Princeton ESP Lab to Close 363
Nico M writes " The New York Times reports on the imminent closure of one of the most controversial research units at an ivy league School. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory is due to close, but not because of pressure from the outside. Lab founder Robert G. Jahn has declared, in the article, that they've essentially collected all the data they're going to. The laboratory has conducted studies on extrasensory perception and telekinesis from its cramped quarters in the basement of the university's engineering building since 1979. Its equipment is aging, its finances dwindling. Jahn points the finger at detractors as well: 'If people don't believe us after all the results we've produced, then they never will.'"
Geez. (Score:5, Funny)
My thoughts (Score:5, Funny)
Credibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Yah, that about covers it.
Only saving grace is, they relied on donations, so they weren't wasting money extorted from others, whether by taxes or by tuition.
Re:Credibility (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not exactly ideal academic objectivity.
I don't have any particular reason to believe these guys. At the same time, I have little reason to doubt their methodology. If their paper made a point, it should have at least seriously considered for publication, and not been rejected out of hand.
I'm disappointed in science today.
Extraordinary evidence is needed (Score:5, Informative)
Well, if you check one of their papers [princeton.edu], you'll find the following sentence, on page 7: "While no statistically significant departures of the variance, skew, kurtosis, or higher moments from the appropriate chance values appear in the overall data, regular patterns of certain finer scale features can be discerned." That's an outright confession of fraud. They are saying they cannot find any evidence if they analyze a statistically significant amount of data, so they pick whatever small sample will suit them. It's as if I threw a coin a million times and said: "Oh look! Here I threw ten heads in sequence!"
Further on, in the next page, they state "Given the correlation of operator intentions with the anomalous mean shifts, it is reasonable to search the data for operator-specific features that might establish some pattern of individual operator contributions to the overall results. Unfortunately, quantitative statistical assessment of these is complicated by the unavoidably wide disparity among the operator database sizes, and by the small signal-to-noise ratio of the raw data,
Of course, if they *did* communicate their results by telepathy, then that would be an extraordinary proof. But what they have published is rather underwhelming, can we assume that if they did have any better results they would have published them?
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That's your mistake. ESP is a faith-based science. No real evidence is required.
Re:Extraordinary evidence is needed (Score:4, Insightful)
(mods, if I missed an obscure quote then have mercy
Depends on your definition of "religion" (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Extraordinary evidence is needed (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously? Science does make a number of untestable assumptions, without which it would be impossible to conduct. This is true of every kind of inference. The main difference between science and religion is that science claims to be objective.
We know that's hogwash: for example, in the simplest probability model for discrete parameter estimation (for example, and science does things like this all the time but generally without a strong statistical foundation), it's not possible to know anything useful about the parameter without making an assumption that can't be founded on logic alone. (That is, if you try uniform prior and uniform likelihood distributions - the most objective ("maximum entropy") model you can make - your posterior distribution must be uniform.) For continuous parameter estimation, which science concerns itself with more often, you often can't even formulate an objective model...
The collection of results similar to this are called the "No Free Lunch Theorems," which ought to be studied by everybody doing inference instead of just by machine-learning and AI researchers. These are very low-level proofs: there is no philosophy involved, only math.
The claim that the scientific process leads to objective truth is nothing more than axiomatic. Under certain conditions that, as far as we know, are impossible to verify, it may be true.
Not that I'm saying science should be classified as religion, but thinking rigorously about its claims ought to reduce errors in judgment.
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Go read a theory book, moderator, or catch up on your Bayesian statistics. If you want clarification, reply. If it doesn't make sense, reply. If you think I'm full of it, first read Wolpert, then reply.
When Wolpert published his first "No Free Lunch" argument about inference, it took the machine-learning and AI research communities by storm. It simply hasn't found its way into all studies of inferenc
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Science isn't about an absolute objective truth. It has axioms, and it has theories that are tested. As long as observation is consistent with assumptions, it's pretty hunky dory, though to be useful to build new theories with, it has to be falsifiable too (The assertion of an invisible rhinoceros in my living room isn't falsifiable for example, the theory of how it got there and what make
Re:Extraordinary evidence is needed (Score:4, Insightful)
Not quite. Fraud is where you intentionally fool others. These guys are just unintentionally fooling themselves.
You didn't read it very carefully... (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Obviously, that's a straw man.
he's right, you know. (Score:5, Funny)
-nB
Did you bother to look first? (Score:4, Insightful)
And have you looked at ALL at the details of his methods or any of his published results?
