Reber and Alcock respond to Cardeña's paper in the American Psychologist

Well I read it and am definitely dismissing it. Here's one of my favourite contradictions in it:

How is one to judge these claims? Are these all supposed
manifestations of a single, global mechanism? If so, what is
it? Is each effect modulated through discrete instantiations
of in-principle identifiable mechanisms? Are these distin-
guishable from each other? And how would one know either
way? Admittedly, this lack of a mechanism doesn’t disqual-
ify the purported effects, but it certainly invites a measured
skepticism about their existential status.

And then later:

Parapsychologists argue that
once all normal explanations are ruled out, only paranormal
explanations are possible. But, of course, one can never be
sure that all normal explanations have been eliminated, or
even that the researchers are aware of all possible normal
explanations. Simply because one cannot think of an alter-
nate cause does not logically justify the conclusion that one
has demonstrated the existence of a psychic phenomenon.

So it's okay to not have a mechanism when you do it, got it. If the skeptic can't provide a specific normal mechanism for an effect then they need to at least change their stance to agnostic on the topic in order to claim reasonability and be taken seriously for it.

The paper overall had only a couple half decent points if you can get through the massive assertions and assumptions. One of my other favorites being that no progress has been made in 150 years and nothings been refined. Ummmm.... remote viewing anyone? It's been applied successfully in multiple areas from military to finance. People are slowly starting to be able to make businesses out of it because it actually works. In the area of psychokinesis refinement is happening as well across the board. It was exciting to hear that Sean Mcnamara has found a similar relationship between remote viewing and PK just as I have, and studies of increasing rigour are being planned and conducted. The old "it's all just heat" shtick is being increasingly disproven. It's pretty obviously not body heat when you're viewing the object on your table through facetime on a phone from a parking lot or recording it passively while you focus on it with no live feedback at all.

His comments on thermodynamics and the inverse square law reeked of assumptions on how he thinks the phenomena should work and it half seemed like he was clinging to threads of "well other people haven't said it." His suggestion for PK was laden with a lack of self awareness:

For example, why do those interested in
psychokinesis run studies where participants attempt to use
mental functions to control the outcome of dice rolls or
force adjustments in the output of RNGs? There are scales
that can detect a cluster of atoms weighing a mere [10^-21]gg
(roughly the mass of a protein molecule). Why not simply
demonstrate the effect by creating sufficient mental force to
be detected by this instrument?

If such a study would be genuinely convincing then the work of Sean Mcnamara and others moving tinfoil and other heavier things would've already caused a world revolution on the subject. Instead people complain they're too light and thus too susceptible to outside influences. Well how susceptible to outside influences do you think a scale of that sensitivity is going to be?

One of the statement on why they think paraspsycholoy is a "belief trap" seems to not have an understanding of science at all:

Another element that reinforces this hope is that parapsy-
chological claims cannot be falsified. There is no way to
show that psychic phenomena do not exist, because psi
effects are only negatively defined. Their presence is said to
be observed only after all normal explanations can be ruled
out.

 

What, you mean like literally all other controlled studies? Where you rule out that its everything other than the one thing you introduced? I get that it's not as stable or reliable as basic kinetics between two wooden blocks but you're also not dealing with things that basic either. You're ultimately dealing with people and in some cases animals and mental states which we know are HIGHLY variable. Of course it's not going to be easy to replicate something like that each time every time. As Etzel had pointed out, the effect sizes aren't really that different than what you see in other social sciences, and that's not surprising.

Overall it seemed like they thought the effects should be larger for "reasons" which is like expecting random people to be martial arts masters. People might try to say "Yes but there actually are martial arts masters, whereas there's no psi masters" Yeah, but there weren't until around, maybe, 1500 - 2000 years ago when Kung Fu started getting heard of/developed. Before then there was no formalised martial system anything quite like that and it developed and has continued to develop all that time. The idea of a combative system certainly was around and certainly some people were better than others, working in isolation or part of a military or similar. But compared to the completeness and efficiency of what Kung Fu and it's many offshoots have become in that time, those people I would say had little overall skill compared to those that came later, refining and improving upon each generation. Psi in general has had a history of being an effectively genocidal crime for around the same period of time. demonized by multiple religions and arguably empires as well. Now it's just barely being allowed the breathing room to really develop. Is anyone really surprised that we don't have droves of people capable of consistent, powerful effects doing public demos yet? It makes sense to expect a random person to be able to throw a sloppy punch, not to be able to take down 25 guys barehanded.

