ESSAY Half a Career with the Paranormal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To begin with a definition, the word paranormal means communication without the currently recognized sensory processes; it may also refer to physical move-ments without the recognized physical processes. For centuries, phenomena now described as paranormal occurred and were described. Most historians of the subject agree, however, that systematic inquiries about such occurrences did not begin until 1882, when the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in London. Its founders openly stated their intention to investigate unusual phenomena. I am a latecomer in this field, because my activity in it did not begin until I had already established myself in conventional psychiatry. I had had training in that specialty and in psychosomatic medicine. My research and training enabled me to advance in academic positions; in 1957 I was appointed professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia. How I reached that position requires a short digression. From birth on I suffered from repeated bouts of bronchitis and spent much time in bed. The illnesses held me back, but I read a great deal, and my succoring mother kept restoring my health. I have an unusually retentive memory, and in phases of good health I jumped ahead of my peers scholastically. Professors like superior students, and I became a favorite of some at McGill University. After I had recovered from several bouts of pneumonia, one of the professors advised me to leave the cold of Canada for the warmth of Arizona. While in Arizona, I somehow learned to improve my health. Thereafter, I resumed a normal upward path in training and academic placement. On the way up I acquired some reputation as a maverick. This epithet seemed appropriate for someone who questioned the assumption, held then dogmatically by most psychiatrists, that human personality is more plastic in infancy and childhood than it is in later years (Stevenson, 1957). The publication of my challenge to this doctrine annoyed many of my colleagues in psychiatry and even enraged a few. For me, the reception of my article on this subject provided
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.010 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".