Dismissing evidence based on preconceived belief is called religion. To be scientific you must actually LOOK at the evidence and methods, and consider it using the same methods used to evaluate all other experimental evidence.
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Semantics aside, what did you mean here?
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Note however that a peer reviewed negative result does not, in the scientific world, mean a permanant negative. If it did then the perceptron[http://www.ccs.fau.edu/~bressler/EDU/Co gNeuro/History%20of%20the%20Perceptron.htm] would not have been developed. What it does mean is that current science cannot provide proof.
NOT his only research (Score:4, Interesting)
Um.... we believe you... (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problems with PEAR (Score:5, Informative)
A PEAR experiment involved a participant attempting to influence a random number generator (essentially) in a pre-specified direction over a large number of trials. Because random events are, by nature, random, you can get streaks that are above or below the mean. If you analyze a large enough sample, these streaks can become statistically significant, even though they're essentially meaningless and practically insignificant -- it's similar to the fact that any deviation from the mean, no matter how small, is statistically significant if you measure the entire population. Additionally, while the probability of any particular streak is low (.5^n is the probability of any number of heads flipped in a row, which gets very small when you talk about enough of them), if you have enough random events, those streaks are pretty much guaranteed to appear.
So, that's the logic of the PEAR data analysis. Collect a huge corpus of random events, look for streaks, then call them statistically significant because of their low base probability of appearance and the fact that they deviated at all from the expected mean. Skeptic magazine has a good discussion of the PEAR lab inanity, and I believe James Randi's commentary addresses it a few times.
The claim that PEAR's research wouldn't be reviewed is probably false, by the way. It's most likely that the papers were rejected from mainstream journals for the very reasons I mentioned earlier, or because the PEAR lab had no theoretical explanation for the "results" they observed. Or, of course, it's because their papers seem rather dubious in their lack of data and explanations of how they've arrived at their stated probability values (which I say from having the experience of reading one in a, how shall we say, less than top tier journal). Additionally, the lab's been extremely difficult with regards to their raw data. Randi, for example, has never been able to get ahold of it.
Re:The problems with PEAR (Score:5, Insightful)
Still, I'm sad to see them go. A little openmimndedness can make the world much more fun. I mean, they were named after a fruit!
Re:The problems with PEAR (Score:5, Informative)
The whole point of statistics is that some "streaks" are very improbable if they are coming from a really random source. In that sense, if a random number generator displays such a tendency, it is rather probable that it isn't really random. So, yes, the statistical power (ability to discriminate between small differences) increases with huge sample sizes, but a really random source should fail such tests with probability p=0.95 regardless of sample size. That is because the tests ALWAYS compare the sample with one coming from a truly (theoretically) random source. This is the way those things work.
I would also like to remind (not to you, personally) the difference between statistically significant and meaningful. Even if an absurdly small difference can be inferred with certainty, it remains to be seen whether it matters in actual practice. This is a common cause of confusion, especially when medical epidemiological studies demonstrate a .001% reduction in risk for heart attack in those who eat cucumber every day. The .001% may be true, but it doesn't really matter.
P.
Re:Um.... we believe you... (Score:5, Interesting)
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You can all help prevent the lab from closing... (Score:2)
Now that might be a problem... (Score:2)
Ahem (Score:3, Insightful)
Where can we, the readers, find all these results?
I dunno. You have this big global network of documents called the "World Wide Web". Certainly, you couldn't publish there.
Honestly, I want to see their "results" published to the web, so we can demolish their methodology and their conclusions. Webloggers can always use interesting material to write about.
Which expert panels? What, exactly, were their comments? What constitutes reason to interrupt work? (If your methodology is flawed, then I'd expect that you don't want to interrupt your work, you want to continue it so you can do the experiments again, properly.)
Nobody would accept such vague arguments if this was a new cryptographic algorithm. Why should we be any less skeptical here?
Also (Score:2)
Re:Also (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Winning the challenge would not only get them a million dollars in funding, but *incredible* publicity leading to millions more.
3. They'd be crazy not to take the challenge if they knew they could win it.
4. They haven't taken the challenge.
Conclusion: They never discovered any repeatable paranormal phenomenon. Why am I not surprised?
