Great, then stop using the stupid argument that if these things exist we would notice them.

I'd like to hear it. A scientific claim that you can easily and cheaply evaluate for yourself -- why wouldn't you want to test it, especially given how intrigued you are by the claim?

Is it that you believe only some people are blessed with the psi gift, and that you aren't one of them? If you really believe in this stuff, don't you want to find out for sure?

A home-designed experiment is not a way to "evaluate" a paper published in JPSP.

really very simple why. If you get a negative result it can easily be blamed on the following:

- you did it wrong
- you don't exhibit psi (remember the paper shows extroverts have higher "psi" functioning. Or you just happened to be in a brainwave state that is not conducive to psi.

If you do get results then it can also be blamed on biases and wishful thinking and even luck.

so basically you have little to take from the fact that it works and absolutely nothing to take from its failure.

Unless you are going to make wrong conclusions and say that your failure to replicate makes Bem's experiment invalid or less reliable. Not even official failed attempts at replication can make that statement. only after many have been done can we look at them all together and ask if there is or isn't something there. Currently this is being done by labs who have better equipment and experience in the field.

and as for your question, maybe I already know I have psi. I just don't use that argument because anyone looking at it can say it's subjective. so I prefer to use good science.

No, genius, I didn't say that psi happens to people, I said people have feelings that then come true. The fact that you could even consider that I was conflating these things speaks volumes.

So you could actually test yourself and know for sure, or you could continue making appeals to authority.

At least now it is clear why you choose the latter route.

not making appeals of authority, unlike you, I post all the links to literature. not my problem you're too lazy to do the reading.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDZXz...feature=relmfu

If Einstein thought he was 100% right and turned out to be wrong, how com you think you can be sure you aren't? I wonder.

You have already another team that in fact their paper is easier to follow (in explaining what they did- surprise surprise when you have nothing to hide the description of what you do proves easier)
who claims they didnt see anything like the Bem results, they failed to replicate experiment 8.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...act_id=1699970

Just download the pdf file linked , its safe no risk, mine came from Stanford Law School server which was closest i guess. Just click on 1 click download and it will find the server closest to you to send it.


You know what Desperado. I will show you what real science is about at its core and although i dont believe any of this i will take the test myself during this week and report the results. But i expected you would be the one eager the most to take it. How sad and in a way telling. You see i am always driven by curiosity about the truth from young age and ultimately i probably am the most open minded of the 2.

So far running 365 trials i predicted correct 184 and failed 181. 53% would have been 193 vs 172 but its a small sample 10% of Bem's and its early. Not a great start for the prediction logic camp though. SD is 10 for that size .

This is not a replication.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...act_id=1715954
This is

Masque, please stop what you're doing. All you're going to prove is that you are either bad at experiments or bad at psi. I can also argue that because you want to prove yourself right, subconsciouly you were guessing wrong and if you do get significant hits I can say you proved me right, I am basically freerolling. you won't in anyway affect the reliability of Bem's result with this methodology. It's not a true replication, period.

Why is online bad? The future is the future regardless where you are located taking the test. It is your future in front of your screen when you guess right or wrong a few seconds later. Who cares what i do with the results and where i send them or if the other subject is next room or in the next state? (in this case though they tested words not pictures but still the process of studying the words in the future after the memory test should have nothing to do with whether you do it at a lab or at home online assuming you are honest about what you find. The thing is the students taking the test only try to recall words and they have no incentive to lie. That said of course i agree a very clean test requires outside monitoring of the subjects for application of the rules. Clearly when i suggested we each take a test at home i realize we will all do it honestly wishing indeed that we had the gift of prediction which clearly if it existed would be a great one - especially with these kind of stupid markets lately)


Deseperado something major is going to happen to physics this decade. And it will involve spacetime and QM and causality and it will challenge everything , but it will do so the right way , using fundamental concepts/elements which the brain is not at all one of them moreover its majestic beauty. It is just another large scale object , what we are looking for is elementary as a property , it has to do with QM and what it says about spacetime. It will not be uncovered by charlatans but people who know exactly how to test properly ideas and how to use math to describe what they are talking about instead of out of their $$#% concepts that nobody understands what the hell they are. Science builds on solid ground , it doesnt leap into unknown territory using made up concepts and unrelated things which is what a lot of what these Psi papers are dealing with.


The issue at this thread is simple if you want to approach it like a real scientific effort with seriousness. An experiment is performed to measure the spin of a particle before it is known. And yet there exist at least one observer in this universe that knows the result either with 100% confidence or with some probability other than 50-50. That observer's predictions are confirmed by many experiments and illustrate an over 50% prediction rate. Establish what this implies for Quantum Mechanics . How does the existence of at least one such observer impact the laws of QM. Can you arrive at some contradiction? What is that? I invite all the physicists in the forum to think about it and see if they can arrive at some way to experimentally test the existence of such observer without knowing who this is in advance only that it exists.

people don't pay attention online.

different monitors

etc.

not a true replication.

I can keep going

Masque, if you know what is the right way and what isn't to make this quantum jump you talk about, why don't you lead the way then? Your attitude is very similar to classical physicists when quantum physics came to be. These were smart people too, why can't you for one second, ponder the possibility that you might be wrong and that consciousness may actually be part of reality? There is more than a billion people who believe that some way or another, some of them great physicists, yet you are CERTAIN that you are right?

