CarlShulman comments on Parapsychology: the control group for science - Less Wrong
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What would be the incentive? Forging results for highly public performances that allowed you to make money off people, sure. But for results published in obscure journals, when even academics in well-respected fields may need to fight tooth and claw for their next yearly funding? In a field that won't even get you the respect of most other academics, and might very well ruin your scientific reputation? Trying to prove a view that doesn't have powerful ideological backers pouring money into it the way creationists do? And with the number of fake researchers apparently staying roughly even for a period of fifty years, looking from the way the effect size hasn't changed?
To get more funding for their work, more fame within the parapsychology community, and to make it more likely that the world at large will realize the truth via "fake-but-accurate" experiments. Some parapsychologists pay for their own experiments, using resources garnered from a "day job" in some other field, but many rely on donations from wacky psi-enthusiasts (people who also get excited about ghosts, "subtle energies" and so forth), or selling psi-controlled meditation lamps. Many others think that it's critically important for mainstream funding sources to provide grants to parapsychologists (such as themselves) to do the work they find interesting and important.
Under those circumstances, a psychic believer could come up with all sorts of justifications: