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CIA Star Gate Project: An Overview (1993) [pdf]

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Re: CIA Star Gate Project: An Overview (1993) [pdf]

#111

Post by mmooss »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #60
diogenes_atx wrote: post #30

No surprise here. The geniuses at the CIA failed to anticipate the fall of the Soviet Union, ignored the warning signs about 9/11, and falsely claimed there were "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq during the American invasion in 2003. Apparently the so-called intelligence agency was busy with important research on "telepathy," "psychokinesis" and other "para-psychological phenomena."

I thought the story was the CIA and other intelligence said there are not wmds, but the bush whitehouse said there were anyhow and invaded all the same.

It was more complicated, from what I've seen:

I think CIA analysts said no WMDs, but the CIA head personally told the President that the case for WMDs was a "slam dunk" - maybe just a kiss-ass moment, but something to learn from: those moments have consequences.

But generally not getting the answers they wanted, VP Cheney and/or SecDef Rumsfeld setup their own mini-intelligence agency in the Department of Defense which produced their desired results, including WMD and also Iraq somehow being involved in 9/11. They relied heavily on an informant that they code-named "Curveball". Seriously.

Re: CIA Star Gate Project: An Overview (1993) [pdf]

#112

Post by stevenhuang »

someothherguyy wrote: post #70

https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads...

His analysis is flawed.

> Despite Professor Hyman's continued protests about parapsychology lacking repeatability, I have never seen a skeptic attempt to perform an experiment with enough trials to even come close to insuring success. The parapsychologists who have recently been willing to take on this challenge have indeed found success in their experiments, as described in my original report.

If the phenomenon we are trying to study is somehow intelligent, then the observer effect will see to it that skeptics will never progress towards understanding until they're somehow "ready", whatever that means.

https://ics.uci.edu/~jutts/response.html

Re: CIA Star Gate Project: An Overview (1993) [pdf]

#113

Post by stevenhuang »

fumeux_fume wrote: post #86
sxp wrote: post #44

For those who want to consider the mundane explanation about remote viewing: remember that humans can still be surprised by the birthday paradox and other synchronicities that occur when sampling data at large scale. So across thousands of sessions, the weak coincidences documented by the Stargate project are expected. For those who want a skeptical & cynical view: if remote viewing works, it would be part of the sta…

Just go to wikipedia for the mundane explanation: data leakage to the judges of poorly designed experiments. Absolutely zero reproducibility.

You are wrong. There has been many reproductions. People don't study it because there is no known mechanism of action and so it's fringe.

Jessica Utts, a well respected statistician

> Despite Professor Hyman's continued protests about parapsychology lacking repeatability, I have never seen a skeptic attempt to perform an experiment with enough trials to even come close to insuring success. The parapsychologists who have recently been willing to take on this challenge have indeed found success in their experiments, as described in my original report.

https://ics.uci.edu/~jutts/response.html

Re: CIA Star Gate Project: An Overview (1993) [pdf]

#114

Post by krackers »

stevenhuang wrote: post #113
fumeux_fume wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just go to wikipedia for the mundane explanation: data leakage to the judges of poorly designed experiments. Absolutely zero reproducibility.

You are wrong. There has been many reproductions. People don't study it because there is no known mechanism of action and so it's fringe. Jessica Utts, a well respected statistician > Despite Professor Hyman's continued protests about parapsychology lacking repeatability, I have never seen a skeptic attempt to perform an experiment with enough trials to even come close to insuring success. The parapsychologists who h…

Before you can define statistical significance, you have to clearly define the success criteria. From what I see, remote viewing produces vague results, so some amount of human interpretation is necessarily. What counts as a "hit"? If you look at "verified" examples from the social-rv site GP mentioned, some of them match only in an abstract sense, but are still counted as a success. The more reliable thing would be to remote view a coin flip and have the person say heads or tails, but that's not how the stargate experiments were defined and I haven't been able to find any trials like this.

Edit: Actually I did find at least one experiment-ish, which is more precognition rather than remote viewing to determine crypto coin price trends [1]. Seems 53 correct predictions, 50 incorrect predictions which is well within statistical chance.

Also seems the social-rv GP linked will eventually have a remote-viewing for real-world events prediction-market type thing. Now that's interesting, and they cleverly avoid it devolving into a traditional prediction market by introducing indirection where two images are arbitrarily assigned to the outcome (true/false) and the person RVs the image, without knowledge of which outcome that image represents.

[1] https://reddit.com/r/remoteviewing/comments/lg6sf2/precognit...

