Big deal, I can consume grand amounts of beer and appetizers in a single bound and never feel like I have sinned agaist the spirit in the lest.
skeptics and the paranormal
by Decidedly_Unsure 24 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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rem
First, let me just say that I noticed that the source of the article was a tabloid, thus my disinterested acknowledgement on the thread under discussion.
::This is what they do with paranormal phenomena. X has an experience in Europe today, Y has several experiences in India tomorrow. They dismiss all these as random ?unexplained? things. Why not consider the countless experiences of all these people who experience paranormal activity as a whole? Why do u have to bring each of these people in a lab and say ?show me again and again? under my scrutiny so I can see it. Could you imagine if that approach was taken before bacteria and microscopes were discovered?
Are you just speaking of generalities, or do you have specific examples? What type of paranormal experiences are you talking about? Fuzzy thinking will not help us learn anything.
It's like saying X sees a cryptozoological creature in Europe today, Y sees several in India tomorrow. What cryptozoological creatures are we talking about? It just so happens that one is the Loch Ness monster and the other is the Abominable Snow Man. Does taking all of these sightings as a whole give any proof of the existence of cryptozoological creatures? No.
Tell us what you mean specifically and then tell us why it would be impossible to test or investigate said phenomenon in a controlled environment.
rem -
Sirius Dogma
my consise philosophy on the subject is
Almost anything is Possible, not everything is Provable and some things are utter BullSh*t.
That being said, Where can I get my own pair of X-ray eyes and how soon can I get them? I need to plan that trip to walk around Victoria's Secrets.
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dolphman
I've been writing in another thread about some similair issues.
I can readily induce a state of meditation where certain (what i think are paranormal experiences) will happen.
It's something i can induce in a lab environment with no problems. I can induce it just about anywhere, so why not a lab.
I'm guessing one way to analyze what's happening is doing a lie detector test (to make sure at least "I" believe what is happening is happening, and I'm not faking it.) and to then try hooking up my head to a machine that can monitor changes in brain activity. Such as seeing what type of brain waves (alpha,delta) i admit during different parts of the process.
Until science can develop different tools to analyze what's happening, i believe these would work for now.
--Rich
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Decidedly_Unsure
Abaddon Thanks for the link. It is really informative since i haven't read much on the formal methodology before this, esp in such a concise manner. I am no apologist for paranormal "beleivers" but i just am repulsed by the "just ain't possible" attitudes that seem so close-minded. I have grave dufficulty in one of the "tenets" or criteria viz: 1. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Natural Law Natural law is central to science. Natural laws are broad generalisations, essentially descriptions, of the way nature has been repeatedly observed to operate. If a phenomenon depends on supernatural intervention, then it is not relying on natural laws, and it is not explanatory by reference to natural law. (Overton, 1982) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ To me either this disqualifies the scientific methodology (as outlined) from analysing, proving or disproving paranormal phenomena. Since by definition it ( a priori ) discounts things that have not been repeatedly observed in nature. I'm having difficulty understanding what this other one means: 2. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Falsifiability Another essential characteristic of science is the requirement that a scientific theory be falsifiable, that it be testable and most scientific theories have some trouble with this criterion. Historically based theories such as evolution cannot turn history back so we can view it directly but in that it is no different from many other forms of science ... in fact no one can literally look directly back to any time prior to their own lifetimes so what are we to do? Would critics of science have us assume that everything before our own time is untrue? ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Who or what determines the validity of these tests. Doesn't hte above explanaton seem to be making a special case for the evolution theory? REM you said ************* Are you just speaking of generalities, or do you have specific examples? What type of paranormal experiences are you talking about? Fuzzy thinking will not help us learn anything. It's like saying X sees a cryptozoological creature in Europe today, Y sees several in India tomorrow. What cryptozoological creatures are we talking about? ************** Good questions. I'm making this up as i go along and i need to and will do a lot more reading on the topic, but I'm talking about basic observabble "phenomena" Eg John in Milwaukee says his daughter can _sometimes_ accurately describe objects and places she has never seen He's done it, say, 3 times. (Often the scientists initila reaction is:probably co-incidence or someone told him about this place or he saw it on TV and forgot etc etc) Ria in Brazil says she can "guess" what number is on a card in a sealed box. She gets maybe 6 out of 10 correctly in your "controlled" environment. Similarly Mark from Finland does the same thing. All these occurences happen with some probability that is higher than the statistical norm for "naturally observed" people. Going back to the questions of tesibility, repeatibility etc Each one of these occurences may be individually dismissed because they couldn't be repeated over and over again with significant statistical deviations. But does the scientist ever consider _A GROUP_ of these claimants as a whole? IOW to what extent does science discount each claim individually because each individual claimant couldn't demonstrate some paranormal phenomena sufficient no. of times to be deemed worthy of consideration. But if the viewpoint is changed to encompass the fact that, say, 5000 people have been able to demonstrate an extraordinary event even just once (eg. tell you what 5-digit no. is on a card in asealed box) would this not be the basis for the rational onlooker to say something abnormal (maybe paranormal) exists, even though we don't know what it is? Do scientists by trying to "isolate" the phenomena to an individual or even small observable groups destroy any chance of gettin to the truth of the matter? You're right it can come out a bit fuzzy, but hopefully i'll be able to sort it out in my mind a bit more clearly. Thanks for the interesting responses thus far.
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Decidedly_Unsure
Dolphman
I read your post as well.
What's interesting to me is the typical skeptic response from Abaddon as one possible explanation:
*****
People can absorb information from a variety of sources and later have that information re-emerge in some fashion, and be genuinely unaware they ever knew those things beforehand.
*****
And there may be a small statistical possibility that what he says may be applicable in your instance.
What I wonder is, assuming that there are others in the world who have very similar experiences to yours what happens from a "scientific assessment" perspective.
Do they more readily accept the small probability that you picked this stuff up somewhere unconciously in a natural way, than considering all of those who experience such things and ask a basic question:
What is the probablity that _all_ these people "absorbed these abilities in some conventional way"
IOW will they dismiss each phenomenon case by case because it more readily fits within their comfort framework. -
rem
Decidedly_Unsure,
What you propose is what paranormal researchers have been doing for years. You have to be careful when doing meta-analysis as you propose. You can think of it like rounding errors. Rounding numbers that are already rounded will lead to incorrect results - thus meta-analysis of groups of studys can do the same thing.
The thing that is interesting about paranormal research is that there have been repeatable findings. The problem is not in repeatability, but in the controls. It seems that the repeatable experiments turn out to be the ones that are not done so very well. Once proper controls are put into place, the effect seems to disappear.
Now, there may actually be an ESP that works below the statistically significant threshold. The thing is, though, that if this is the case, there is no way for us to distinguish it from random phenomenon. A pill has to work better than a placebo for us to agree that it has any quantifiable efficacy. Sure, a medicine may actually be doing something, but if it can't beat out the background-noise (placebo and chance) then the effect is worthless.
Where the issue comes in here is that if people are so sure of their psychic abilities, they should be able to beat out random chance. Especially with the amazing anecdotes we hear about. There should be terabytes of data on this stuff. These types of anecdotes are not rare at all - no more rare than an airplane crash or tornados. The lack of scientific data on such a popular phenomenon is quite conspicuous - especially when scientists (most who were/are believers) have devoted their entire lives and careers looking for this stuff.
rem -
Decidedly_Unsure
Rem
Do you know if any of these studies are published and available for public view?
I'd really like to see how they do the math to dismiss all the claims.
What is their sample size? I would think that meta-analysis, as you term it, would be more appropriate for these types of phenomena.