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If the million dollar challenge you are referring to i
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Re:Also (Score:5, Interesting)
I have. From the FAQ:
1.4. How many people have passed the preliminary test?
None. Most applicants never agree to a proper test protocol, so most are never tested.
1.5. How many people have passed the formal test?
No one has ever taken the formal test, as one must first pass the preliminary test.
2.1. What do you mean by "mutually agreed upon"?
"Mutually agreed upon" means that neither side can force the other side into doing or saying something that they don't want to, and that if no agreement can be reached, the application process is terminated, with no blame or fault attributed to either side.
It's easy to point fingers after a Challenge claim comes to an impasse and say that the other side was being unreasonable. This phrase is used to insure that finger-pointing has no merit.
Randi claims that most applicants never agree to a "proper test protocol", and are never tested. But he also points out that both sides have to agree what that "proper test protocol" is. So either side can basically tank the process by being disagreeable. With a million dollars on the line (not to mention his reputation), you have to believe that Randi has a serious incentive to make sure that nobody passes the test. Apparently the easiest way to do so is to ensure that nobody (or only a very few people) actually gets to take the test.
Again, I'm not arguing that paranormal powers exist. I'm just pointing out that JREF's "Million Dollar Challenge" is little more than a publicity stunt, set up in such a way that they advertise a million dollars being available without ever having to pay out on it (or indeed, even attempt the challenge).
I think that there was a software company is Russia that recently offered a similar challenge. Apparently someone was disputing their claims of being unhackable or uncrackable or something, and the company offerred a large sum of money to anyone who could break their software. The only catch was that you had to fly to Russia on your own dime, and use systems that they configured, and meet all sorts of other restrictive criteria that were specifically constructed to ensure that you could not succeed. The contest wasn't designed to prove anything, it was merely a way for the company to get some free publicity and advertise to perspective customers that "even when offerred x amount of money for demonstrating flaws in our software, nobody has yet been able to do so".
Now if the criteria were set and judged by a neutral third party, then I might have a little more faith in the challenge. But I doubt that would ever happen because JREF would then face the chance (however minute) of actually losing the money and the bragging rights.
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I found the same thing (Score:3, Insightful)
They have to have an absolute prohibition on spending any time or money of their own, since they'd spend a fortune refutin
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Re:Ahem (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ahem (Score:5, Interesting)
Thanks, this has the 50-page paper I was looking for when I saw this story - I remember it from years ago: On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness, With Application to Anomalous Phenomen (1986). Foundations of Physics, 16, No. 8, pp. 721-772 (PDF [princeton.edu]). Now, the Foundations of Physics is not exactly a top-tier journal, but there is some very minimal peer review. The figures present some results that are, on the surface, somewhat surprising. For example, look at Fig. 2, p. 726. I suggested to CSICOP (the Skeptical Inquirer magazine, that I subscribed to) that they have some of their experts do a rebuttal, but even though I got a response that they'd take it under consideration, it apparently never happened. I am still puzzled by this paper.
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What will Dr. Spengler do now? (Score:5, Funny)
They think they're here for marriage counseling. We've kept them waiting for two
hours and we've been gradually increasing the temperature in the room.
It's up to 95 degrees at the moment. Now my assistant is going to enter and ask them if they'd mind waiting another half-hour.
Your results...do not impress (Score:3, Insightful)
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Your Google fu is weak, glasshoppa. The actual quote is "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and Carl Sagan said it (mostly in reference to UFOs).
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WTF does levitation have to do with Extra Sensory PERCEPTION??
Or do you not even know what ESP means?
I'm not taking the labs side here... but your statement is totally ignorant.
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every 2 or 3 in 10,000 outcomes can be changed, I'm not impressed. Those are pretty basically standard statistical anomalies, and to say that they are definate proof of ESP is a very far stretch.
Depends on the methodology. If repeated anomalies are correlated to the instructed direction of influence, then it might be pretty strong evidence of a very weak influence. E.g. the subject is instructed to influence the device to produce high numbers. Over 10,000 trials the device shows a prefence for producing high numbers.
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Re:a lot of effort for... (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean, they're psychic. They know what will happen. And the only thing they get out of it is $1 million and a life forever ruined in the name of science.
Global Consciousness Project (Score:3, Interesting)
The World Trade Center attacks, Princess Diana's death, and other events with long lasting consequences brought large shifts in the outcomes prior to the events occuring - which is the most bizarre and interesting part. Other events, such as New Year's Eve, etc, also have results that are regularly shown. It's a positively enthralling study.
