Psience Quest

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Chris

K9! has posted on the Skeptiko Forums the sad news of the death of Robert Jahn, former director of the PEAR Lab and an important figure in parapsychology, particularly in the fields of micro-psychokinesis and remote viewing/perception:
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/ro...2017.4041/
The Daily Grail has an obituary for him:

https://www.dailygrail.com/2017/11/vale-...sychology/
(2017-11-17, 04:34 AM)Kamarling Wrote: [ -> ]The Daily Grail has an obituary for him:

https://www.dailygrail.com/2017/11/vale-...sychology/

From the article:
Quote: If the PEAR lab’s positive results in parapsychology are confirmed, Robert Jahn will be remembered as a pioneering, heretical voice who, despite unrelenting pressure from the skeptical community, uncovered a whole new dimension to human consciousness.

Chris

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page, here's a long article on Jahn and the PEAR Lab from Epoch Times:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/uplift/dr-...83724.html

Chris

Here's a link to an analysis of the striking behaviour of the Global Consciousness Project data in the 24 hours following Robert Jahn's death. (The Global Consciousness Project was in a sense Jahn's "brain-grandchild", as it grew out of the work on random number generators at the PEAR labs, which he founded.)
http://global-mind.org/events/bob.jahn.html
(2017-12-20, 10:21 AM)Chris Wrote: [ -> ]Here's a link to an analysis of the striking behaviour of the Global Consciousness Project data in the 24 hours following Robert Jahn's death. (The Global Consciousness Project was in a sense Jahn's "brain-grandchild", as it grew out of the work on random number generators at the PEAR labs, which he founded.)
http://global-mind.org/events/bob.jahn.html

I wonder if it would help if someone compiled a list of events that must eventually come true. For example, elderly scientists involved with the GCP, deaths of other named celebrities, earthquakes is places where cities are built close to fault zones, etc.

It would then be possible to track the performance of the GCP without the constant niggling doubt about whether the effects are due to cherry picking.

David

Chris

(2017-12-20, 11:34 AM)DaveB Wrote: [ -> ]I wonder if it would help if someone compiled a list of events that must eventually come true. For example, elderly scientists involved with the GCP, deaths of other named celebrities, earthquakes is places where cities are built close to fault zones, etc.

It would then be possible to track the performance of the GCP without the constant niggling doubt about whether the effects are due to cherry picking.

That's more or less what the GCP did in the period 1998-2015, with its "Registry of Formal Hypotheses and Specifications":
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/pred_formal.html

They didn't try to define the events before they happened, but they did define them before looking at any of the data, which is the important thing. (Peter Bancel excluded a relatively small number of the events from analysis because they weren't satisfactorily pre-specified.) The final list contained 500 events, and produced a Z value of 7.31, associated with a p value of 1.333x10^-13. At that point they ended the formal experiment, believing they had sufficiently proved that there was a real effect.

They are still analysing individual events, and if I understand correctly the hypothesis for Robert Jahn's death was pre-specified in the same way as those in the formal series. But admittedly the difference is that they are no longer committed to publishing the result in every case. (That's as far as I know, and I may be wrong about it.)