Is this evidence we can see into the future?

<i>The effects he recorded were small but statistically significant.</i><p>And this, ladies and gentlebeings, is why you should be very wary of ever believing studies with small but statistically significant effects.<p>Psi is the control group for modern science: they use the same methods in a case where no actual phenomena exists, and yet it looks like a regular field of scientific study, dealing with "small but statistically significant effects", and the larger the sample size, the smaller the effect, but it remains "statistically significant".<p>And not only that, if a psi study finds that someone can guess which cards someone else has drawn from a deck, using telepathy, you will next find that someone can predict cards <i>before</i> they are taken from the deck, using precognition, and then that subjects can <i>influence</i> which cards are taken from the deck, using telekinesis, and <i>then</i> you will discover that they can influence which cards are taken from the deck, <i>two weeks later going backward in time</i>.<p>With small effect sizes that are statistically significant, of course.<p>Not because people can actually control which cards are taken from the deck two weeks after the fact.<p>But because <i>bad statistics are symmetrical in the directions of time and causation</i>, and it makes no difference to <i>bad statistics</i> whether the temporal distance is two seconds or two weeks.

My vote is probably not. The plausibility of these things is pretty important. With the aspirin heart attack prevention example mentioned in the text, we have a plausible biological mechanism to give us reason to expect an effect, so we can be satisfied with more equivocal data. I'm not aware of a plausible mechanism for precognition - in fact, it seems like precognition would probably require a bunch of other things we think true to be false to work - so I'll need much stronger evidence than this to accept it.<p>Also, a thought - if precognition is possible, why don't we see more of it? Being able to improve recall of words is nifty and all, but it seems like it'd give you a huge advantage catching prey or evading predators so I'd expect to see evidence of it all over the place.