Psychic Ability Claim Doesn't Hold Up In New Scientific Experiments 315
cold fjord writes with some stunning news from the world of science, excerpting:
"A new study has failed to find evidence that psychic ability is real. Skeptics may scoff at the finding as obvious, but the research is important because it refutes a study published in a psychological journal last year that claimed to find evidence of extrasensory perception. That research, conducted by Daryl Bem of Cornell University, triggered outrage in the psychological community when the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology announced in 2010 that the paper had been accepted for publication." Here's a link to the academic paper.
in my minds eye (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:in my minds eye (Score:5, Insightful)
There are over 6 billion people in the world sir, it would be amazing if there wasn't anyone who had had this experience. The fact that you know someone for whom this has happened demonstrates nothing, can you vouch that she has never ever said "don't go" any other time and nothing untoward taken place? Given that your grandmother thought she was psychic would she have noticed if she had "a feeling" and nothing happened?
How often did she have "feelings"? As a parent I've had "feelings" quite a few times but nothing ever happened, of course if i had a "feeling" every day then some of them would have correlated with incidents that occurred, who has a life without incident?
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but this is possibly the most common fallacy of belief regarding "precog". Lets face it, if it were real we would have noticed all the rich and successful people who got that way being precog, there would be government departments staffed by precogs predicting plane crashes, stock market crashes, crimes, weather, asteroids, etc. It's like aliens, who only ever visit when no-one else is watching :)
snake
Re:in my minds eye (Score:5, Interesting)
"Precog" is what most of your forebrain is doing most of the time, modeling, predicting, mostly guessing. Those of our ancestors who were best able to use their powers of prediction to successfully reproduce have been "genetically selected" against those who weren't as good.
If there were a mechanism that truly allowed us to know, or guess with better than statistical odds, the outcome of events in the distant (2 seconds or more) future, that would be an awesome advantage which should rapidly spread through any gene pool, unless the established social order burned them as witches or some-such all too believable tragedy.
Maybe, like life itself, precog is just a very very rare alignment of complex chemical or maybe quantum phenomena... given the billions of years of evolution that have passed without it becoming prominent on Earth, I think the odds of it emerging during my lifetime are.... remote.
Re:in my minds eye (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, but how many times did she have a bad feeling about something and then nothing at all happened and she forgot about it?
Flamebait? (Score:3)
A person deluded by a cognitive bias sharing an experience does not equal flamebait. The post is interesting even if only as an example of why people believe in such things.
Not surprising (Score:5, Funny)
I have foreseen that outcome....
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Funny how it's the skeptics who 'claim' they knew the results of this beforehand.
Oh, and by the way, when you do an experiment like that, make sure you use a proper random number generator. (one that has a *tested* uniform distribution - if you're expecting a uniform distribution of course, otherwise, test for the distribution you're expecting)
Re:Not surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
rgb (speaking ex cathedra as the author of dieharder, which does indeed know how to test for uniform distributions as well as test random number generators in general many, many ways...;-)
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Most failures in 'randomizing' data are not difficult to detect (once you look at it)
Two examples.
1 - http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/12/the-danger-of-naivete.html [codinghorror.com]
2 - (this happened to me) program works on one compiler, in the other it gives strange results (this is a simulation of signal transmission over noise conditions). Turns out on compiler 'a' random() doesn't return a value from 0 to the maximum value of a long, but returns up to a value less than the maximum value
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want an analogy, imagine getting a big crowd of people together who believe in psychics, and who have handed over their name, address, CC details and other snippets of information - you could probably convince them that you're talking to their dead relatives, if you wanted to be a fraudulent shyster who likes making money from the grief and hope of the gullible.
Re:Not surprising (Score:4, Funny)
Exactly! If there were psychic powers, it would be a world where those with average intellects would control vast fortunes, where hard work and study didn't pay off, and where people mindlessly followed trivial events while ignoring important events.
