Marilyn Schlitz

A little synchronicity: yesterday I was browsing the subject of consciousness and came across a video from the Closer To Truth series featuring Marilyn Schlitz. This morning (as it is right now in NZ) I see another Marilyn Schlitz interview from Closer to Truth has been posted at The Daily Grail.

https://www.dailygrail.com/2017/11/psi-r...-into-esp/

A large portion of the general public believe in psi effects (such as telepathy and precognition) due to to first-hand, real-world experiences, but only a small percentage of those people follow academic research into the topic. This is perhaps due to the statistics-heavy papers that result from studies into psi, which are, at best, a dry read, and at their worst almost incomprehensible to the lay reader.

I have to say that I agree with the "almost incomprehensible" comment (except for the use of "almost"). What's worse, for the layman, is the way that both sides of any debate often seem to use the same statistics to support their case. 


FYI, here's the video I was watching yesterday:

https://www.closertotruth.com/series/doe...aterialism

A little synchronicity: yesterday I was browsing the subject of consciousness and came across a video from the Closer To Truth series featuring Marilyn Schlitz. This morning (as it is right now in NZ) I see another Marilyn Schlitz interview from Closer to Truth has been posted at The Daily Grail.

https://www.dailygrail.com/2017/11/psi-r...-into-esp/

By the way, at the end of that video she describes the experimenter effect tests she did with Wiseman and it was interesting that she notes the apparent effect on the subjects when they were greeted by her as opposed to being greeted by Wiseman. Make of it what you will but that indicates to me some kind of telepathic empathy or some such.

By the way, at the end of that video she describes the experimenter effect tests she did with Wiseman and it was interesting that she notes the apparent effect on the subjects when they were greeted by her as opposed to being greeted by Wiseman. Make of it what you will but that indicates to me some kind of telepathic empathy or some such.

I never understand why people think the Wiseman-Schlitz results show an experimenter effect. In their joint study, the experimenter was actually doing the staring, which to my mind makes the role more like that of a participant.

I never understand why people think the Wiseman-Schlitz results show an experimenter effect. In their joint study, the experimenter was actually doing the staring, which to my mind makes the role more like that of a participant.

I used that term because that's how it became known at the time. She doesn't actually call it that in the video.

By contrast, here's Krauss talking about the same subject. I know in advance that he's going to disagree with my worldview and that I should take that into account but the guy is such an arrogant prick that I want to switch him off before I get half-way through the video ... no evidence ... wishful thinking ... we should be able to measure the ESP signals with our sophisticated equipment ... if ESP were true then there would be people making billions from their predictions ... all accidents and coincidences. Sorry if my bias is showing.

I think almost by definition extreme, dogmatic sceptics aren't very bright.

"This isn't controversial" really isn't a clever claim to make, because it can be disproved by just one person disagreeing with it.

And his choice of killer argument against precognition isn't very clever either, given that he evidently knows nothing about either gambling or speculating on the stock market!

At the risk of going further off-topic, I'd just point out that what Lawrence Krauss says about gambling/speculation and compound interest is demonstrably false - even setting aside the obvious facts that gambling odds are always weighted in favour of the house/bookmaker and that there are charges for speculating on the stock market.

He claims that even a tiny average return per individual investment - it doesn't matter how small, and he gives 0.1% as an example - will result in large gains if repeated over time, because of compound interest. At first glance that claim does appear to be true on average, but averages can be misleading. Further consideration shows that if you have a tiny average return and if you compound your bets (i.e. multiply the results of your bets together), over a long period you will have an infinitesimal probability of making a huge profit, but a practical certainty of losing nearly all your money.

To stand a real chance of benefitting from compounding in this way, you don't just need to have a positive average return. You need the average of the logarithm of the result to be positive. That's a much more demanding requirement, and it means that a tiny average return of the kind indicated by most psi experiments will nearly always lose you money.

Wikipedia says Krauss's first degree was a first class one in mathematics and physics, so he could have worked that out if he'd thought about it carefully.