
I'm happy to see someone stand up against copyright strikes and DMCA claims. Often you're dealing with a giant corporation that has a "whatever, we don't care" which defaults to just believing whatever makes it less work on them, which means I can make extremely weak-faith claims to get stuff removed.
Evidence of any kind of telepathy would rewrite scientific understanding. VCs would be spewing gigabucks at even the weakest possible kind of telepathic communications. https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_economic_argument.png
"But privately, she seems completely unwilling to even talk to anyone who doesn’t agree with her conclusions."
For an example of this, check out the Talk Tracks episode with "skeptic" ringer Becca Cramer, who "tried to debunk the tapes and couldn't" ... well, she didn't try very hard! They spend most of the episode trying to make cueing/prompting sound as out there and convoluted as possible, basically turning the debate on its head and saying if you can't disprove that FC fails message passing tests ~because~ of telepathy, then you must accept that as the explanation.
Cramer also references a supposed "100 papers" supporting FC, which is a number advocates often claim but have never actually listed or sourced, telling me she's fully locked into the spelling/facilitated communication bubble just like Ky Dickens.
I've tracked down the "100 studies" to a 2014 article by Cardinal and Falvey that merely asserts this without attribution. Requests to the Cardinal and Falvey for a citation have gone unanswered. I've corresponded with Becca Cramer and she's admitted that she didn't actually find over 100 studies and that this was mere hearsay (it's become a powerful meme in the FC/Telepathy World). Ms. Cramer has fixed her "I found over 100 studies" lines in her Medium and Substack posts, but we still hear her confidence voice asserting this on the Telepathy Tapes Talk Tracks--which continues to seriously damage her credibility.
Cramer also still leads one of her Medium posts with the line:
"What would you do if you saw a video of someone reading their mother’s mind, from the other room? A young man named Akhil is doing just that."
And implies this can be seen in the Telepathy Tapes library for $9.99 - of course, there's no such video available. All the videos of Akhil (or anyone else for that matter) have his mom right next to him, cueing and prompting answers that he's supposed to gather telepathically. The rest of her piece is an exercise in creative writing as she tries as hard as she can to frame straightforward cueing and prompting as some convoluted, impossible explanation next to ... well, telepathy.
And now, true to form, she's opening a paid walled garden where people who are "open-minded" can talk about these ideas in a private Discord etc. Whether intentional or not, it's clear that she doesn't want to actually engage in transparent, good faith debate that gets us to a more nuanced, rigorous, shared understanding. Her tactics of choice are intellectually dishonest and logically fallacious so-called "reporting", straw man arguments, (attempting to) shut down discussion, and hiding in an echo chamber of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning.
I'm fascinated (and also profoundly disturbed) by this story, not least because it hits at our zeitgeist where critical thinking and motivated reasoning seem to be duking it out everywhere, and people who Do Not Understand How Things Work (at best, the proverbial "right twice a day broken clocks" or "swivel-eyed loons") are in the highest positions of power muddying the waters of consensus reality.
All that said, thanks, Zaid, for following this story.
I'm happy to see someone stand up against copyright strikes and DMCA claims. Often you're dealing with a giant corporation that has a "whatever, we don't care" which defaults to just believing whatever makes it less work on them, which means I can make extremely weak-faith claims to get stuff removed.
Evidence of any kind of telepathy would rewrite scientific understanding. VCs would be spewing gigabucks at even the weakest possible kind of telepathic communications. https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_economic_argument.png
"But privately, she seems completely unwilling to even talk to anyone who doesn’t agree with her conclusions."
For an example of this, check out the Talk Tracks episode with "skeptic" ringer Becca Cramer, who "tried to debunk the tapes and couldn't" ... well, she didn't try very hard! They spend most of the episode trying to make cueing/prompting sound as out there and convoluted as possible, basically turning the debate on its head and saying if you can't disprove that FC fails message passing tests ~because~ of telepathy, then you must accept that as the explanation.
Cramer also references a supposed "100 papers" supporting FC, which is a number advocates often claim but have never actually listed or sourced, telling me she's fully locked into the spelling/facilitated communication bubble just like Ky Dickens.