Nothing like the real world.
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Look at the available evidence - if there was any psychic ability then the chances are that it would already be well documented.
No, that's backwards, because:
Even a slight statistical ability would have big impacts in warfare, commerce and many other areas of life.
Whatever real psychics are out there, they either a) are getting rich in the stock market (etc.) and not talking about it, or b) have all been sucked into various intelligence agencies.
The only way an ordinary member of the ballast like yourself would hear of proven psychic powers, is if they were so common that they could not be kept under wraps.
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That could be because they get an advantage out of denying their abilities, while making use of them (perhaps unconcsiously). Like a "Family Values" proponent soliciting gay sex in bathrooms...
Also, what was Jobs's "reality distortion field"?
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Like the sceptics who 'claim' that they knew subsequent tests will show neutrinos don't travel faster than light!
You use past results and experience to predict the future. That a single study showing positive results for ESP was flawed in some way, is a natural starting position. If this study had backed it up, then I'd still assume both are flawed in some way, just with a little less confidence.
Not exactly flawed... (Score:5, Interesting)
That a single study showing positive results for ESP was flawed in some way, is a natural starting position.
Ah, but Bem's 2011 paper [dbem.ws] was not flawed at all. He successfully and convincingly demonstrated his lack of understanding [wikipedia.org] of statistical techniques and his ineptitude in application of said techniques. He also illustrated the failings of the peer review process [physicstoday.org] in minor fields. His incompetent attempt [csicop.org] at "validation" of ESP was the most persuasive evidence of all, in fact.
This overwhelming ignorance of statistics is prevalent throughout the social "sciences" and is almost as widespread in medical fields. Bem is not the first to misunderstand and misuse t-tests or to fail to distinguish exploratory and confirmatory [ejwagenmakers.com] analysis. Those in fundamentally innumerate fields should not play with numbers (especially using packaged statistical software) except under supervision of a qualified adult. They are emphatically not qualified [wikipedia.org] to certify themselves as competent in statistics or any other area outside their specialization.
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Many thanks for those links.
You're welcome :)
Here [plosmedicine.org] is another article you might like, which I inadvertently omitted. It was supposed to be linked to the "medical fields" text, but I somehow left it out... And that's not even getting into the widespread misuse of the 95% confidence [matthen.com] level (the linked page misuses it, even in criticizing its misuse by others, how about that for irony).
Re:Not surprising (Score:4, Informative)
You mean like this experiment?
"I. Human-Machine Anomalies"
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/experiments.html [princeton.edu]
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Funny how it's the skeptics who 'claim' they knew the results of this beforehand.
Funny how it's the skeptics who 'claim' that an apple is going to fall towards the earth.
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Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, I believe there was a cable problem...
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If you do a bunch of comparisons, you're occasionally going to hit a result that's a couple of standard deviations out. That's what the first experimenters did, and the press went nuts over the green jelly beans.
Social Psychology? (Score:5, Insightful)
If ESP is ever proven real, the ones that will be most interested are the physicists.
Re:Social Psychology? (Score:5, Funny)
ESP is already proven to those using it on a daily basis. Physicists shouldn't ever ignore aspects of reality, b/c what they aim to do is to describe reality. They haven't done imaging of electromagnetic fields around brains yet (which are the antennae for our consciousnesses which are located outside our bodies beyond time and space). The brain is a sequencer unit for the sole purpose of serializing perception. There's also a relationship between subatomic particles and their respective consciousness-lets, there's a transitional state between consciousness and matter called not-yet-matter. An Electromagnetic Unit is smaller than the smallest subatomic particle. It will all be proven with scientific studies one day when instruments have become even better. Physicists should use mathematics properly. Math is not a toy, it's a tool.
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What.The.Fsck?
Re:Social Psychology? (Score:5, Insightful)
^This is how crazy you have to be to actually believe in ESP.