Anyway, it suggests that we, as a whole, are projecting a field of human consciousness that affects random outcomes. This would suggest that any lone person attempting to affect random outcomes would be lost in the sea of thoughts, and have little to no overall effect.
I am curious as to whether or not you could create some sort of shielding or better result by varying location, proximity, etc... The most interesting and telling experiment I can think of would be to take a human and a few random generators a great distance from the earth and resume tests. I had no idea that any really credible institute had been performing these tests, this is neat.
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GCP is in the words of Penn&Teller: Bullshit
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Didn't those two say the same thing about global warming?
no. No. and NO ! (Score:5, Informative)
No peers, indeed (Score:2, Interesting)
For as long as I can remember I've had a subtle effect on machines. I've heard similar things described here many times, in many discussions. When friends and relatives ask me to fix something, and I come over to help them out, the thing just starts working. Mostly it's with computers.
I'm not a religious person. I don't believe in god. In fact it's my attitude that belief should be limited to the bare minimum and that, if given a choice, we
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Re:No peers, indeed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:No peers, indeed (Score:5, Funny)
Scattered throughout the world is an invisible compound called "pixie dust". It permeates the air, and is the primary component of the "magic smoke" that computers are made of. Because computers are naturally attuned to this pixie dust, they tend to work better whenever there are larger concentrations of it around.
Now, most normal people have a regular bathing and hygeine schedule. All this showering and teeth-brushing washes off whatever trace amounts of pixie dust they've accumulated throughout the day. Computer geeks, on the other hand, have no time for such fivolities as "showering". There's code to be written, dammit!
As a result, the pixie dust in the air naturally builds up on and around computer geeks. Whenever the intrepid geek gets near a computer, some of that dust shakes off, thereby increasing the local density of the stuff in the air. Picture Pigpen from Peanuts, only he's exuding a cloud of invisible dust that makes computers work better instead of mobile filth. Other properties of the filth cloud are probably unaffected in many cases, though.
This reasoning also explains why it is that computers will continue to work for a while after the geek has declared the computer working and left - it takes time for the air to circulate all that extra pixie dust away, so the computers have a while to be positively influenced by it. After a sufficient amount of time, though, it wears off and the computer goes back to its insufficient ambient levels, and thereby stops working again.
See? It's all perfectly reasonbly explained. Science!
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Some people tend to not understand what a computer is doing. When someone else comes along and says, "Yeah, it's working," and knows that it's working, the problem is often in user education rather than system status. Correct operation is - especially in computers - reliant upon an understanding that the way the computer is operating is appropriate for the situation.
Re:No peers, indeed (Score:4, Funny)
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For as long as I can remember I've had a subtle effect on machines. I've heard similar things described here many times, in many discussions. When friends and relatives ask me to fix something, and I come over to help them out, the thing just starts working. Mostly it's with computers.
Interesting indeed, I've been working closely with people like you for decades. Our special skills have been accepted and admired by both our friends/relatives and by large companies willing to pay rediculous amounts of money to place us close to their machines (mostly computers). We call ourselves engineers, developers, programmers, geeks or nerds. The most intriguing is that in general we cannot explain exactly what we do to the users so that they don't need us anymore. In many cases we don't even know e
Re:No peers, indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
As for the alleged lack of peer review, that's the standard defense of wackos and nutjobs, and rarely true. I've heard of these guys before; it's not like they haven't gotten any exposure in the scientific community. They are just not very convincing. If they could demonstrate a mechanism, or harness their purported effect to actually *do* something, people would become interested.
Re:No peers, indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it evidence for ESP if I'm able to discern your identity? ;)
More seriously, the experience you describe is fairly common. There are a number of normal factors that can cause this impression. It's related to the opposite phenomenon that an application that works perfectly whenever the developers use it can break within 30 seconds of a new user trying it. It's not that it worked, and now it doesn't -- it's that the standard use-paths and expectations of the program were heavily ingrained in the people who used it, so without even thinking about it they did what the program expected. As soon as a new user, who doesn't have all the expectations and officially-approved metaphors in his head uses it, it falls over.
Similarly, something that appears to be broken can start working as soon as someone who understands it well tries to use it. It's not supernatural, it's just a lot of little habits of understanding that people don't even really notice, but that develop automatically over years of experience.
Another contributing factor is that this common impression overrides occasional negative experiences (I can't count the number of hard drives that have died on me :-P but in common situation I still get a lot of "things just working," enough to make me forget the bad times). It's a sort of opposite to the "I'm always in the slow lane" experience in traffic jams.
A nice illustration is the following joke from the Hacker's Dictionary:
This joke is funny precisely because so many people have had exactly this experience. I've had similar things happen to me many times, where I just look at the computer and (theoretically) do exactly what the previous user has been doing, only when I do it, it works. I doubt there's really anything supernatural about it, but after so many years of working with computers I automatically avoid potential problems because I understand how computers "think" (one reason a lot of techies prefer UNIX -- despite some limitations, its "thinking process" is extremely clear and consistent, allowing the "just works" experience more often for people who really know the system... Windows, even when stable, can have very erratic thinking patterns).
Anyway. That's my take on it ;)
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Evolution and ESP (Score:3, Insightful)
But, hey, thanks for trying.
Re:Evolution and ESP (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't believe in these phenomena without evidence, but I can foresee ways in which revealing them could be detrimental to someone's chance at off-spring!
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Re:Evolution and ESP (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a lot of ifs.
Just think about all the people with a very high IQ which aren't even capable of dealing with everyday life and/or never get married and have kids, that could be everything from people with ADHD to professors that spend so much time within their own research that they hardly know what day of the week (or month) it is.
So being very smart, which should give them advantage, doesn't mean that they've actually got an advantage which will be spread using breeding; and it could be the same with people with (weak) ESP (if it exists), they could for instance have a greater chance of having a personality which makes them second guess their ESP to the extent that the positive side of it are negated, or maybe those are the nutcases we laugh about because they leave their citylife and move out into the country (as they have a closer connection to nature).
Some people are tempted to say that some, like very successfull businessmen, might be using (weak) ESP to optimize the work and deals they do; so within what's usually refered to as instinct there might be some ESP (if it exists).
So just because we don't have psi-cops running around reading peoples minds we don't have proof that ESP does or doesn't exist, we can't just say that evolution should have resulted in individuals with strong ESP today if it exists - that's just like arriving in a spaceship on earth milions of years ago and saying that there will be no smart humans there because if there would be smart humans there would already be smart humans there. (it's of course debatable if there are any smart humans here today...)
If ESP really exists today it might be different from what we expect it to be, ie not a single clear talent, and it might be so weak that it'll take 100's or 1000's of year before it's so obvious that no one can deny that it truly exists; and even if we knew that to be possible, we can't say for sure that those with the right genes will be around long enough to acctually produce those children with strong ESP.
So what do we really know? Nothing more than that we can't prove anything beyond any doubts... which today goes for both ESP and string theory and a whole lot more that we're currently researching...
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Unless of course the mutation that enables ESP is a fairly recent one, and just now making its way throughout the population. If fact, a lot of these abilities are claimed to b
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Because it doesn't exist.
Belief in ESP is simply an extension of child-like "magical thinking" where young children around 6 and younger believe that most things in the world happen magically, due to a lack of understanding of cause and effect. Persisting in such belief only underlines your immaturity.
Good radiance to pseudoscience (Score:5, Insightful)
Conclusion quoted:
In their book Margins of Reality Jahn and Dunne raise this question: "Is modern science, in the name of rigor and objectivity, arbitrarily excluding essential factors from its purview?" Although the question is couched in general terms, the intent is to raise the issue as to whether the claims of the parapsychological community are dismissed out of hand by mainstream science unjustifiably. This paper argues that in the light of the difficulties in replication (even by the PEAR group itself), the lack of anything approaching a theoretical basis for the claims made, and, perhaps most damaging, the published behavior of the baseline data of the PEAR group which by their own criteria indicate nonrandom behavior of the device that they claim is random, then the answer to the question raised has to be no. There are reasonable and rational grounds for questioning these claims. Despite the best efforts of the PEAR group over a twenty-five-year period, their impact on mainstream science has been negligible. The PEAR group might argue that this is due to the biased and blinkered mentality of mainstream scientists. I would argue that it is due to the lack of compelling evidence.
At best this was pseudo science. At worst they scammed private investor from money to study something inexistant (AFAIK this was not public found). They were fitting the data to the conclusion. They were begging for belief, but were quite empty handed on the falsification side. The quicker this shame can be closed, the better. Now if we could do the same for the other 999 pseudo science outfit outside here...
