> Joseph Banks Rhine, a psychologist at Duke, had developed an interest in the possibility of extrasensory perception, or E.S.P. Rhine devised an experiment featuring (...) cards printed with one of five different symbols: a card was drawn from the deck and the subject was asked to guess the symbol. A [test subject] averaged nearly 50% during his initial sessions, and pulled off several uncanny streaks, such as guessing nine cards in a row. The odds of this happening by chance are about one in two million.
The point of "replicability" is to eliminate bias; but it assumes bias affects each person independently.
In fact, bias is also a cultural phenomenon and is subject to fashion. Some results are expected at a certain point in time; replicating an experiment with different experimenters ("scientists") at the same time doesn't eliminate the "fashion bias".
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> Joseph Banks Rhine, a psychologist at Duke, had developed an interest in the possibility of extrasensory perception, or E.S.P. Rhine devised an experiment featuring (...) cards printed with one of five different symbols: a card was drawn from the deck and the subject was asked to guess the symbol. A [test subject] averaged nearly 50% during his initial sessions, and pulled off several uncanny streaks, such as guessing nine cards in a row. The odds of this happening by chance are about one in two million.
I think this is what happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn7-JZq0Yxs#t=1m24s (opening scene from Ghostbusters).
The point of "replicability" is to eliminate bias; but it assumes bias affects each person independently.
In fact, bias is also a cultural phenomenon and is subject to fashion. Some results are expected at a certain point in time; replicating an experiment with different experimenters ("scientists") at the same time doesn't eliminate the "fashion bias".
Repeating the experiment ten years later does.