BY GARY SMITH
Spiritualism began more than 150 years ago with the three Fox sisters: Leah, Margaret, and Kate. People who attended their séances reported that the deceased used rapping sounds to communicate with the living. (Margaret eventually admitted that the mysterious sounds were made by the sisters cracking their toe joints!) The subsequent decades have seen an amazing array of mind-over-matter tricks involving entertainers jangling tambourines, bending spoons, and abusing other props.
Nowadays, in our age of big data and big computers, peer-reviewed research is often used to demonstrate the existence of implausible mental powers. Every study of implausible mental feats that I’ve looked at—and I’ve looked at many—provides further evidence of the wisdom of Nobel-laureate Ronald Coase’s wry observation, “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.” I will illustrate this statistical mischief with several life-and-death examples.