Re: cost: When the viewing in the military intelligence unit was good, it was more than cost-effective; they had more paying taskers than they had viewers to handle it, for years. When the viewing ceased to be very good, it ceased to be cost-effective.
Re: psi: Remote Viewing is the combination of psychic functioning (an art) and a science-based protocol (science). If there is no science, it is not RV, it is just psychic. If there is no psi, obviously it is not RV, it is just science. The sense of legitimacy that RV gained for itself in the past via both intelligence and research was based on that unique combination.
Most of what has been presented and taught to the public is just the psi. Which is not too different than what humans have had since the dawn of time. Except that in some cases, at least, a good deal of ritual and cloying belief systems are gone, and the process is done with a bit more of a logical approach. Depends on the person.
There is nothing wrong with psychic work. The reason I am interested in remote viewing -- apart from having been a medical-model skeptic at one point, so probably I would not have been able to accept it enough to truly learn and practice it, were it not for the science and historical-intell element -- is because the science-based protocol prevents fraud, delusion, and an endless list of potential error (in process).
It does not make it accurate; RV's science-based protocol is not about psi, it is about "preventing everything that is NOT psi from polluting the process."
At least, everything external to the viewer. The psi part is still an art and still subject to the same issues traditional psi is in that respect (symbolism, representationalism, mistranslation, miscommunication, misacquired target, analytical assumptions (and filters and distortions and...), emotional filters, aesthetic influences, and that doesn't even start on the endless list of things that can impinge on results based on non-viewer issues that are more subtle points of protocol related to target selection, tasking, feedback, interdependency of teams or tasker/viewers, and so on.
Back to the first point: the appropriate use of remote viewing, like any other form of intelligence gathering, is in concert with other sources of information. And, like any tool, you aim it toward what you can fairly well do with it. That is simply a matter of creative management.
I might add that there seems to be some assumption here that what we are suggesting would be an appropriate single-test public-demo on a layman's-forum for remote viewing, somehow constitutes the entirety of what remote viewing at large can do. This would not be accurate. Different viewers have different strengths, just like musicians or athletes or any other skill, and in an intell context viewers may train specifically to a certain kind of tasking(s). Also, the double-blind protocol ensures lack of information transfer, which helps vastly with evaluation of data afterward, so while it may be only 'occasional' that one gets highly specific and/or abstracted information, a good tasker is able to re-task (just assign it in a new number and drop it back into the tasking qeue for that viewer) several times until they get the kind of information they wanted. This however is a different situation than a one-off 'demo' on the internet. So, what is "appropriate" for a test/demo on the internet, should not be construed to constitute what is "possible" for a long term, developed viewer team.
RC