Kung Fu was, as far as I know, originally developed at lest partially in secret as well. It got similarly demonized and commandeered due to the power it could put into the hands of an individual. Capoera was designed to look like a dance because those people weren't allowed to know how to defend themselves so when the Portugese guards would come by they'd go "oh they're just dancing" and leave. Likewise how a bunch of famers in Japan turned the things they had around them into weapons and developed guerilla tactics to fight the Shogunate because they didn't have access to the equipment or training of the samurai and called it Ninjitsu. Yes, these are vast oversimplifications of what actually happened in these cases, that's not the point.

The point is, psi development it at the stage that I at least would expect it to be at given what it's gone through. And once it does get to the point of even the mainstream having to admit that small effects are in fact being found, demonization will likely follow just like it has for everything else that gives individuals power. Lest they turn those small effects into large ones with practice. Something I'd argue we're already starting to see small hints of in remote viewing specifically. Maybe getting funny ideas of living more independently off of their own hard work and merit and whatnot along the way. It also would not remotely surprise me to find out later that there were people in the world capable of high level abilities who kept it secret for their own benefit and/or safety.

Overall I think this article has done a great service to the field in being so terrible. Its few good points seem overshadowed by the vast bad ones, and their refusal to even look at current data condemns it totally.

In case anyone would like to actually read the paper before dismissing it, it can be downloaded from http://jt512.dyndns.org/documents/Search...sible_.pdf

The paper makes some good points, for sure. The abstract is sort of dickish, though.

The paper makes some good points, for sure. The abstract is sort of dickish, though.

I think some of the good points were the sheer amount of meta analyses done in the field, potentially the quote by Darly Bem though I'd have to check up on that lest it be getting taken out of context and quote mined. And that every science had to go through intense scrutiny before being accepted. Though I have never agreed with the idea of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" Since the very concept of an "extraordinary" claim  requires an emotional adherence to a worldview. Everything is just a claim, nothing more.

[Laird]

potentially the quote by Darly Bem though I'd have to check up on that lest it be getting taken out of context and quote mined

Yes, I think it's been misinterpreted and taken out of context. We've discussed it before on Psience Quest. Malf initially raised the quote here, contending that it "condemns" Bem, and in the following post, I disagreed, followed by Chris, who also disagreed.

Malf sourced it from a Steve Novella blog, but the original source is this Slate article, so you can see it in its best context there.

Yes, I think it's been misinterpreted and taken out of context. We've discussed it before on Psience Quest. Malf initially raised the quote here, contending that it "condemns" Bem, and in the following post, I disagreed, followed by Chris, who also disagreed.

Malf sourced it from a Steve Novella blog, but the original source is this Slate article, so you can see it in its best context there.

I read it and yeah I'd say it's been taken out of context, probably on purpose given the quality of many of the other arguments in the paper.

::EDIT::

Though I do think the original studies may still be a little questionable, though the idea of precognition still seems sound from other areas, such as dream precognition. I also don't think precognition requires that the information is literally coming from the "future" or that time is literally flowing backwards. Which is something the article seems to assume which seemed odd to me.

[Laird]

I also don't think precognition requires that the information is literally coming from the "future" or that time is literally flowing backwards

Interesting. What alternative concept(s) would you suggest?

I'm curious about one thing in the full article by Reber and Alcock. On the sixth page they say:
"In this interview [the Slate interview by Daniel Engber] Bem also acknowledged that he never actually ran any of the experiments or directly supervised the data collection. He used student volunteers."

I can't see where that comes from in the article by Engber. Can anyone see any statement by Bem to that effect there?
https://slate.com/health-and-science/201...roken.html

It's perhaps worth pointing out that although they claim the data are irrelevant, they do actually make one claim about the data. They claim that attempts to replicate Daryl Bem's "Feeling the Future" studies "almost uniformly failed." That is perhaps the impression they got from a small number of failures that were publicised soon after the publication of Bem's paper. But the meta-analysis published by Bem and others in 2015 covered 90 studies and showed an overall Z value of 6.4 (and the result remained significant when Bem's original studies were excluded).

This meta-analysis is one of the ones included in the paper by Cardeña which Reber and Alcock are responding to. The second section in Cardeña's Table summarising the data is headed "Precognition/Bem-type studies." But it appears that Reber and Alcock really are serious about not examining the data.

Continuing to read the paper by Reber and Alcock - on this point, although the article in the Skeptical Inquirer is presented as "a summary of our arguments" in the American Psychologist paper, and although the SI article claims that the replication attempts "almost uniformly failed," that is not actually the result of ignorance of the literature, as I had wondered whether it might be, because in the full paper the authors do refer to the meta-analysis, saying "Bem and colleagues carried out a meta-analysis that seemed to show that the effects, although small, were real."

