Skip to main content

Chris French - Five Way Interview

As well as being Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and the head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, Chris French regularly appears on TV and radio and is an expert skeptic on the popular BBC show, Uncanny. His new book is The Science of Weird Shit.

Why science?

Science may not be perfect – because scientists are only human and are susceptible to the same foibles as everybody else – but for my money it is by far the best approach we have for trying to figure out the truth about how the universe works and our place in it.

Why this book?

I taught an optional module on anomalistic psychology for over 20 years at Goldsmiths, University of London. The topics covered, including alien abduction claims, ghosts, people claiming psychic abilities, and belief in conspiracies, are topics that most people, whether believers or sceptics, find inherently fascinating. The module allowed me to discuss a wide range of relevant psychological phenomena, such as the unreliability of memory, hallucinatory experiences, and various cognitive biases, but also to emphasise the need for critical thinking. I had wanted to write a popular science book on anomalistic psychology for many years but only found the time to complete that project following my retirement.

There are clearly two very different questions: do paranormal abilities and other weird phenomena exist at all, and why people believe in them. Is the starting assumption in anomalistic psychology that they are all misunderstandings of psychological or biological phenomena, or do you start with an open mind?

The primary focus of anomalistic psychology is to see if we can come up with non-paranormal explanations for ostensibly paranormal phenomena and, wherever possible, to produce evidence in support of those alternative explanations. So, we assume, purely as a working hypothesis, that paranormal phenomena do not exist. But an important part of proper scepticism is to always be open to the possibility that you may be wrong. I am not convinced that paranormal phenomena really do exist on the basis of the current evidence as I see it. However, stronger evidence may be produced in the future that leads me to change my mind. Also, I have put a great deal of time and effort into directly testing paranormal claims. To date, the results have not supported the claims. Being open to changing one’s mind in the light of evidence is, I would argue, true open-mindedness.

What’s next?

For the foreseeable future I will be very busy promoting my new book. I am doing talks all over the UK as well as at conferences in Lyon, Visegrad, and Las Vegas, and lots and lots of podcast interviews. Once things calm down a bit, I’ll give some thought to writing another book. I’ve got some ideas on that front but I’m keeping them under wraps for the time being.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

I’m still excited about finally getting my book over the finish line. I realised the other day that I had written the original proposal back in 2010 but my day job at Goldsmiths was so busy that I just never found time to move the project forward. I’m still ridiculously busy even though I’ve retired but much more of my time is now taken up doing things I actually want to do!

 Photo © Stuart Gennery


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T
Post a Comment
Read more

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on
Post a Comment
Read more

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question.  Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book
Post a Comment
Read more