EntreNous said:
Calling a theory, any theory, bullsh!t prior to completing a thorough study of that theory is absolutely a sign of bias. I'm sure the scientist in question has done great work but he clearly is demonstrating bias to conform with the prevailing OPINION.
Ok, so there are a few things going on here.
1) You are misreading the quote and ultimately creating a strawman. Nowhere did Robin say that these ideas ARE bullshit. He said they are ARGUABLY bullshit. He's not stating it as an absolute, but as an allowable reality. In fact, if you read through the article closely, it doesn't appear that he makes ANY concrete assertions about the "truth" of the matter. Throughout the piece his statements are qualified with allowances of possibilities, potential flaws in hypotheses/approach, etc.
So, we are not so much seeing Robin's biases as much as those of the readers screaming "BIAS," imo.
2) The "theories" you claim he is calling bullshit are literally "intuitive theories that the entities were evidence of alien life, or that DMT facilitated trans-dimensional travel." Neither of these "theories" are scientific theories. They are simply Mckenna's personal theories based on psychedelic experiences. There is a categorical difference between a scientific theory and this type of assertion, so when you claim "Calling a theory, any theory, bullsh!t prior to completing a thorough study of that theory," this is ultimately nonsense, as no scientific evidence has been provided to support any of Mckenna's "theories" and they're only really theories in the colloquial sense.
Ultimately, it's a category error to say that Robin can't dismiss Mckenna's theories without rigorous scientific effort as there was no rigorous scientific effort that went into forming them!
3) No one is objective. That's the nature of existence. Robin and his team have their own pet theories, just as much as other researchers have theirs. Having an opinion does not mean your research is biased. Again, he acknowledges that his approach is not perfect:
“It’s not a bulletproof approach,” he says. “But we’re working on the hypothesis that the experience of entity encounters rests on brain activity. And if it does, then why don’t we look at the neural correlates of some elements of encounters [with] entities off the drug, and get a sense of where people’s brains are sensitive.”
You can disbelieve THEORY A and design an unbiased scientific experiment to test the validity of THEORY A. If your experiment shows that THEORY A is correct (or incorrect) your personal beliefs don't matter, as the experiment's bias is what matters, not your personal opinions. This is part of the beauty of the scientific method.
So until they've actually carried out their methodology, you're really hard-pressed to cite bias. And as I've already stated, this seems more about the beliefs of the readers than anything Robin's said or done...