In fact, I can't see any reference in the AP paper to Bem's results not having been replicated, as stated in the SI article. Instead, his results are dismissed on the claims that (1) Bem told Daniel Engber that the experiments had all been done by students (which I can't find stated by Engber, and which in any case doesn't seem to be a valid objection in itself) and (2) Bem told Engber that although he realised the importance of experimental rigour and was "all for" it, he didn't have the patience for it and preferred that it should be done by others (none of which logically implies that his experiments weren't conducted rigorously - quite the opposite, I'd have thought).

I think there are actually several warning signs about the accuracy of Engber's article. His treatment of a replication attempt by Bem and others was misleading, as discussed previously. And the information he says he obtained from Jade Wu, one of Bem's experimenters, doesn't agree with what's stated elsewhere. Probably the strangest statement attributed to her is that Bem had said "I’m gay, so I don’t know what’s sexy for heterosexuals." Certainly Bem studied homosexuality in an academic sense, but as he has been married twice (to women) it seems there must have been at least a serious miscommunication here.

Continuing to read the paper by Reber and Alcock - on this point, although the article in the Skeptical Inquirer is presented as "a summary of our arguments" in the American Psychologist paper, and although the SI article claims that the replication attempts "almost uniformly failed," that is not actually the result of ignorance of the literature, as I had wondered whether it might be, because in the full paper the authors do refer to the meta-analysis, saying "Bem and colleagues carried out a meta-analysis that seemed to show that the effects, although small, were real."

In fact, I can't see any reference in the AP paper to Bem's results not having been replicated, as stated in the SI article. Instead, his results are dismissed on the claims that (1) Bem told Daniel Engber that the experiments had all been done by students (which I can't find stated by Engber, and which in any case doesn't seem to be a valid objection in itself) and (2) Bem told Engber that although he realised the importance of experimental rigour and was "all for" it, he didn't have the patience for it and preferred that it should be done by others (none of which logically implies that his experiments weren't conducted rigorously - quite the opposite, I'd have thought).

I think there are actually several warning signs about the accuracy of Engber's article. His treatment of a replication attempt by Bem and others was misleading, as discussed previously. And the information he says he obtained from Jade Wu, one of Bem's experimenters, doesn't agree with what's stated elsewhere. Probably the strangest statement attributed to her is that Bem had said "I’m gay, so I don’t know what’s sexy for heterosexuals." Certainly Bem studied homosexuality in an academic sense, but as he has been married twice (to women) it seems there must have been at least a serious miscommunication here.

To correct that last statement - it's been pointed out to me privately that Daryl Bem does "identify as gay." And although he has been married twice, his second marriage was actually to a man, not a woman.

However, what Jade Wu is quoted as saying about the experimental work isn't consistent with the information we have from other sources, so I think the Slate article does need to be treated with caution. I'll try to post some more information about that later.

However, what Jade Wu is quoted as saying about the experimental work isn't consistent with the information we have from other sources, so I think the Slate article does need to be treated with caution. I'll try to post some more information about that later.

Just to be brief, as it's not really on topic for this thread -  the Slate article says that in Fall 2009 Jade Wu saw the advertisement for the job, and for the rest of that semester and into the next one, with other women - none of whom had heard of ESP when they were recruited (!) - she tested "hundreds" of undergraduates. Soon after she started, she saw a bunch of pornographic pictures and Bem asked her thoughts on them; they "would be" the stimuli for the first experiment presented in his paper. And later there is a comment, "Wu, for one, remembers Bem making lots of tweaks to his experiments. He would adjust the numbers of trials and the timing of the stimuli, she says."

Actually, Experiment 1, with the erotic pictures, had been completed three years earlier, in 2006. In fact the only experiment published in "Feeling the Future" that hadn't already been completed by 2009 was Experiment 9, the second one on Retroactive facilitation of recall. That was done over three weeks in November and December, by both male and female experimenters, and had just 75 sessions (including controls), not hundreds. In that experiment, there were no stimuli whose timing could be "tweaked," but just lists of words. The protocol, including the timing, was the same as in the first "precall" experiment done two years earlier, except for an additional practice session at the end.

So there are quite a lot of discrepancies of detail between Engber's rendition in 2017 of what Jade Wu had told him, and what the data files say. In particular, it looks as though the part about tweaks to stimulus times must have been third-hand by the time it got to Engber, rather than being a personal recollection by Jade Wu, as he presents it.

Bem's own comment on what Engber wrote about unreported pilot testing can be found here:
https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-c...4#pid13704