Re:Social Psychology? (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't have to be crazy. Uncritical or uneducated is enough. Keep in mind that the amount of logical and mathematical education most of the /. audience have is not representative for the general population.
There are a couple proven psychological traps at work here, such as confirmation bias, our inability to correctly estimate non-trivial probabilities, and more.
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You need to look up words you don't understand before using them, such as "sane".
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Or religion
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Everything we know about consciousness (and at this point we know a rather lot)...
We may know a lot about how to describe consciousness and the parameters around it, but there is still a lot we don't know about it to include the core aspect of what it actually is and why it arises.
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Dr. Gene Ray, I presume.
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TimeCubeGuy, is that you?
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wishing is making it so
?
Charles Tart, The End of Materialism: (Score:2)
How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together http://www.paradigm-sys.com/ [paradigm-sys.com]
"Charles T. Tart is internationally known for his more than 50 years of research on the nature of consciousness, altered states of consciousness (ASCs) and parapsychology, and is one of the founders of the field of Transpersonal (spiritual) Psychology. His and other scientists' work convinced him that there is a real and vitally important sense in which we are spiritual beings, but the too dominant, scientisti
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I mentioned in my comment that group think could be related to both mainstream science and alternatives. As for the rest of your reply, I think you may want to consider a few key ideas;
* The placebo effect is real, it is actually getting stronger, and MDs regularly use it. So how can you say homeopathy, even if it were to be nothing more than the placebo effect, does not work?
* Nutrition and lifestyle choices are probably the major determinant of good health most of the time for most people, yet MDs have ne
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On a second note, if physicists are so interested why are they not researching it?
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> if physicists are so interested why are they not researching it?
Because it is easier to ignore the evidence then to be honest and admit there is something here we don't understand.
i.e.
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publications.html [princeton.edu]
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Awww, that's cute! The best thing out of PEAR was the name "Strip Mind Media". The only stuff coming out of there that isn't understood is the fact that someone thought that it should have been funded in the first place.
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Biologists too. They'd be interested in demonstrating the unknown biological mechanism that makes the new sense work.
So, convince me (Score:5, Insightful)
A new study has failed to find evidence that psychic ability is real. Skeptics may scoff at the finding as obvious
No, sceptics may consider the finding plausible but will question whether the evidence supports it.
RTFA: The peer review was not a double-blind study (Score:5, Interesting)
The peer review was not a double-blind study. ...
Ergo: No scientific evidence, any finite conclusion is worthless.
You fail. Thank you very much.
End of discussion.
Then again, as far as I can read out of the article, the initial experiment wasn't a double blind test either.
However, the experiments setup looks interesting and - in a fully controlled environment - could statistically prove the existence of clairvoyance.
Bottom line:
We're just as smart as before.
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You do realize Non-locality of Mind has already been proven, right?
See the documentary "The Quantum Activist". It features Dr. Amit Goswami, Ph.D, retired, Professor of physics at the University of Oregon's Institute of Theoretical Science for 30 years, so its not like it features some unknown nut-job.
Well worth watching.
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This guy apparently stars in "science" videos for nut job cults:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Goswami [wikipedia.org]
So he supports and probably is some nut job.
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What the hell is a 'retired' PhD? Did he have to give his sheepskin back? It's not like the military where you resign your commission.
And, looking at his Wikipedia page, I'd have to agree with you that he's not 'some unknown nut-job'. He appears to be a well known nutjob.
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Non-locality of Mind
Ah, is that the meaning of the phrase "He's not quite all 'there'" -points to head with a twirly finger- ?
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From his site:
"This film bridges the gap between God and Science."
Pretty much have to first prove the existence of God, don't you think?
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I'm not sure what you mean by a "finite" conclusion, but if you think that only double-blind studies count as scientific evidence, then I suppose you don't think astronomy or particle physics or paleontology are scientific fields?
