This forum was so much stronger in the early years when Alex was genuinely curious about the existence of psi and had a real desire to "follow the data"...now he's 100% certain he's right about the existence of psi and the moderation has unfortunately followed suit. We now have a true echo chamber who feels empowered to belittle anyone who dare question this certainty and discuss the limitations of the data and the evidence. It demonstrates a real insecurity on the part of proponents who will no longer discuss the data, imo. Sure, it's comfortable to have this place on the web where everyone pretends that the discussion is over, but it's hardly productive towards improving psi's profile in mainstream science, which I still think is one of the most important goals we have as proponents. I know there are many hard-liners here who will say "screw mainstream", and have no interest in convincing anyone about psi, and I get that, to a point, but I still hold out hope that the existence of psi will eventually permeate the mainstream ideology, and I believe that pretending the discussion is over is counter-productive towards that goal.
I can't speak for Alex, but although I would probably be classed as a proponent, I would class myself as extremely curious and very suspicious of the conventional scientific take on issues like consciousness, and evolution.
Nevertheless, I have been stunned over the years at how poorly sceptics of various sorts have performed in the podcasts. This has certainly influenced me a lot!
I have been amazed by how little guidance I have had from Alex regarding my role here (though I had a discussion with him and several other people before banning FLS), so I am speaking from a completely personal point of view. Although I don't want to go into specific cases, I can absolutely assure you that there is no witch hunt of sceptics going on! Indeed, we still have several total sceptics who contribute regularly. I would also encourage any sceptic reading this to come on and try to make a the conventional scientific case in as effective a way as possible. All I ask is that everyone here - sceptic or not - presents an honest case without playing games, and without abuse.
I certainly don't want to "screw mainstream", because obviously somehow all the topics we discuss have to relate to conventional science in some way! What I do think has happened, is that people realise that the level of debate here is fairly high, and that simply ranting and sneering isn't acceptable. I would say that supporting the sceptical position in a thought out way has become really hard because in a sense you really have to explain away the whole of Irreducible Mind, lots of NDE evidence, n-fold blinded medium studies, Dean Radin's presentiment experiments, etc - which takes some doing!
Even if we don't get too much sceptical debate here, there is still plenty to debate, because the only approximate consensus here, is that the standard scientific position will need to be modified!
David