Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that ESP proves frequentist statistics isn’t real. In what has got to be one of the best object lessons in why hypothesis testing (the same statistical method usually used by the medical research industry to produce the Scare of the Week) is prone to generate false results, a well-respected psychology journal is set to publish a paper describing a statistically significant finding that ESP works.

The real news here, of course, is not that ESP has been proven real, but that using statistics to try to understand the world is a breeding ground for junk science. If I had to guess, I’d say the author (who is a well-respected academic who has never published any previous work on ESP) has had a case of late-career integrity and has decided to play a wonderful joke on the all-too-deserving field of psychology by doing a few experiments until obtaining statistically meaningful results that defy everything we know about the universe. As I’ve pointed out before, one of the many problems with hypothesis testing is that you don’t have to try all that hard to prove anything, even when done “correctly,” given that nobody really keeps track of negative results.