"I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything" ~T.H. Huxley

imo

Funny that in explaining why we shouldn't replicate his experiments in simple, easy ways you focus so much on the interpretation of negative results — there's just one sentence here about a positive result. But if a dozen people did one of his experiments at home, with enough trials actually to get good statistics (far more than Bem did), then if even one of those dozen exhibited psi at the frequency claimed by Bem to exist over the whole sample, we'd soon have dramatic evidence that Bem was right and psi exists, as well as having identified someone apparently capable of it. Seems that would be a good thing, no?

But... no. You pretty clearly expect that these experiments will fail, that no one conducting 10,000 trials of a single, unchanging test will get a positive result. Or that one will (if enough do the experiment, it's bound to happen, right?) but then won't exhibit it in the next 10,000. Even if that happens, you have your explanations ready for why the results obtained by Bem, the great godfather of psychology or whatever, with his ever-shifting experimental parameters and his 150 trials, should be given more weight than those of anyone who deigns simply to crank out a truly large number of very simple tests.

Maybe you can address this: These tests are incredibly easy to do. Why didn't Bem do lots of them? When he saw that he was getting positive results, why didn't he keep the experiment exactly unchanged and just conduct a few thousand tests, so he could get unarguable proof? Why screw around with a different test every semester for a decade, or whatever it was, if he thought he was onto the greatest scientific discovery of the age?

All this discussion of the Randi million is actually minimizing it. If Bem had done one test in sufficiently rigorous fashion that we couldn't sensibly have this debate, he'd be well on the way to becoming the most celebrated person of the century, and a billionaire to boot.

But he didn't. Wonder why.

no, I don't have an agenda. I was just trained in good science and it's how I think. I explained to masque why I was freerolling. don't try to put a spin on it, that's just desperate.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/type-II-error.asp
basic stuff really

Link this in the other thread. Clearly something needs to change in how science is taught (well, or maybe to whom we even attempt to teach it).

Her report
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/air.pdf
Ray Hyman's report (His response to the publication of Bem's findings was “It's craziness, pure craziness. I think it's just an embarrassment for the entire field.”)
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/hyman.html

in his conclusions
Jessica utts responded to his claims about parapsychology research here
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/response.html

15 years later, we're still rejecting new and accumulating evidence based on the impossibility of the phenomena and Ray Hyman's attitude.


Clearly having made that report in 1995, setting a near-zero prior now, is a joke.


~~
more material on Utts' webpage

http://www.stat.ucdavis.edu/~utts/

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/JSE1999.pdf

very informative paper about the role of statistics in science in general and in the case of psi specifically. Anyone is going to use stats in their arguments should read this in its entirety

Hyman oversteps a little in that if we get widely replicable deviations by any independent researcher who looks, it's not proof of psi, but it's proof of SOMETHING interesting, which is good enough IMO. But, beyond that, his general point- that proponents need to do good, replicable research and have the findings hold up under independent replication if they want to be taken seriously holds, and we still don't have any positive results of the sort.

Furthermore, one of his criticisms slaps d00doo7 right in the face. If he (or researchers) can't give a replicable protocol where psi should occur, then attempting to test for it scientifically is by definition impossible and therefore completely ******ed. When d00doo7 whines incessantly about small deviations in a testing protocol necessarily invalidating the usefulness of any result obtained, this is basically what he's doing- putting all of his confirmation-bias approved results on an untouchable pedestal and calling all failures imperfect replications and therefore useless. That's not science.

Believing an empirical "fact" is true and stating that literally no amount of other empirical evidence can change your mind on that "fact", combined with specious logic for rejecting all kinds of possibly contradictory evidence, is actually just the hallmark of a garden-variety nutter.

From her reply.
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/response.html

Deperad0ooo it appears that you were in fact not taught good science but the opposite. Hope you soon see the irony in your discussion about people scared of their worldview being disrupted because they demand good science, good research and statistically significant, repeatable results. The reason you are dismissive of people wanting the scientific method to be properly applied in this case is simply because you are afraid the results won't be what you like.

Enjoying the ownage TomCowley has been dishing out to you thus far.

scientific method had already been successfully applied. You're just too ignorant to see it or do your own research. Period.

T.cowly has been doing nothing but embarrass himself

For outsiders, it is easy to see that this extraordinary claim requires extra ordinary evidence. A paradigm shift is not going to happen anytime soon. For something this huge, a few researchers that are convinced by a few studies will not be sufficient. The only way this is going to be taken seriously by the rest of the world is by A LOT of independent confirmations and publications in top journals in various fields.

can you define few, please, and show your evidence why the research we have and the people who believe in it can be described as such.

Indeed, I can't think of a recent thread in which one poster has been owned so thoroughly by another.

lol, none of you managed to produce one single reliable outside source. your clear inability to respond the the evidence I am posting (you are not even trying to address it) had led you to focus attacks on me.

it's actually very amusing.

yeah, I've seen much more thorough ownage in other threads than the supposed ownage some of you are running in here to celebrate

TC's comments are like 50% nerdy put-downs (you're lucky if your parents have published any of your work on the refrigerator) and 50% general methodological criticisms that are quite likely to be valid, as far as I can see, anyway, but sufficiently non-specific and non-directed at actual, highlighted portions of Bem's paper that it automatically fails as devastating ownage.