Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine and the director of the Skeptics Society. He also wrote Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. In the following selection, Shermer argues that experiments that attempt to prove the existence of extrasensory perception (ESP) are flawed. In any ESP experiment, there will be people who score well below and well above the average for chance. Shermer maintains that these results do not indicate that the test takers have a high degree of ESP ability. Rather, he asserts, probability theory and statistical analysis predict that in any test a small percentage of people will test fairly high and low. The fact that people score as predicted is not a sign of ESP, he concludes.

One of the most overused one&mdash...