A double-blind study, when possible, is a great way -- perhaps the best way -- to investigate certain questions. That does not make it the only form of scientific evidence
Surprising :) (Score:3)
I bet psychics did not see that coming :)
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Yeah, if psychic powers were real you'd think that they wouldn't be slinging tarot cards in their little one room shop under the adult video store.
As bad as those people are, a huge majority of psychics pray on the grieving. I hate cocksuckers like John Edwards and whatever the name of the fat one with the bad haircut and mustache is. Honestly, every time I see a psychic hawking their "services" I want to punch them in the face and ask them why they didn't see it coming.
Not really Psychic (Score:4, Interesting)
"retroactive facilitation of recall’, which examines whether performance on a memory test can be influenced by a post-test exercise."
All they are testing is pre-cognition, aka time travel of the mind, and really the least likely psychic power to exist. The ability to do this would pretty much break science.
The journal does not publish replications (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the really interesting (and shocking) bit of the story. One has to wonder how much real understanding of the scientific method the editors of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology really have. If they don't understand the value of independent replication - then what are they publishing ? Interesting anecdotes ?
Re:The journal does not publish replications (Score:4, Insightful)
Journals not publishing null results or replications is a widespread problem that many reserches lament.
I've thought for a while that there should be a journal just for replication or null results to be published im. Even if the goverment has to fund it.
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It's not just psychology. Most scientific journals are not much interested in replications or negative results. Generally, to get such things published, you need to embed them in a paper that also includes some novel positive results. This imposes a positive bias on the literature of unknown magnitude. The bias is likely greater for results that are surprising or otherwise exciting.
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Nobody else in the world that I know of believes in a statistical method vs a scientific method, certainly not any philosophers of science I've read about.
In fact, even biology uses statistics; Gregor Mendel's experiments on pea plants are a good example. Yes, they do use statistics heavily there, and they have for quite some time!
My favorite psychic-related news headline (Score:2)
So I can't ever have Jedi powers? (Score:5, Funny)
Damn. Thanks for ruining my day.
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You can, but only in a galaxy far, far away. (assuming Jedi powers haven't degraded since "long ago..")
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Don't feel too bad. These aren't the Jedi powers you were looking for, anyway.
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Nothing to see here (Score:2)
The past 100 years hasn't produced any repeatable high quality studies showing any psi effects exist.
If psi was a drug, the results are so terrible there is no way it would ever be considered for use.
But they will continue to go around in circles data mining to find anomalies to study then abandoning that modality once it cant be replicated.
If psi was real, the mechanism would be truely astounding. Physists would really have their work cut out for themselves. Strange they have never seen anything that could
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Personally, part of
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The PEAR studies were discredited, which I'm sure is what you're referring to.
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The PEAR studies were discredited...
They might have been on the list, but I'd have to pull out the research folder. Some of the studies have been outright discredited over the years, but others are a bit more of a question mark and are just "inconclusive." As a whole it makes for some interesting reading at times, but I doubt we are going to get a satisfactory answer any time soon.
... which I'm sure is what you're referring to.
Please don't assume you know what people are thinking as it tends to be quite off putting.
How to find a real psychic (Score:2)
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You won't find a real psychic that way. The real ones have long retired on their winnings. :P
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'Supports vs Proves' is something we need remember (Score:2)
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In my mind's eye I see you writing a run-on sentence in the very near future.
That will be five dollars.
Of course. (Score:3, Insightful)
All the real psychics never admit to being psychic. They win in vegas or the lottery or the stock market and keep their mouths shut.
Because they can also see being cut up into little slices and studied by someone if the world ever really gets proof they are psychic.
Power Analysis (Score:3)
Gonna sounds like a nutter here but (Score:2)
The history of science (Score:3)
Science should never be wielded like dogma, leave that to religion.
