This violates our common sense, but it doesn't necessarily violate physics. We've known for a long time from quantum mechanics that time may not fit with our preconceived notions of what we want to think it is. Entropy only means that time moves forward. The rest, such as that we can't know the future, we've just assumed.
Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
101–110 of 123 posts
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#102"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…
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. True. But on the other hand, publishing ridiculous claims and incorrect results is a necessary part of science. When we publish only results we know to be correct, because they agree with mainstream beliefs, we introduce a bias into the sci…
> In reality, if you publish 20 experiments with p=0.05 [1], 1 of them should be incorrect.
In reality it doesn't turn out this way because the results that get written and published tend to be biased in favour of novelty and demonstrating a relationship rather than the absence of one. How many similar experiments could have been terminated, never submitted or not published because they failed to show anything notable? This is one of reasons... 'Why Most Published Research Findings Are False' http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/
That meta-study applied to medical studies and I think this genre would probably fair even worse when it came to long term replicability.
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#103The question is. Do they see the future or make the future. Somedays I'm convinced computers react to my moods.
If you're convinced computer react to your moods, you should consider reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There's an entire chapter dedicated to the concept. It's philosophy, not science, but interesting and possibly wise nonetheless.
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. True. But on the other hand, publishing ridiculous claims and incorrect results is a necessary part of science. When we publish only results we know to be correct, because they agree with mainstream beliefs, we introduce a bias into the sci…
If you're going to use highly subjective frequentist statistics at all, p minimum gold standard for extraordinary claims. If the phenomenon is real, and not bad statistics, it only requires two and a half times as many subjects to get p < 0.001 instead of p < 0.05. Physicists, who don't want to have to put up with this crap, use p < 0.0001. p < 0.05 is asking for trouble.
A complication is that if the effect were real, all our ideas of prior vs. posterior probability would need re-thinking. The hypothesis is that humans can be influenced by posterior events. That includes the experimenters.
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#105"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…
Oh big deal, who cares if some people have their faith in the paranormal strengthened. Something like one in two people or more believe in what scientists would consider paranormal already. Good scientists know there is much yet to be discovered.
The problem is that these people are allowed to vote and hold office.
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#106So it looks like I'll be studying my Mega Millions picks tonight. My methodology: 1. Buy ticket 2. Go AWOL until after the drawing. 3. Study numbers 4. Look up results 5. Profit
Judging from the porn study, you'll get better results if you write a script to screen-scrape the winning numbers after they're posted online, then display them to you alongside some hot pron amidst several sets of randomly chosen lottery numbers alongside SFW pictures.
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I repeat, you do not need 1000 times as many subjects to get results that are 1000 times as significant! If 40 subjects gets you results with p all the published results being real effects, instead of most of them failing to replicate when tested, sounds like a great tradeoff to me. And I suspect the ultimate reason it's not done this way... is that scientists in certain fields would publish a lot fewer papers, not s…
"1000+", not "1000x". Also, I'm assuming bigfudge was talking about p < 0.0001, given the comparison made to physicists.
Yes - thanks. The current norm for a 'suitably powered' trial of a psychotherapy is about 300. We've just got a trial funded for that number (admittedly in a challenging patient population) which will cost about £2.5m in research and treatment costs. We would love to run 1000 patients and start looking at therapist-client interactions, individual differences in treatment suitability but that's out of the question.
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, then let's funding psychology like we fund physics. I would love to run 1000+ patient studies to test psychotherapies, and in fact we'd be able to answer some really interesting questions if we did, but there is currently no way of doing this.
Let's fund psychology like that when the psychologists define their hypotheses before the experiment begins as well as physicists do.
That's a cheap shot. Our trial will publish a detailed protocol and analysis plan, as do most large, publicly funded trials. Small-scale experimental work is a different matter. I personally agree that all experiments which could end up in peer reviewed journals should be registered before participants are recruited.
This would be simple to do by submitting ethics applications and an analysis plan to a trusted third party which would only release them once the author is in a position to publish, or at a pre-agreed cutoff (perhaps 2 years), whichever is the shorter (to avoid scooping). Perhaps I should set something up...
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. True. But on the other hand, publishing ridiculous claims and incorrect results is a necessary part of science. When we publish only results we know to be correct, because they agree with mainstream beliefs, we introduce a bias into the sci…
This is why I'm an advocate of accepting/rejecting scientific papers based solely on methodology, with referees being given no information about the conclusions and with authors being forbidden from post-hoc tweaks. A million times yes. Also: no publication without the experiment's methodology and criteria for success having been registered prior to the experiment's commencement.
agreed - I replied to a comment above with this suggestion. It would be nice if grant bodies started requiring this for all funded research, and kept (public) track of researchers with a bulging file drawer.
Re: Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future
#110I am embarrassed to ask, but can someone explain the word flashing test a different way? For some reason something is not clicking for me the way it is written on NPR.