Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future • Hacker News Board

Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future

#11

Post by yan » Tue, Jan 04, 2011, 8:39 PM UTC

zdw wrote: post #3

Krulwich's NPR Science pieces has some of the best verbal delivery, storytelling form, and production values - it's worth listening to the audio version of them. Highly recommended if you're thinking about making a podcast.

Krulwich also co-hosts Radiolab (.org), which is incredible.

Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future

#12

Post by nervechannel » Tue, Jan 04, 2011, 8:40 PM UTC

garyrob wrote: post #4

See http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Wag... ("Why Psychologists Must Change the Way They Analyze Their Data: The Case of Psi".) It demolishes the study referred to in the npr article.

Just reading it now -- seems like a very thorough takedown of the whole thing, in fairly non-technical language.

It makes the very good point that this paper makes lots of statistical tests, and then bases big claims on the small minority that showed a significant effect. This is in no way restricted to psychology, drugs companies for example do this all the time. It's cheating, whether you realize it or not.

Statistical significance only tells you that a result is unlikely to be a fluke -- not that it definitely isn't a fluke -- but the more tests you do, the sooner you'll see a fluke on average.

Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future

#13

Post by srean » Tue, Jan 04, 2011, 9:01 PM UTC

zafka wrote: post #7

garyrob wrote: post #4

See http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Wag... ("Why Psychologists Must Change the Way They Analyze Their Data: The Case of Psi".) It demolishes the study referred to in the npr article.

So far the best line in this paper is: "Returning to Laplace’s Principle, we should obviously assign our prior belief in precognition a number very close to zero, perhaps slightly larger than the probability of, say, goldfish being able to talk"

You touch upon a very important point. For some reason we are very bad at Bayesian reasoning. Sometime it leads to unsubtantiable opinions http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1909576 but could be very damaging if faulty reasoning is used by a jury or a judge...."the person can be guilty or not guilty so the probabilities are 50:50".

I would be a lot more relieved if people with the power over other peoples lives grokked Baye's rule and priors.

Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future

#14

Post by gfodor » Tue, Jan 04, 2011, 9:04 PM UTC

bluekeybox wrote: post #5

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The classic 5% (or even 0.1%) statistical threshold is sometimes not enough. See here for an easy-to-understand example of why that is the case: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_... In other news, capital punishment has been installed for science journalists publishing articles that contain a question in the title that can be succinctly a…

Can someone please, please explain this to me? I've never understood why the oft stated line "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is anything other than a clever saying. Why should it be that things that follow your intuition require any less rigor to prove than those that do not, and vice versa? Presumably there should be no subjectivity to cold hard science; evidence is evidence, and a certain quantity of evidence should reflect fact equally well regardless of how unusual that fact is.

edit: just to note, nowhere in constructing a statistical test is it required that the creator decide how "extraordinary" the null hypothesis is.

Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future

#15

Post by danparsonson » Tue, Jan 04, 2011, 9:05 PM UTC

garyrob wrote: post #4

See http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Wag... ("Why Psychologists Must Change the Way They Analyze Their Data: The Case of Psi".) It demolishes the study referred to in the npr article.

That was a refreshing read, thanks for posting it. It took me a moment to understand the important difference between exploratory and confirmatory experiments - that you can find patterns in anything if you look hard enough, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything until you repeat the process but look for the specific pattern you noticed previously. Reminded me of the Bible Code theory from the 90's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_code)

Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future

#16

Post by kenjackson » Tue, Jan 04, 2011, 9:23 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #14

bluekeybox wrote: post #5

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The classic 5% (or even 0.1%) statistical threshold is sometimes not enough. See here for an easy-to-understand example of why that is the case: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_... In other news, capital punishment has been installed for science journalists publishing articles that contain a question in the title that can be succinctly a…

Can someone please, please explain this to me? I've never understood why the oft stated line "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is anything other than a clever saying. Why should it be that things that follow your intuition require any less rigor to prove than those that do not, and vice versa? Presumably there should be no subjectivity to cold hard science; evidence is evidence, and a certain quan…

Why you ask? Because it won't be believed otherwise. Causal proofs of a statistical nature aren't math proofs. They aren't, generally at least, proving fundamental relations that resist all dispute. Rather they are simply persuasive.

To be persuaded of something you already strongly believe is far easier than something you don't believe. And really the key word is persuade. It's not that people can prove the sun will come up tomorrow, but they can persuade you that it will. .

Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future

#17

Post by ewjordan » Tue, Jan 04, 2011, 9:24 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #14

bluekeybox wrote: post #5

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The classic 5% (or even 0.1%) statistical threshold is sometimes not enough. See here for an easy-to-understand example of why that is the case: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_... In other news, capital punishment has been installed for science journalists publishing articles that contain a question in the title that can be succinctly a…

Can someone please, please explain this to me? I've never understood why the oft stated line "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is anything other than a clever saying. Why should it be that things that follow your intuition require any less rigor to prove than those that do not, and vice versa? Presumably there should be no subjectivity to cold hard science; evidence is evidence, and a certain quan…

It's simply the way Bayesian statistics work: if the prior probability of something happening is very low, then for me to flip from thinking "didn't happen" to "did" it will take some new information that is very powerful.

If you think that's illogical, I'd ask you to consider why a teacher is more likely to accept the excuse "my dog ate my homework" than "aliens kidnapped me and stole it". You seem to be arguing that given that the evidences are equal (a mere statement from a kid), the teacher should properly consider both occurrences to be equally likely.

Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future

#18

Post by jazzyb » Tue, Jan 04, 2011, 9:27 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #14

bluekeybox wrote: post #5

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The classic 5% (or even 0.1%) statistical threshold is sometimes not enough. See here for an easy-to-understand example of why that is the case: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_... In other news, capital punishment has been installed for science journalists publishing articles that contain a question in the title that can be succinctly a…

Can someone please, please explain this to me? I've never understood why the oft stated line "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is anything other than a clever saying. Why should it be that things that follow your intuition require any less rigor to prove than those that do not, and vice versa? Presumably there should be no subjectivity to cold hard science; evidence is evidence, and a certain quan…

I believe what the saying means is this: If a theory X is accepted as true, then that implies that some amount of reasonable evidence exists in support of X. If we are to prove ~X, then we must show not only evidence in favor of ~X but also explain why the evidence in favor of ~X is stronger than the evidence in favor of X (e.g. using better instruments results in more precise measurements). The new evidence must be more "extraordinary" in the sense that it must be strong enough to overturn the evidence in support of the "ordinary claim".

The line "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is just more poetic than the paragraph above.

Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future

#19

Post by nostromo » Tue, Jan 04, 2011, 9:34 PM UTC

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" -- and I wouldn't count these small studies as extraordinary.

Unfortunatley, publishing these kind of claims prematurely help the more gullible among us to fall for ridiculous claims from psychics and others who would take advantage of them. (The authors of "The Secret", I'm looking at you.)

Commenters on NPR's website (not exactly the dumbest audience online) have already shown this problem; "All of you criticizing this need to open up your minds" and "The future, as well as the past, influence our dreams."

Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future

#20

Post by Qz » Tue, Jan 04, 2011, 9:39 PM UTC

Wow, the word retyping test seems like a total scam. Of course you're better able to recall words after a test in which you were already better able to recall those words. It's called memory. Correlation, not causation, as the maxim goes.