For example:
http://web.mit.edu/randy/www/words.html [mit.edu]
Most of these "experts" should have known better, and not gotten cocky with their current state of known science. At no point will we ever know it all. At no point can we say, we know this currently understood law of physics is 100% irrefutable. (Although it' may be 99.9% irrefutable, jus' sayin')
It just may be -however unlikely- that psychic phenomenon is real, but **extremely** rare and not really reproducible -something that can be tapped into on demand- and it's more even probable that most to all psychics are frauds, or at the very least, people who may have experienced some level of ESP once or twice but who greatly overstate their ability as something they can use when they want to, as though it were a reliable tool, a superpower even. Hah.
Of course, on the other hand... it's not good to be so open minded that yer brain falls out. Maybe it's all coincidence.
Either way, bias will always taint this subject, from one end of the argument or the other, but I predict the argument will go on for the foreseeable future.
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
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They don't have to be smart enough to realise it. As you say, its all science can do. It goes without saying. However the constant lack of high quality, reproducible results means any effect that exists is extremely small at best.
That's not really the interesting bit (Score:5, Insightful)
A "negative" finding, as you put it, is really just failure to find a positive outcome. In other words, they were not able to replicate the original study even though apparently using the same methods. This doesn't prove that psychic phenomena does not exist. But it is a data point that suggests that there are no good scientific reasons to believe in psychic phenomena.
The real interesting bit of the article is this:
That's the real controversy here. Many journals are biased against articles that describe attempts to replicate previously published results, even if the outcome is negative. This is a disincentive for scientists to engage in much of what would be very useful research.
Re:That's not really the interesting bit (Score:5, Insightful)
This is dead on the money -- I agree. I keep Richard Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" address here: http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm [lhup.edu] permanently open in a browser tab just to remind me how important replication really is. There is a major effort at the highest levels of the government that sit in oversight of the granting agencies and that ultimately fund the journals themselves (indirectly) to change some of this, because it is this very reluctance (plus a tendency to publish "results" but hide the actual data and methodology from precisely the public access and scrutiny and critical replication that is essential to the scientific process) that leads to a huge amount of junk science being published every year, much of it (sadly) in social psychology, medicine, and climate science, where at least two of these have enormous costs associated with error.
ESP, fortunately isn't one of them. As you note, it (as a hypothesis) could be true, but there is so far no good reason to believe in it. Such evidence as there is is anecdotal and fails to stand up in a reproducible way to skeptical critical tests seeking to verify the anecdotes. However, we can go farther than this -- ESP may exist, but it is in some sense a rare phenomenon if it does. If it were universal and common, we could hardly have failed to discover this by now. The many experiments that have been done seeking to confirm the phenomenon (and failing) have the effect of gradually lowering the plausible boundary of its existence, just as the many (failed) experiments seeking e.g. magnetic monopoles don't disprove their existence but they do establish plausible limits on how common they are (at least in the forms being tested).
ESP, unlike monopoles, suffers from a serious flaw as a scientific hypothesis. I can understand how a monopole might exist, and can further see how their existence has considerable explanatory power and esthetic appeal -- electrodynamics would become more symmetric, charge quantization would be "explained", if there was at least one monopole in the Universe. They consistently fit in with our existing knowledge. ESP, on the other hand, does not. There is not one single theory (that I know of) that offers a consistent explanation of how ESP could function in terms of known physical law. Indeed, things like precognition overtly violate so very many physical laws -- for starters, the second law of thermodynamics -- that verifying it might well require the complete rewriting of all the laws of physics. This is actually a serious problem. It is like "coming back from the dead" or other forms of supernaturalism and magic -- sensible people reject such hypotheses as the default belief (often in the face of various offerings of anecdotal "evidence") because, to paraphrase somebody (Thomas Paine?) it is far more easy to believe that a human is a liar or mistaken than to believe that the stars themselves have gone out of their courses. If true precognition were reproducibly demonstrated, analyzing the requisite dynamical flow of information involved would very much make the stars go out of their courses, with future complex phenomena causing entropic shifts in current chemistry. We do not, as a general rule, ever observe entropy-shifting effects preceding their causes.
rgb
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Sure, today I don't have mod points. Figures.
