Slashdot Mirror
Princeton ESP Lab to Close
Nico M writes " The New York Times reports on the imminent closure of one of the most controversial research units at an ivy league School. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory is due to close, but not because of pressure from the outside. Lab founder Robert G. Jahn has declared, in the article, that they've essentially collected all the data they're going to. The laboratory has conducted studies on extrasensory perception and telekinesis from its cramped quarters in the basement of the university's engineering building since 1979. Its equipment is aging, its finances dwindling. Jahn points the finger at detractors as well: 'If people don't believe us after all the results we've produced, then they never will.'"
Didn't expect that.
Surely the lab's directors should have seen this coming?
Of course, all my _other_ senses kept telling me that. Now if only these super-senses really worked when it mattered.
From the article: One editor famously told Dr. Jahn that he would consider a paper "if you can telepathically communicate it to me."
Yah, that about covers it.
Only saving grace is, they relied on donations, so they weren't wasting money extorted from others, whether by taxes or by tuition.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
After looking at all the data, we certainly believe in your results. Your data proves that there is no evidence for ESP (except in flawed non-reproducible experiments). So long and thanks for confirming the obvious.
For a fund raiser hosted by Egon Spengler.
Where are Dr. Peter Venkman, Dr. Raymond Stantz, Dr. Egon Spengler, and Winston Zeddmore going to get letters of recommendations?
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
they would have seen this coming.
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
Where can we, the readers, find all these results?
"We submitted our data for review to very good journals," Ms. Dunne said, "but no one would review it. We have been very open with our data. But how do you get peer review when you don't have peers?"I dunno. You have this big global network of documents called the "World Wide Web". Certainly, you couldn't publish there.
Honestly, I want to see their "results" published to the web, so we can demolish their methodology and their conclusions. Webloggers can always use interesting material to write about.
Several expert panels examined PEAR's methods over the years, looking for irregularities, but did not find sufficient reasons to interrupt the work.Which expert panels? What, exactly, were their comments? What constitutes reason to interrupt work? (If your methodology is flawed, then I'd expect that you don't want to interrupt your work, you want to continue it so you can do the experiments again, properly.)
Nobody would accept such vague arguments if this was a new cryptographic algorithm. Why should we be any less skeptical here?
http://outcampaign.org/
I'm trying to determine whether human emotional states have a measurable effect on the psychomagnetheric energy field. It's a theory Ray and I were working on when we had to dissolve Ghostbusters.
They think they're here for marriage counseling. We've kept them waiting for two
hours and we've been gradually increasing the temperature in the room.
It's up to 95 degrees at the moment. Now my assistant is going to enter and ask them if they'd mind waiting another half-hour.
I'm a pretty open-minded guy, but when the best proof that somebody can come up with for ESP is that every 2 or 3 in 10,000 outcomes can be changed, I'm not impressed. Those are pretty basically standard statistical anomalies, and to say that they are definate proof of ESP is a very far stretch. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."; I can't recall who said it, but it's pretty much how science does (and should) examine things like this. When you can find someone who can levitate a car anytime, anywhere, I'll believe you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If they need more funding, I suppose they could always get the money from the JREF.
http://outcampaign.org/
The presence of the GCP is indicative of an overall human collective consciousness. Google it if you're not familiar, it's another Princeton based study, perhaps done by the same people, that shows some really interesting data indicating an overall change in random outcomes prior to any event that affects a large portion of the human consciousness as a whole.
The World Trade Center attacks, Princess Diana's death, and other events with long lasting consequences brought large shifts in the outcomes prior to the events occuring - which is the most bizarre and interesting part. Other events, such as New Year's Eve, etc, also have results that are regularly shown. It's a positively enthralling study.
Anyway, it suggests that we, as a whole, are projecting a field of human consciousness that affects random outcomes. This would suggest that any lone person attempting to affect random outcomes would be lost in the sea of thoughts, and have little to no overall effect.
I am curious as to whether or not you could create some sort of shielding or better result by varying location, proximity, etc... The most interesting and telling experiment I can think of would be to take a human and a few random generators a great distance from the earth and resume tests. I had no idea that any really credible institute had been performing these tests, this is neat.
I've never posted anonymously, but I figure now's a good time.
For as long as I can remember I've had a subtle effect on machines. I've heard similar things described here many times, in many discussions. When friends and relatives ask me to fix something, and I come over to help them out, the thing just starts working. Mostly it's with computers.
I'm not a religious person. I don't believe in god. In fact it's my attitude that belief should be limited to the bare minimum and that, if given a choice, we should rely on verifiable facts as the basis for actions and attitudes. This odd effect I have on machines has happened so often, for decades, that I can't really deny it. It's subtle, but it's been observed by people around me, for as long as I can remember. And yet I feel embarrassed talking about it, even posting anonymously about it.
So I'm glad to see that PEAR has existed, but not surprised at all that the scientific community refused to peer review their work. Maybe their work will be picked up by someone else. Maybe this phenomena and others like it will be more easily measured in the future. Who knows? It doesn't bother me much, really. If it's an actual physical phenomena it'll still be there in the future, and hence will have the possibility of being measured.
The methodology wasn't flawed, so much as the analysis and the conclusions drawn from it.
A PEAR experiment involved a participant attempting to influence a random number generator (essentially) in a pre-specified direction over a large number of trials. Because random events are, by nature, random, you can get streaks that are above or below the mean. If you analyze a large enough sample, these streaks can become statistically significant, even though they're essentially meaningless and practically insignificant -- it's similar to the fact that any deviation from the mean, no matter how small, is statistically significant if you measure the entire population. Additionally, while the probability of any particular streak is low (.5^n is the probability of any number of heads flipped in a row, which gets very small when you talk about enough of them), if you have enough random events, those streaks are pretty much guaranteed to appear.
