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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]

#61

Post by sxp »

bfuller wrote: post #58
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…

What would be the price of revealing this information advantage?

There have been hedge funds and other investment groups that claim to use RV. (At least according to Google and pro-RV books.) They also claim to be able to beat the market. Based on those anecdotes, I think any hedge fund that thinks they can use RV will publicly brag about it to get more investors.

None of these groups can replicate their results beyond the initial claims. This is strong evidence that positive results in RV are just due to selection bias, specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias. If those investment groups could actually replicate their results, they would still be major names and others would be actively trying to copy them since it should only take a couple of millions of dollars to find capable RV candidates.

The non-skeptical view is that if people try to predict the stock market via RV, they will interfere with the future and their prediction ability will decrease. But when weighing this hypothesis against the hypothesis that RV is just selection bias, the latter wins due to Occam's Razor.

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

#62

Post by diogenes_atx »

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.

A Google search using the terms "did the CIA claim there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003?" yields the following information:

The CIA and the Bush administration claimed Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in 2003, building the case for invasion on assertions that Saddam Hussein had active WMD programs and failed to comply with UN resolutions, though these claims proved to be incorrect after the invasion found no stockpiles, leading to later acknowledgments of intelligence failures...

CIA's Role: The CIA provided assessments, including classified estimates, stating high confidence in Iraq's possession of biological and chemical weapons, which formed the basis for public statements by officials...

Intelligence Failures: Investigations later confirmed that the intelligence community was "simply wrong" in its assessments, highlighting failures in analysis and sourcing, despite intelligence professionals believing their information at the time...

In summary, the CIA and U.S. government did assert the presence of WMDs, but these claims were later disproven, revealing significant flaws in the intelligence used to justify the war.

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

#63

Post by the_af »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #59
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…

The issue with remote viewing as the CIA understood it was not that it didn’t work. By all means there are documents that indicated it did work. The difficulty however was that the training program was unreliable and insufficient to establish a reliable pipeline to competency like other military skills.

The "difficulty" with remote viewing is nonsense pseudoscience and crackpottery.

It absolutely does not work. Not "unreliably", but not work at all.

This reminds me of that one time on HN when someone tried to convince me that ritual witchcraft (I think they called it blood magic) on servers was a real thing, necessary to make them work, and my dismissal was typical of narrow minded people.

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

#64

Post by the_af »

noworld wrote: post #53
akatechis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the CIA report predates the attack, which is especially strange It's only strange if you believe the CIA released notes from their super-secret psychic program rather than the more plausible explanation that this is disinformation that was backdated for a boost of prestige.

Can you give me some evidence that this document was backdated? I'm not saying the government isn't shady AF, but I just wonder what's behind the immediate jump to "this has to be BS" rather than keeping an open mind.

Extraordinary claims (that RV is a real phenomenon) require extraordinary evidence. The null hypothesis is the default position, it requires no extraordinary evidence; the opposite does.

This is scientific method 101. Let's not pretend we're not familiar with it just because some dodgy CIA document surfaced.

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

#65

Post by the_af »

squigz wrote: post #29
noworld wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first PDF is the record of a remote viewing session from 2 days before the USS Stark incident, and it is eerily similar to the incident. The feelings and "atmosphere" (can't think of a better word for it) sound like what you might expect on a ship being attacked by a random missile. For example: 1. The drawing on p. 7 looks like the superstructure of a warship. 2. The next few pages might describe what it feels l…

How many of these 'remote viewing' sessions didn't bear any similarities to anything? If you throw a bunch of stuff at a wall, some of it is going to stick. Especially when it appears to be random words that can be applicable to millions of situations.

> If you throw a bunch of stuff at a wall, some of it is going to stick. Especially when it appears to be random words that can be applicable to millions of situations.

Indeed. I'm amazed so many HN regulars are surprised by this. It's how horoscopes work, we've known this for centuries now.

Have people forgotten the scientific method, the standards of proof, etc?

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

#66

Post by therobots927 »

FuturisticLover wrote: post #25
noworld wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first PDF is the record of a remote viewing session from 2 days before the USS Stark incident, and it is eerily similar to the incident. The feelings and "atmosphere" (can't think of a better word for it) sound like what you might expect on a ship being attacked by a random missile. For example: 1. The drawing on p. 7 looks like the superstructure of a warship. 2. The next few pages might describe what it feels l…

Yeah, Remote Viewing should be a real-time event. This is Precognition.

Why does it need to be real- time? If rv is possible then it’s naive to assume that time is somehow “special” vs 3D. It’s possible that time is not unfolding linearly, that is only an illusion. “Remote” could involve accessing information from along the time dimension.

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

#67

Post by [deleted] »

an0malous wrote: post #35
squigz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of these 'remote viewing' sessions didn't bear any similarities to anything? If you throw a bunch of stuff at a wall, some of it is going to stick. Especially when it appears to be random words that can be applicable to millions of situations.

> Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is ex- pected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of a magnitude similar to those found in government sponsored research at SRI and SAIC…

[deleted]

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

#68

Post by someothherguyy »

an0malous wrote: post #35
squigz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of these 'remote viewing' sessions didn't bear any similarities to anything? If you throw a bunch of stuff at a wall, some of it is going to stick. Especially when it appears to be random words that can be applicable to millions of situations.

> Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is ex- pected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of a magnitude similar to those found in government sponsored research at SRI and SAIC…

That says 2019, but it was published in 1995:

https://ics.uci.edu/~jutts/air.pdf

This goes into way more detail and covers Utts's work.

https://www.priory-of-sion.com/biblios/images/mumford.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Utts

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

#69

Post by therobots927 »

diogenes_atx wrote: post #42
logicchains wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>falsely claimed there were "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq during the American invasion in 2003 This was due to malice not ignorance/incompetence.

Well in that case, the CIA is not merely stupid and incompetent, it's deliberately evil. How many innocent civilians were slaughtered in Iraq during the American occupation?

Evil and apparently experimenting with magic. Sounds like a recipe for a good time.
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