One lesson of the common misuse of statistics is to not "defy the data" until you're sure what it says.
Here's an important reply cited in the other threads:
http://www.ruudwetzels.com//articles/Wagenmakersetal_subm.pdf
Does psi exist? In a recent article, Dr. Bem conducted nine studies with over a thousand participants in an attempt to demonstrate that future events retroactively affect people’s responses. Here we discuss several limitations of Bem’s experiments on psi; in particular, we show that the data analysis was partly exploratory, and that one-sided p-values may overstate the statistical evidence against the null hypothesis. We reanalyze Bem’s data using a default Bayesian t-test and show that the evidence for psi is weak to nonexistent.
I read the NYT link yesterday or something, and IIRC, they mention somewhere that the statisticians had already found major flaws - like that. I'm a little surprised anyone feels a need to 'defy the data'.
A major psychology journal is planning to publish a study that claims to present strong evidence for precognition. Naturally, this immediately stirred up a firestorm. There are a lot of scientific-process and philosophy-of-science issues involved, including replicability, peer review, Bayesian statistics, and degrees of scrutiny. The Flying Spaghetti Monster makes a guest appearance.
Original New York Times article on the study here.
And the Times asked a number of academics (including Douglas Hofstadter) to comment on the controversy. The discussion is here.
I, for one, defy the data.