To belabor the point even more. Let's say over a 24 hr period, subject X was able to make some unusual prediction or sighting ( eg see 3 green discss and 2 blue ones in a sealed box). They were not able to repeat this more than once over 100 tries in the 24 hr period. Consequently this may be deemed statistically insignifcant. OTOH if one considers 500 different experiments on persons _claiming to have psychic ability_ perhaps each 1 of them had 1 significant "sighting" over their experiment.
I would then compare this to 500 experiments on people who have no claims whatsoever on psychic ability. See how many, if any at all, were able to have a "sighting" in the 24 hour period. Is this the type of analysis that's beeen done?
Decidedly_Unsure -
Abaddon
Decidely_Unsure:
Synchronicity is often interpretated as a paranormal event. It's the coincidental occurrence of events in a way that seems related but is not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality
For example, how many people here have thought of someone only to have the phone ring and that person be on the other end? Wow! A paranormal event... or a function of;
- The percentage of time you spend thinking about other people
- How many people you think about in such a way
- What percentage of the time you are within reach of the phone
- How many phone calls you get on an average day
- What percentage of these are from the above mentioned group of people
If you play with numbers, you'll see that people get called by people they happen to be thinking of whlst they think of them all the time, it's just a meaningless coincidence. If someone could do it consistantly, then that would be something. But no one can, can they?
And that's assuming people are honest when they make their claims.
Okay, say I said a duck just flew out my ass. Say that a certain number of people around the world every day said ducks flew out of their ass. Say you were unable ever to observe under controlled circumstances a duck flying out of someone's ass.
What would your conclusion be?
Ria in Brazil says she can "guess" what number is on a card in a sealed box. She gets maybe 6 out of 10 correctly in your "controlled" environment. Similarly Mark from Finland does the same thing. All these occurences happen with some probability that is higher than the statistical norm for "naturally observed" people.
Bell curve, or statistical distribution; a lot in the middle, and very little at the extremes. Say the 10 cards have 5 different faces. That's a 20% chance of naming one, and a 0.00064% chance of naming six, and a 0.000001024% chance of naming 10. It's also a 26% chance of naming six wrongly and a 11% chance of naming 10 wrongly. In a test of people, there will be people who do very very well and people who do very very badly. There will be an average. Rita and Mark are no more meaningful than people who get them all wrong in themselves; it's the average that shows you what is happening either of a group or of an individual. Most individuals who test really well one day don't the next.
There is a 0.00001% chance of naming a 5 digit number by guessing. If you want 5,000 people who've done that, just ask 50,000,000 and BANG! you have 5,000 people who have demonstrated a/ clairvoyance or b/ nothing much... and the stats show you'd have demonstrated nothing much.
In all mass tests I have seen, there is no significant deviation from probability; no incidents of 5,000,000 people being asked to guess a 5-digit number and 1000 people getting it right (which would be a total violation of probability, a clear indication of unknown phenomena, and a media frenzy).
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rem
Decidedly_Unsure,
The reason why this is not a valid approach is because of the Texas Sharp Shooter fallacy. For an accurate result with Meta analysis, you have to have a random sampling. The problem is that only interesting studies are usually published while loads of negative findings are circle filed. In this case when I say interesting, I mean studies that are near statistical significance, but not quite. When you pull only the interesting studies together you may find some things pop out. The problem is that you have selected your base so that this is inevitable. That is the flaw in most meta analysis. It's just too difficult to do a good job at it.
Again with the rounding analogy - adding statistically insignificant results together should not result in a statistically significant result, but these types of errors do come up in meta-analysis. I know Ray Hyman has done a lot of work in this area in finding the flaws in meta-analysis. I'm not sure where you can find the studies themselves, but they are referenced in many writeups and books on the subject, including many that I've recommended before:
Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, Hines
Demon Haunted World, Sagan
In Search of the Light, Blackmore
How to Think About Weird Things, Schick
Why People Believe Weird Things, Shermer
Here is a really cool writeup on the scientific consensus about PSI research: http://www.skepticreport.com/print/teresi-p.htm
rem