Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recently, I was chosen to be one of forty individuals invited to submit a short essay for a special issue of the Journal of Parapsychology. The topic we were asked to address was "Where will parapsychology be in the next 25 years?" This challenge encouraged me to reflect on the history of psi research and the continuing debate over its merits and results, and I found it to be a useful exercise. I also found it to be somewhat depressing, and I don't believe that was due merely to an uncharacteristic spasm of negativity. In any case, it led me to wonder what my SSE colleagues working in other areas of anomalies research would say about the future of their own respective disciplines. For example, can we speculate competently, based on the history of UFO research, where that research is likely to be in a quarter century? Or the quest for new and reliable sources of energy, including "cold fusion" or LENR? Hypnosis or altered states research? Are we seeing any notable and sweeping advances in any of these areas-say, increases in understanding among the few who do the research, or in the impact that research is having in the public at large? Can we predict competently which of the latest cutting-edge or trendy theoretical proposals (e.g., in earth science, astrophysics, or survival research) are likely to be genuinely fruitful? So, in the hope that my reflections on the future of parapsychology will encourage similar exercises among JSE readers (in addition to eliciting predictable cries of protest), what follows is an expanded and (freed from severe space limitations) rather less curmudgeonly version of my little essay for the Journal of Parapsychology, reproduced in part with the kind permission of editor John Palmer. Perhaps it would be interesting to have a roundtable discussion along these lines at some future SSE conference.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".