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Exposing an inconsistency in a positive claim is quite different, and much easier, than proving a negative. "You have failed to prove X" is not the same as "X is false".
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Science can establish an upper bound on any claim you care to make.
It can't disprove existence claims. If you claim somebody somewhere has a psychic ability, that's easy to dismiss because no evidence is advanced, but can't be disproved.
But if you make a specific claim such as I can transmit my thoughts to my assistant in another room using ESP, that can be statistically proven or disproved.
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That's ridiculous and you know it -- you employ psychics.
Of course I employ psychics; I'm a taxpayer.
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psychotics?
FWIW "She thinks she's psychic; i think she's psycho."
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Your data to support this argument? There's tons and tons of data and source code you can download...who doesn't share?
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I generally agree, but bear in mind that this is strongly dependent on agency supporting the research. NASA, for example, requires the publication of both methods and data. Hence if you want to replicate GISS, you can, or you can write your own alternative from the same data. HADCRUT, OTOH, has notoriously failed to provide
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I suspect that if DHS set up a pre-crime department it wouldn't actually matter if the psychics really could predict anything...
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> they turn all pseudo-skeptic and quote James Randi chapter and verse
FTFY. James Randi is a pseudo-skeptic -- he can't apply his skepticism towards his own skepticism.
See: http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/Page30.htm#RealSkeptics [debunkingskeptics.com]
> there's no such thing as spirits, ghosts, gods, reincarnation or afterlife?
WRT the afterlife, the only people you should talk to IMHO are people who have been declared clinically dead, and yet "awoke" 30 mins, 1 hr later. etc. Because unless you have been dead, you have _ze
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Oh hey look, skeptics aren't skeptics because they don't always take public stands on political issues (despite the fact that many of them do). I love these "skeptics aren't skeptics" claims because most claimants never make their own argument, they just like to link to another one someone else made, usually in rant-format, that just furiously reiterates outrage that they don't accept magic and ancedote as proper argument or because they haven't addressed one particular issue or another; here, it's just a
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The number of people now living who have reported 'post death' experiences is estimated at over one million. This is based on there being over 100,000 cases still living where the event occurred in a western style hospital or other similar setting, with the physical state of the person at time of 'temporary death' being well recorded. I have asked several professional skeptics in this field how many people they think are reporting 'near death' experiences in a given year, and always thesir estimates are low
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Debunking Skeptics (Score:2)
Great link on skeptics who won't ever question the "mainstream", thanks: http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/Page30.htm#RealSkeptics [debunkingskeptics.com]
To amplify it:
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/ [debunkingskeptics.com]
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/Contents.htm [debunkingskeptics.com]
And see also my: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science [pdfernhout.net]
And check out Charles Tart writings about the limits of "scientistic" and materialistic thinking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Tart [wikipedia.org]
http://www [paradigm-sys.com]
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I'm just sayin'...
rgb
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But this is precisely the problem. Precognition violates the second law of thermodynamics. End of story. Not only does it violate it, it violates it badly. If "ESP" were demonstrated, especially things like precognition, it is very, very difficult to see how it could ever be made consistent with our current knowledge of physics. It would be as bad as Neo learning that his entire Universe is a sh
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But this is precisely the problem. Precognition violates the second law of thermodynamics. End of story. Not only does it violate it, it violates it badly. If "ESP" were demonstrated, especially things like precognition, it is very, very difficult to see how it could ever be made consistent with our current knowledge of physics.
That depends on what one thinks "precognition" is and whether it's actual knowledge or just a form of prediction (subconscious or otherwise).
I mean, *I* can predict the future with a very high degree of accuracy for certain things- I know that if I throw a ball in the air that it's going to start falling and hit the ground in a few seconds time with near-certainty. I know that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.