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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]

#121

Post by lijok »

the_af wrote: post #110
lijok wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it surprising that they can’t talk about it in concrete terms given “ all these people supposedly worked on things much more exotic”?

Because talk is cheap, but when pressed, a crackpot like Puthoff cannot provide a single relevant detail. Had he been involved in actual top secret projects, he would shut up about them; instead he fantasizes. He also has a history of quackery, belief in the paranormal, and being duped by Uri Geller. I mean, he's the worst kind of crackpot: a sucker who believes magic tricks are real and will evangelize about it.

You didn't answer the question, you just went on another one of your rants. Why is it surprising that he can’t talk about it in concrete terms given “ all these people supposedly worked on things much more exotic”?

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

#122

Post by lijok »

the_af wrote: post #103
lijok wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude claims “there are documents that indicated it did work”. You didn’t enquire about them, just completely dismissed it. That is indeed typical of narrow minded people.

Dudes claim all kinds of crap online. He already posted a PDF that indicated nothing of the sort. If you will believe anything that seems true to you, because someone online said so, without any weight of evidence, and which is widely considered pseudoscience (go check)... I have a bridge to sell you. What's with the wave of anti-intellectualism on HN of all places? Are we really trying to debate whether debunked cra…

You're one of the dudes online - never forget that.

Examining something != believing it, it's step 2 in the scientific method, with which I advise you get familiar with before invoking it as much as you have in this thread.

If all you have to contribute to the discussion is thrashing around, maybe stay out of it?

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

#123

Post by the_af »

lijok wrote: post #121
the_af wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because talk is cheap, but when pressed, a crackpot like Puthoff cannot provide a single relevant detail. Had he been involved in actual top secret projects, he would shut up about them; instead he fantasizes. He also has a history of quackery, belief in the paranormal, and being duped by Uri Geller. I mean, he's the worst kind of crackpot: a sucker who believes magic tricks are real and will evangelize about it.

You didn't answer the question, you just went on another one of your rants. Why is it surprising that he can’t talk about it in concrete terms given “ all these people supposedly worked on things much more exotic”?

I did answer, but I realize arguing with parapsychology believers is a fool's errand.

Puthoff is a crank. Of course he won't provide evidence of participating in top secret projects that produced any results: he doesn't have it. He can only speak in the vaguest terms typical of pseudoscience cranks.

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

#125

Post by the_af »

lijok wrote: post #122
the_af wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dudes claim all kinds of crap online. He already posted a PDF that indicated nothing of the sort. If you will believe anything that seems true to you, because someone online said so, without any weight of evidence, and which is widely considered pseudoscience (go check)... I have a bridge to sell you. What's with the wave of anti-intellectualism on HN of all places? Are we really trying to debate whether debunked cra…

You're one of the dudes online - never forget that. Examining something != believing it, it's step 2 in the scientific method, with which I advise you get familiar with before invoking it as much as you have in this thread. If all you have to contribute to the discussion is thrashing around, maybe stay out of it?

> You're one of the dudes online - never forget that.

I never made any outlandish claims and therefore the onus isn't on me to prove anything.

> Examining something != believing it

But parapschyology has been examined and tested by scientists, and none of it has been verified in independent and controlled conditions. Unlike what the other commenter claimed, there are zero documents indicating RV works. Many of its practitioners have been shown to be frauds, pranksters or cranks (Puthoff thought Uri Geller was a psychic and was fooled by sleight of hand). What new evidence is there? RV isn't a new claim; it's an old debunked claim. Have they won the Amazing Randi prize yet? They could have, if RV was real!

> If all you have to contribute to the discussion is thrashing around, maybe stay out of it?

I'm reminding participants about how the scientific method works, which is important when discussing outlandish claims.

> Maybe stay out of it

???

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

#126

Post by the_af »

finalarbiter wrote: post #13
namanyayg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the first pdf mean? (And does it remind anyone else of an ee cummings poem or is it just me)

The first PDF is the results/notes of someone attempting remote viewing. Given the dates, I agree with the above poster that the similarities are impressive.

The PDF mentions a ship and some sort of unexpected catastrophe (in vague surrounding, horoscope-like terms) but it also mentions "high-powered lasers", Bikini atoll, H-bombs, and the drawings of the alleged ship superstructure look nothing like those of the USS Stark (some of the notes mention a "flight deck" like an aircraft carrier's; while the USS Stark does have a flight deck this is a mostly irrelevant detail about this class of ships). Plus this was done for the CIA, so unsurprisingly any "viewing" would be primed to refer to military hardware and events; imagine if they mentioned McDonald's, ice-cream, and an upcoming football match.

If you exclude H-Bomb, high powered laser, disregard the shapes don't match the USS Stark, and fixate on the coincidences -- pattern-matching, something the human brain has evolved for survival -- of course the similarities will seem impressive. This is "cold reading 101", a known trick. The average tarot reader knows how to do this.

Interestingly, we don't know of any other predictions that widely missed the mark. So if predictions 1 to 10 were made, most wildly inaccurate, but one of them vaguely/partially resembles something that happened some days after, that's not convincing to demonstrate anything but a random result. Let's say another prediction stated "calm waters, US dominance, safe passage, successful mission, happy sailors". How would we assess the accuracy of the predictive method?

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

#127

Post by the_af »

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…

> Jessica Utts, a well respected statistician

No, she isn't. She's a statistician, but mostly known for being in the panel review of Star Gate, and for close associations with parapsychology organizations.

She was already involved in parapsychology, having coauthored papers with the director of Star Gate (a parapsychologist himself) before becoming part of the review panel! You cannot have vested interests in the phenomenon being real if you're going to judge it impartially. You cannot have a relationship with one of the key personnel in the project you're reviewing, and especially not a relationship specifically about the same kind of things you're supposed to review! This is a serious flaw, she shouldn't have been part of the panel.

> There has been many reproductions

Like which ones? A reproduction must be done independently, by scientists without the same sponsors and vested interested. Can you point to these reproductions?

By the way, Star Gate was canceled with the conclusion that the experiments were inconclusive. Had there been reproductions, surely the conclusions would have been different?

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

#128

Post by freejazz »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #99
freejazz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before the evil Europeans set their greedy eyes on the new world there was peace, love, and ecstasy every single day. That's reading a lot into the other post.

“since Europeans first put eyes on it” seems to justify it pretty well.

"500 years of brutality and slaughter in pursuit of profit" no one said it was peaceful before

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

#129

Post by rendx »

lagniappe wrote: post #50
firesteelrain wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true. I didn’t take into account inflation.

Sadly, I don't think any of us did or do.

In case anyone was wondering:

> $2,000,000 in 1991 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $4,759,500.73 today

https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1991?amount=20000...

Second source: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=2%2C000%2C000....

> $4,816,077.27

Still not a lot.

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

#130

Post by krackers »

krackers wrote: post #115
krackers wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess another thing, is that the null hypothesis is that an incorrect image is equally likely to be matched to any of the 10 decoy targets. But this isn't the case, the LLM has its own implicit bias. For instance, if you modeled things as a "bag of words" then longer target descriptions are more likely to match with images that contain bunch of text. So some decoy targets are more likely to be hit than others.

I think to counter this, you'd need to model your null hypothesis as the distribution that results when you have the LLM score a deliberately incorrect image against your target + dummies.

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