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I'll answer to an AC (Score:3, Interesting)
Where are they. I certainly find NO POSITIVE RESULT WHATSOEVER. Care to do a citation. Peer reviewed journal would be nice.
And if you check the parapsychological literature Ha. HA. Let me guess. Not peer reviewed. Not even remotely in the science citation index. Certainly does not look like it.
As for the rest of your drivel, if you had read the ORIGINAL paper from the PEAR team and what they admit you would not be adament on "posit
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Here [princeton.edu] is a reasonably comprehensive list of their publications and where they are published.
And to save you the effort of, you know, reading too much, here [princeton.edu] is a recent publication from Cellular and Molecular Biology (in 2005), which includes descriptions of many of POSITIVE RESULTS, including an assortment of citations for further information.
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No, you see, it doesn't count if you re-do the experiment yourself and get the same result, even if you do it for 30 years. It only counts if someone ELSE can re-do your experiment and get the same result - at least ONCE.
Belief vs reproducibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Science vs Faith (Score:2)
I was going to make this identical point. Thanks for saving me the trouble.
In this day of trumped-up controversy over the difference between Science and nonsense/non-science, Princeton is missing a big opportunity to underscore the importa
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As Venkman would say... (Score:2)
Back off, man. I'm a scientist.
I try and spread the word of my psychopathic power (Score:3, Funny)
My response: "The psychic's friends network."
You know, there is a madness to my method!
Nick Powers
How does science explain ... (Score:2, Offtopic)
Project Alpha (Score:2)
Problematic statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
Jefferys advocates the Bayesian approach as an alternative to their p-value test (as do I), but even non-Bayesians admit such problems with p-values can happen (they just think the alternatives are worse); see here [colostate.edu] for some references, and here [dur.ac.uk] for some criticisms of and non-Bayesian alternatives to classical accept/reject significance testing. This paper [bmj.com] (PDF) is an opinion piece which reviews the issue from a medical research perspective.
The Conscious Universe (Score:2)
Bottom line: It's not a very well written book but the conclusions it draws are scientifically sound and inescapable. There is something going on which is poorly described and poorly understood by science. Also what ever it is, is above and beyond statistical randomness. (and well below these fools running around talking to dead, bending spoons, and reading minds)
This doesn't surprise me at all. Pity there's so muc
But we really do know its real... (Score:2)
When it comes to quantum computing thought interference shows up.
Also there is the fact that humans do act upon abstract thinking which means it obvious that thought does in fact influence physical reality. I think I'll design and build this whatever, so I draw it up, research its needs, purchase the material needed and build it... all based on thought.
When it comes to mind reading and the likes, let me tell you about the majic dumpster.
All to ofte
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But what about all those times you needed or wanted something that didn't show up - those moments are easily forgotten and filtered out. But when you "miraculously" get something you wanted, you remember it because it seemed unusual and special.
Good luck with the lotto ticket but I believe your odds are the same as everyone elses. Your experiences are coincidental.
Let me be the nay sayer here (Score:3, Insightful)
You'll see it when you believe it. (Score:3)
Science is the attempt to document and reduce observation and learn from it without bias. But look at this entire series of over 200 posts; we have in evidence mountains of unsupported claims: "PEAR used faulty experiments!" "PEAR uses faulty statistical analysis!" "If PEAR had real evidence, why not apply to James Randi?" and similar mindless blather. How many of these posters have actually read the source material before rendering their judgments? How many links are provided? How many of them are self-referencing nonsense? I don't know; I've not looked myself; I don't actually know anything much about PEAR, but at least I am willing to admit that much!
Indeed. Fume and spit and fill the air with noise, but please do not mistake this for meaningful discourse. It's just the sound of fear and bias. If people honestly used the science they claim to love properly, then I suspect this whole site would look rather different!
-FL
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...at 4, many thousands of years worth of wars are fought over essentially the same thing
I always wonder why people insist that religion is the root of most wars, when the evidence seems so obviously to indicate that it is a tool of warlike leaders.
How many wars can you name where the warriors and the religious were the same group? We seem to have this image of kind-of medieval times where armies followed a cross (or a crescent) to defeat the infidels because they are infidels.
Were the fighters in Northern Ireland the humble, faithful churchgoers, or thugs who found a pretext to exercise thei
Re:The birth of a scientist's mind (Score:4, Insightful)