Skeptical Attempts to Dismiss Psychic Phenomena

[Laird]

it is weird there was a spider study in there for....some reason.

Just a quick note: the impression I got was that it was not a study on spiders, but a human precognition study using images of spiders as part of the stimuli (as opposed to the usual image stimuli). Maybe you were under the same impression too, or maybe my impression is wrong - just thought I'd mention it.

Just a quick note: the impression I got was that it was not a study on spiders, but a human precognition study using images of spiders as part of the stimuli (as opposed to the usual image stimuli). Maybe you were under the same impression too, or maybe my impression is wrong - just thought I'd mention it.

The Stat Modeling article also mentions a claim about failed replications not being including but put in a file drawer. But this is also merely hypothetical AFAICTell, and you can make this claim against a lot of studies?

Radin also makes note of the possibility that with regards to Psi in general studies suggestive of Psi existing could also be shoved in a file drawer.

[Laird]

The Stat Modeling article also mentions a claim about failed replications not being including but put in a file drawer. But this is also merely hypothetical AFAICTell, and you can make this claim against a lot of studies?

In this respect, the article also leaves out this from its quote of the abstract: "The number of potentially unretrieved experiments required to reduce the overall effect size of the complete database to a trivial value of 0.01 is 544, and seven of eight additional statistical tests support the conclusion that the database is not significantly compromised by either selection bias or by intense “p-hacking”".

However, the link it provides to the paper itself is dead, so it may have been working with an older version of the paper than the one in which I found that wording: https://f1000research.com/articles/4-1188

It also goofs badly with this: "Bem’s paper was published in 2011, so how can it be that experiments performed as early as 2003 are exact replications?"

Apparently, the author of the article failed to read this in the paper, or to otherwise encounter this well-known fact (emphasis added by me): "To encourage replications from the beginning of his research program in 2000, Bem offered free, comprehensive packages that included detailed instruction manuals for conducting the experiments, computer software for running the experimental sessions, and database programs for collecting and analyzing the data."

It's almost as though criticising this article is like... well, shooting fish in a barrel.

"I have seen these people go to the ends of the earth and beyond, conjuring fictional narratives so that they never, ever have to concede. I’ve seen this from garden variety skeptics on the Internet and from academics. How much longer do we have to placate their delicate egos by maintaining the fiction that psychic ability isn’t real?"

You don't have any obligation to placate their delicate egos. Just keep on going. Surely someday there will be a compelling theory from which we can derive and test new hypotheses and ultimately develop technology.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....62992/full

~~ Paul

Nice to see you post, Paul. Hope you are well.

Nice to see you post, Paul. Hope you are well.

Doing just fine. I hope you are, too.

Got boosted today.

~~ Paul

From Bem's handbook for P-hacking, i mean Writing the Empirical Journal Article :

If a datum suggests a new hypothesis,
try to find additional evidence for it elsewhere in the data.
If you see dim traces of interesting patterns, try to reorganize the data to bring them into bolder relief. If there
are participants you don’t like, or trials, observers, or interviewers who gave you anomalous results, drop them
(temporarily). Go on a fishing expedition for something—anything —interesting.

@Paul, good to see you.

"I have seen these people go to the ends of the earth and beyond, conjuring fictional narratives so that they never, ever have to concede. I’ve seen this from garden variety skeptics on the Internet and from academics. How much longer do we have to placate their delicate egos by maintaining the fiction that psychic ability isn’t real?"

You don't have any obligation to placate their delicate egos. Just keep on going. Surely someday there will be a compelling theory from which we can derive and test new hypotheses and ultimately develop technology.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....62992/full

~~ Paul

Thanks for the link, Paul

I hope this paper gets attention here.   

 Specifically, we will argue that the controversies about the existence of psi could be highly informative about psychology and consciousness studies.

 

If I could argue worth a shit, I would argue with the authors on the above assertion.

 Nevertheless, which ever explanation is correct, the results of psi research may be informative for the wider psychological sciences (Schooler et al., 2018). Indeed, they lead to two opposites but very heuristic hypothesis: (a) within this domain of research, which has been conducted by hundreds of researchers whose critical efforts span over a century, the researchers have either been fraudulent or have been fooled, even when using the most reliable tools of scientific research and (b) psi exists and human consciousness can interact with its environment beyond the usual boundaries of space and time. This paper will explore these two hypotheses and their consequences for psi research and psychology in general.

"I have seen these people go to the ends of the earth and beyond, conjuring fictional narratives so that they never, ever have to concede. I’ve seen this from garden variety skeptics on the Internet and from academics. How much longer do we have to placate their delicate egos by maintaining the fiction that psychic ability isn’t real?"

You don't have any obligation to placate their delicate egos. Just keep on going. Surely someday there will be a compelling theory from which we can derive and test new hypotheses and ultimately develop technology.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....62992/full

~~ Paul

From this article:

For example, the United States government attempted to employ psi for more than 20 years during a program usually known as Stargate in which military personnel were selected on basis of their supposed psi-abilities to acquire information (e.g., about Russian military sites) at a distance (in space and time; Hyman, 1996; Utts, 1996; May et al., 2018)21. The null hypothesis would mean that staff of the best United States intelligence agencies (CIA, NSA, etc.), a number of military officers working on this program (some of whom were decorated with the legion of merit; McMoneagle and May, 2014), top scientists who have examined the project (notably a past president of the American Statistical Association; Utts, 1996), and even the president of the United States (Jimmy Carter admitted that a lost military plane Tu-22 has been found thanks to the Stargate program) have been fooled by the results of 504 military operations over almost 20 years (1973–1995). If this interpretation of significant results in psi experiments is accepted, it may follow that other areas of “reputable” research, involving many researchers, could also produce illusory results.

There are several people on this forum who know a lot more about this program than me, but i have always wondered how the nature of the cold war era are left out of consideration.
Is it not possible that this program was meant to explain to the other side how certain intelligence was obtained? Could this not be an effort to protect more classic sources or assets?
Or maybe it was an attempt to have the sovjets outspend themselves in a mirror program?
It is maybe no coincidence that the program was ended when the iron curtain was lifted a few years earlier.

Does anybody here know of sources that considered this angle?