Everyone's lack of basic knowledge about something can be seen as embarrassing if you want to find it embarrassing (Little Hawk)

No, that's not the problem with Two Bears. His problem is that he oversteps the boundaries of his knowledge. Nobody knows everything and not to know something is not embarassing at all, but embarassing is to do as if you would know something on a field on which you don't. Two Bears fights above his weight when he tries talking science.

I don't mind at all him talking about personal experiences, what he does and all that. He is the expert in that field. But when I read him talking for instance that "Kirlian photography has proven" it becomes obvious instanteneously that he just repeats second hand literature and lacks any knowledge about the pitfalls of that research, about the many counterarguments and what would constitute a good controlled experiment on that field.

He may be good on what he does and impressive to some others, but he lacks any appreciation about his own limitations.

Two Bears,

you may not like Randi and I agree that his no nonsense language doesn't appeal to everybody (though I find him personally very charming and patient) but the rules which way he offers his money are very clear cut. If you are as goos as you think you are that should be an easy grab for you. For instance, you just could offer him you perceive the energy field (aura) of a person behind a screen when all (usual) sensory means of perception are excluded. That's an easy experiment, basically, when you know how to explude other cues. But I could understand if you are reluctant because there is something to lose for you: an unrealistic self-evaluation. But one could argue that that can be seen as a gain.

Carol,

I'm here without my books, so I cannot give you the correct/complete reference. In M.D. Dunnete's (editor, probably more editor names) Handbook of industrian and organizational psychology there is a chapter titles something like 'Conduct and design of quasi experiments in field settings' by Cook & Campbell (& one more?). Read the first part about what can go wrong in experiments, in particular what threatens internal validity.

The main problem with y
There is a lot of work to do before such an experiment would start to be convincing. I know that I'm being a wet blanket here but I have seen it too often that believers in something paranormal do their own quickly thought out experiment. They are initially full of enthousiams for they usually get positive results. Then it is pointed out to them that they have overlooked a lot of counter interpretations. They repeat the experiments with more and more controls and the effect eventually goes down to nil. They are disenchanted and stop experimenting for without positive results their initial enthousiams is lost. Then they blame science for not being able to find out what they know is true instead of considering that the null hypothesis may be true after all.

The first badly controlled experiment makes it (without the small print) into the believers' literature as "CC (2005) has proven that energy..." Then unavoidably believers like Two Bears looking for corroboration of what they have no doubt about read it and feed it back into discussions as the one we have here.

Doing research is like playing an instrument. It is easy with most instruments to get a sound at once, but it takes long years of practice before you get really good.

Wolfgang