I thought I'd start a thread on this project because, taken at face value, it provides some of the strongest experimental evidence for psi, but has tended to be neglected by sceptics and proponents alike.
It began as a kind of sequel to the microPK experiments conducted at the PEAR lab at Princeton. It consists of a worldwide network of several dozen random number generators. Essentially the idea behind it was that at the time of significant events - typically, events that engaged the attention of the whole world - the random number generators would exhibit unusual behaviour. Different measures of unusual behaviour were used at different times, but the commonest signified that the numbers produced by the different generators would tend to correlate with one another.
The network still exists, and continues to generate numbers. It has a Facebook page, where the latest post examines its response to Hurricane Irma:
https://www.facebook.com/EGGproject/
But for evidential purposes, the significant data are those produced by the "Registry of Formal Hypotheses and Specifications". According to the organisers of the project, for each of a sequence of 513 events in the period 1998-2015, a statistical hypothesis was specified before the data were examined, and was then tested. In subsequent analysis about a dozen of these events were excluded because the hypotheses were poorly defined, or not defined before any of the data were seen, but for the 500 classified as "rigorously defined", the cumulative Z value was 7.31, corresponding to a p value of 1.333 x 10^-13.
http://global-mind.org/results.html
As far as I'm aware, that result remains totally unexplained by sceptics. The hypotheses were stated to be pre-specified - that is, specified before the data were examined. The specification wasn't just a vague hypothesis - it was a specific statistical test that would yield a definite Z value for the event. And it was stated that all the pre-specified events would be included, so there would be no "publication bias" in the results.
Sceptics have criticised certain post hoc analyses of particular events, such as 9-11, which in principle is fair enough. But obviously those criticisms don't address the formal registry, for which the hypotheses are stated to have been decided in advance. And sceptics tend to dismiss the whole project as a post hoc fishing expedition, which proves only that they haven't bothered to look at the protocol.
Perhaps there's a statistical artefact lurking somewhere in the analysis. But if so, no one has found it yet. All the data are freely available to anyone who wants to try. The results have been compared not only with the theoretical behaviour of random number generators, but also with control sets sampled randomly from the database. They have also been analysed in great detail overa period of about a decade by Peter Bancel, who says he originally approached the problem as a sceptic.
If anyone wants to assert an "atheistic" rather than an "agnostic" opinion of psi, I think it's reasonable to ask them for a non-paranormal explanation of these results. I'm not aware of one - outright fraud excepted.
It began as a kind of sequel to the microPK experiments conducted at the PEAR lab at Princeton. It consists of a worldwide network of several dozen random number generators. Essentially the idea behind it was that at the time of significant events - typically, events that engaged the attention of the whole world - the random number generators would exhibit unusual behaviour. Different measures of unusual behaviour were used at different times, but the commonest signified that the numbers produced by the different generators would tend to correlate with one another.
The network still exists, and continues to generate numbers. It has a Facebook page, where the latest post examines its response to Hurricane Irma:
https://www.facebook.com/EGGproject/
But for evidential purposes, the significant data are those produced by the "Registry of Formal Hypotheses and Specifications". According to the organisers of the project, for each of a sequence of 513 events in the period 1998-2015, a statistical hypothesis was specified before the data were examined, and was then tested. In subsequent analysis about a dozen of these events were excluded because the hypotheses were poorly defined, or not defined before any of the data were seen, but for the 500 classified as "rigorously defined", the cumulative Z value was 7.31, corresponding to a p value of 1.333 x 10^-13.
http://global-mind.org/results.html
As far as I'm aware, that result remains totally unexplained by sceptics. The hypotheses were stated to be pre-specified - that is, specified before the data were examined. The specification wasn't just a vague hypothesis - it was a specific statistical test that would yield a definite Z value for the event. And it was stated that all the pre-specified events would be included, so there would be no "publication bias" in the results.
Sceptics have criticised certain post hoc analyses of particular events, such as 9-11, which in principle is fair enough. But obviously those criticisms don't address the formal registry, for which the hypotheses are stated to have been decided in advance. And sceptics tend to dismiss the whole project as a post hoc fishing expedition, which proves only that they haven't bothered to look at the protocol.
Perhaps there's a statistical artefact lurking somewhere in the analysis. But if so, no one has found it yet. All the data are freely available to anyone who wants to try. The results have been compared not only with the theoretical behaviour of random number generators, but also with control sets sampled randomly from the database. They have also been analysed in great detail overa period of about a decade by Peter Bancel, who says he originally approached the problem as a sceptic.
If anyone wants to assert an "atheistic" rather than an "agnostic" opinion of psi, I think it's reasonable to ask them for a non-paranormal explanation of these results. I'm not aware of one - outright fraud excepted.
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