Re: CIA Star Gate Project: An Overview (1993) [pdf]

#115

Post by krackers »

krackers wrote: post #108
sxp wrote: post #44

For those who want to consider the mundane explanation about remote viewing: remember that humans can still be surprised by the birthday paradox and other synchronicities that occur when sampling data at large scale. So across thousands of sessions, the weak coincidences documented by the Stargate project are expected. For those who want a skeptical & cynical view: if remote viewing works, it would be part of the sta…

That social-rv is really interesting, apparently the target is randomly assigned _after_ submission, so it's not just remote viewing but also precognition? The popular ones on the "explore sessions" are a very close match, but if you look at other predictions by those accounts, they're less sure. It's very easy to form a connection between any two images if you allow abstracted forms of similarity, and fundamentally…

Hm I did notice this bit "list of up to the last 50 targets you've done (so you don't get duplicate targets too frequently)" which seems to invalidate some of the methodology. If the target is never among the last 50 you've done that skews sample space a bit. The fact that this needs to be done also seems to imply the set of images is not that large...

And this is worsened by the fact that the LLM-based auto scoring explicitly uses the last 10 as decoy targets

>When you submit a session, the system collects your last 10 targets (including the current target) to create a pool of possible matches. A multimodal AI agent is presented with your complete session (including all drawings, text, and data) along with all 10 targets from the pool. The agent is instructed to analyze and rank the targets based on how well they match the session content.

The protocol otherwise seems good, but the specific carveouts here would seem to bias results.

The source for the judging is at https://github.com/Social-RV/comparative-judging which is the part which would need to be studied carefully. At first glance, it exposes raw filenames to the LLM which might bias things. The ranking logic also seems a bit sketchy, it does some tournament-style elimination thing which I haven't analyzed thoroughly but if decoys are eliminated in an earlier round it could bias things compared to just asking the LLM to order the 10 images based on similarity in a single-pass which is obviously unbiased.

Re: CIA Star Gate Project: An Overview (1993) [pdf]

#116

Post by someothherguyy »

stevenhuang wrote: post #112
someothherguyy wrote: post #70

https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads...

His analysis is flawed. > Despite Professor Hyman's continued protests about parapsychology lacking repeatability, I have never seen a skeptic attempt to perform an experiment with enough trials to even come close to insuring success. The parapsychologists who have recently been willing to take on this challenge have indeed found success in their experiments, as described in my original report. If the phenomenon we a…

She also says

" There is little benefit in continuing experiments designed to offer proof, since there is little more to be offered to anyone who does not accept the current collection of data. "

Which is an insane thing to say and reveals her motivated reasoning.

Re: CIA Star Gate Project: An Overview (1993) [pdf]

#118

Post by stevenhuang »

someothherguyy wrote: post #116
stevenhuang wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His analysis is flawed. > Despite Professor Hyman's continued protests about parapsychology lacking repeatability, I have never seen a skeptic attempt to perform an experiment with enough trials to even come close to insuring success. The parapsychologists who have recently been willing to take on this challenge have indeed found success in their experiments, as described in my original report. If the phenomenon we a…

She also says " There is little benefit in continuing experiments designed to offer proof, since there is little more to be offered to anyone who does not accept the current collection of data. " Which is an insane thing to say and reveals her motivated reasoning.

The results have been collected using experimental rigour stricter than medical trials.

The one's engaged in motivated reasoning are skeptics like you and Randy who refuse to engage with the data because of, ironically, motivated reasoning. The data is clear. Either point out the flaws in the experimental protocols or consider you have some metaphysical priors to update.

Re: CIA Star Gate Project: An Overview (1993) [pdf]

#119

Post by [deleted] »

escanda wrote: post #73

I am from Spain and know some agents. Those are also known events under the freemasonry term umbrella. I have seen, after writing through Tor to a known intelligence agency, a ministry of a cabinet through my inner eye, or whatever you may call it. Black and white video so to speak. I was even threatened by a twice loaded gun so I could go away to my own businesses in that affair. I can talk without being in the same…

[deleted]

Re: CIA Star Gate Project: An Overview (1993) [pdf]

#120

Post by jjk166 »

squigz wrote: post #101
jjk166 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For those who want a skeptical & cynical view: if remote viewing works, it would be part of the standard strategy of every hedge fund. Please don't use the efficient capitalism argument. By that logic, if polio vaccines worked then why didn't 1940s pharma companies sell polio vaccines back when people were getting polio? Remote viewing is bunk, but not because hedge funds in their omniscience have determined it to…

> Please don't use the efficient capitalism argument. By that logic, if polio vaccines worked then why didn't 1940s pharma companies sell polio vaccines back when people were getting polio? Because they didn't know about such a vaccine. We know that remote viewing "exists" I think that GP's point - that, if such things exist, they would actually be utilized - is a good one. The framing might not be great but it's als…

The concept of vaccines had been known for centuries during the 1940s. No one had ever gotten a polio vaccine to work. Imagine if they had concluded since it had never been done that it therefore could not work.

We are aware of remote viewing as a concept but it does not currently exist - no one has ever gotten it to work. There are very good reasons to think it can't work, but the lack of a practical implementation alone is not such a reason.

The issue is not capitalism specifically, it just frequently takes that form. Firefighters not doing something is equally fallacious proof of impossibility.

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