Has anyone investigated Dean Radin's work? It demonstrates similar statistical effects in a huge number of experiments. He has put forth quantum entanglement as the explanation.
Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
21–30 of 123 posts
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#22"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) hav…
> All of you criticizing this need to open up your minds
This type of attitude is infuriating - if a claim can survive the crucible of peer review then it we can be much, much more certain that it is true and correct. If humans were to posses a limited form of precognition that would be awesome - but before we can claim to posses a thing we must be sure that it is real.
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#23My bet is a crappy pseudo-random number generator, or other software bug.
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#24See 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. Statist…
the more tests you do, the sooner you'll see a fluke on average
In other words, if you toss a coin 1,000 times, then it's hideously unlikely that you'll see a run of 100 consecutive heads. But if you toss the coin 100,000,000 times, you shouldn't be too surprised to see that 100-toss run buried in there somewhere, even though the odds of getting 100 in a row are so small.
Right?
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#25Figuring out what time is may be what causes civilizations to go extinct. Once you figure out how to probe the earlier states of the universe you find everything vanishes, along with the evidence that the civilization ever existed. This may be why our visible universe is not teeming with chit-chat.
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#26Wow, 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.
I think you missed the point.
1. People recalled as many as possible.
2. People were divided into two groups, control and experimental.
3. Experimental group was asked to retype the words.
4. Control group was asked to go home.
5. Experimental group found to score better on initial test.
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
This is true, but I'd add a caution: just because something seems outlandish or improbable doesn't mean it actually has a low prior probability. Human intuition on what's weird and what's not is not a reliable oracle of prior probability. If you're going to give the prior an actual number, you better base it on actual facts.
In your example, based on existing data, it is indeed fair - some dogs do sometimes eat homework, whereas there are no verified accounts of aliens stealing it. So that's a legitimate adjustment of priors. Particularly if you actually have data on the incidence of paper-hungry dogs.
But in science and philosophy, there's lots of important questions for which we can't legitimately calculate priors, and "it would be too weird" is not at all relevant when determining their values.
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Statist…
the more tests you do, the sooner you'll see a fluke on average In other words, if you toss a coin 1,000 times, then it's hideously unlikely that you'll see a run of 100 consecutive heads. But if you toss the coin 100,000,000 times, you shouldn't be too surprised to see that 100-toss run buried in there somewhere, even though the odds of getting 100 in a row are so small. Right?
Ugh, reminds me of the undergrad psych research I participated in. When your original hypothesis doesn't turn out, just run correlations on your data until you find something to write about. Publish or perish, right?
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#29[deleted]
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#30I'm going to memorize the winning numbers from tonight's Mega Millions draw after they are announced.