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

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

#41

Post by tel »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #31
nostromo wrote: post #19

"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…

I wish I could upvote this 1,000 times.

People occasionally mention p-value calibration and note, sadly, the damage caused by this reckless practice that allows false results to eke through the airtight, 300' tall walls of scientific publication. But there is value in being wrong. It's a part of science.

In a way, it's the MD's White Coat syndrome applied to PhDs. Something that is scientific and written in a journal is necessarily correct in public opinion instead of the rigorously considered opinion it really is. Both paper-reading public and the authors of some of those papers tend to believe this.

And to cover it from a Bayesian point of view, it's pretty vital to keep the culture such that the risk of publishing something incorrect doesn't to strongly dominate the decision to publish. You should be confident talking about your beliefs long before they distribute like deltas.

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

#42

Post by DanielBMarkham »

nostromo wrote: post #19

"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…

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

I agree, but we need to be really clear about what the claims are.

It could be that there is a reproducible 1% "mystery" effect that works from future to past, but only in experiments like this. In which case claim wouldn't be extraordinary, it'd just be something we can't understand.

Remember that he's still in the data gathering stage. If -- and it's a big if -- there is any kind of reproducible pattern that doesn't match known laws, that doesn't mean there is a claim. There is simply data that doesn't fit our current models.

That's why people who push frontiers have to be very, very careful about differentiating the data from the claims.

Lots of guys make lots of money with bogus TV shows and books on stuff like this, and it's a shame: many times there is something unusual in the data, but the claims jump far ahead of any reality. Fear of this effect has probably silenced a lot of little tiny pieces of data that wouldn't make sense -- it's simply too much trouble to have to keep explaining yourself. This might be one of the factors explaining Feynman's story of the Millikan oil drop experiment.

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

#43

Post by cmos »

Fargren wrote: post #40
maxklein wrote: post #33

This is trivial software to write. Why does someone not quickly whip up a web app that does the picture thing as described in the experiment, then we can personally test if we have ESP senses or not? Specs: Two buttons - ESP mode or non-ESP mode. In non-ESP mode, 60 random pictures are shown and we are to guess. Then it gives the correct one. In ESP mode, add some porn. If the results are different, then we have ESP.…

Javascript random is only pseudoalleatory. I think you need a true random number generator to truly test this.

can't it just get one from the server?

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

#44

Post by Fargren »

joeld42 wrote: post #23

My bet is a crappy pseudo-random number generator, or other software bug.

Anotehr article about the same study: http://hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/precognition-real-corn...

From the article : "The sequencing of the pictures on these trials was randomly determined by a randomizing algorithm … and their left/right target positions were determined by an Araneus Alea I hardware-based random number generator."

At the very least they were using Araneus Alea wich is a hardware random number generator, so the numbers were not predictable. It's possible that the "randomizing algorithm" did something dumb and made the sequence not random, but I doubt it.

I think that it's more likely thet the sudy was done so many times that it eventually gave significant results than it is that the sequence was not random. Or maybe prescience is real to some degree, or the study is a statistical glitch.

However the replication package they provide has the compiled program without the source code, and that is a red flag to me.

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

#45

Post by marze »

nostromo wrote: post #19

"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.

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

#46

Post by Gianteye »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #24
nervechannel wrote: post #12

Earlier 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?

You've got it. The other half of the problem is that there's a chance that when you start flipping coins the first 100 flips will all turn up heads. Now, does this mean that the universe is bent and has begun preferentially treating Mr. Lincoln's head different than his backside? Does this mean your testing apparatus is biased? Is this an inherent property of coins? If you stop flipping at 100 it'd very tempting to conclude that this is the case.

The only way to find out is to do enough flips to eliminate the chances of your final result being influenced by statistical flukes. Measuring small differences, like trying to answer "does a coin preferentially land on one side vs the other?" usually takes hundreds of thousands of tests to guarantee you're seeing objective data, rather than seeing patterns in noise.

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

#47

Post by lwat »

Fargren wrote: post #40
maxklein wrote: post #33

This is trivial software to write. Why does someone not quickly whip up a web app that does the picture thing as described in the experiment, then we can personally test if we have ESP senses or not? Specs: Two buttons - ESP mode or non-ESP mode. In non-ESP mode, 60 random pictures are shown and we are to guess. Then it gives the correct one. In ESP mode, add some porn. If the results are different, then we have ESP.…

Javascript random is only pseudoalleatory. I think you need a true random number generator to truly test this.

Random.org can help

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

#48

Post by endtime »

Fargren wrote: post #40
maxklein wrote: post #33

This is trivial software to write. Why does someone not quickly whip up a web app that does the picture thing as described in the experiment, then we can personally test if we have ESP senses or not? Specs: Two buttons - ESP mode or non-ESP mode. In non-ESP mode, 60 random pictures are shown and we are to guess. Then it gives the correct one. In ESP mode, add some porn. If the results are different, then we have ESP.…

Javascript random is only pseudoalleatory. I think you need a true random number generator to truly test this.

Why would psuedorandomness be insufficient? Don't try to hack the JS and the effect should be the same.

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

#49

Post by Eliezer »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #31
nostromo wrote: post #19

"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…

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.

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

#50

Post by qiqing »

Hypothesis #1:

53% in an experiment that has 36 trials? Really? 50% is 18/36, but 19/36 is 52.7%, and 19/35 is 54.3%. Depending on experimental design, if it just so happens that near the end of the 20 minutes, the subject has a tendency stop on one of the last erotic pictures they're like to guess and let the time run out.

Hypothesis #2: Depending on how the computer's random number generator was seeded (and they might have a relatively short repeating sequence), subjects may have, however unconsciously, "learned" to predict the randomness, something they would have insufficient motivation to do in the other set of pictures. [We can test for this by seeing if they were getting better at it over the course of a session.]

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