So, that's the logic of the PEAR data analysis. Collect a huge corpus of random events, look for streaks, then call them statistically significant because of their low base probability of appearance and the fact that they deviated at all from the expected mean. Skeptic magazine has a good discussion of the PEAR lab inanity, and I believe James Randi's commentary addresses it a few times.
The claim that PEAR's research wouldn't be reviewed is probably false, by the way. It's most likely that the papers were rejected from mainstream journals for the very reasons I mentioned earlier, or because the PEAR lab had no theoretical explanation for the "results" they observed. Or, of course, it's because their papers seem rather dubious in their lack of data and explanations of how they've arrived at their stated probability values (which I say from having the experience of reading one in a, how shall we say, less than top tier journal). Additionally, the lab's been extremely difficult with regards to their raw data. Randi, for example, has never been able to get ahold of it.
The Freelance Wizard
But, hey, thanks for trying.
PEARS was defraught of bad method. Google around any good math blog or skeptic report and you will be able to read why. first link I found CSICOP
Conclusion quoted:
In their book Margins of Reality Jahn and Dunne raise this question: "Is modern science, in the name of rigor and objectivity, arbitrarily excluding essential factors from its purview?" Although the question is couched in general terms, the intent is to raise the issue as to whether the claims of the parapsychological community are dismissed out of hand by mainstream science unjustifiably. This paper argues that in the light of the difficulties in replication (even by the PEAR group itself), the lack of anything approaching a theoretical basis for the claims made, and, perhaps most damaging, the published behavior of the baseline data of the PEAR group which by their own criteria indicate nonrandom behavior of the device that they claim is random, then the answer to the question raised has to be no. There are reasonable and rational grounds for questioning these claims. Despite the best efforts of the PEAR group over a twenty-five-year period, their impact on mainstream science has been negligible. The PEAR group might argue that this is due to the biased and blinkered mentality of mainstream scientists. I would argue that it is due to the lack of compelling evidence.
At best this was pseudo science. At worst they scammed private investor from money to study something inexistant (AFAIK this was not public found). They were fitting the data to the conclusion. They were begging for belief, but were quite empty handed on the falsification side. The quicker this shame can be closed, the better. Now if we could do the same for the other 999 pseudo science outfit outside here...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
And have you looked at ALL at the details of his methods or any of his published results?
Dismissing evidence based on preconceived belief is called religion. To be scientific you must actually LOOK at the evidence and methods, and consider it using the same methods used to evaluate all other experimental evidence.
They simply retrofit the data after the fact. And once you retrofit data you can find ANY EVENT which match as long as your criteria is low enough. There is always some bad stuff going around. Especially that they aren't limited by event size, number of people, or geography !! This is again pseudo science at its best. You want to sway us ? Fine ! Set a level of population impacted, a geography limit, event size, then make bloody prediction. Else what you are doing is no better than taking a random bunch of data and finding correaltion between that data and other event. I bet with the same methodology I could take the price variation of potatoe per tons, take only the cent (fractional aprt) and find a corelation with major earth event. As long as I define event as above I am pretty sure any kind of shit can be retrofitted.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Glad to see at least one instance of hogwash losing its funding.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Back off, man. I'm a scientist.
You know those survey cards and the like? They always ask "How did you hear about us?"
My response: "The psychic's friends network."
You know, there is a madness to my method!
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
I didn't see that one coming.
'sig' deleted due to the stupidity of it's 'nature'
The birth of a scientist's minds generally follows set paths. The young scientist's mind is exposed to many deliberate untruths, which are allowed to propagate throughout time based upon the fun factor of such myths.
1. The tooth fairy.
2. The Easter Bunny.
3. Santa Claus.
4. All of modern religion.
Such fun stops at 3, and at 4, many thousands of years worth of wars are fought over essentially the same thing. In light of this, there's an automatic WTF when one claims to be both religious and scientific all at the same time; there's an inherent split of reasoning involved with a person that practices both religion and science. The more reasonable explanation is that any scientist that practices religion automatically has their views, methods and results discolored by that can neither be seen, tested or replicated; and are therefore moot by the principles of science due to their underlying faith in something that cannot be seen, proven, tested or gawped at.
Real scientists are atheists by design, atheists by rote testing, and agnostic in practice....yet ever so much more one of the other.
The PEAR group consistently obtained positive results for 30 years.
:Pear is a failure in all respect of statistical analisys
Where are they. I certainly find NO POSITIVE RESULT WHATSOEVER. Care to do a citation. Peer reviewed journal would be nice.
And if you check the parapsychological literature Ha. HA. Let me guess. Not peer reviewed. Not even remotely in the science citation index. Certainly does not look like it.
As for the rest of your drivel, if you had read the ORIGINAL paper from the PEAR team and what they admit you would not be adament on "positive" result. Here is the link already psoted by another psoter
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Check their methods. Controls are used. And with careful investigation by many outside parties, no methodological flaws have been found.
The equivalent has been done in dozens of different experiments with consistently positive results, just not at 95% success rates. (Usually a pre-defined set of pictures are used, rather than numbers, because people can visualize them better. Mathematically this is equivalent to transmitting numbers.)
If you apply that kind of logic to home runs, you would conclude that home run hitters don't exist. If you let Babe Ruth bat twice and he strikes out both times (likely, considering his record), you'd conclude that he can't hit. This would be a ridiculously illogical conclusion, which is why your requirement of such a success rate is not relevant.
First, PEAR operated on a budget over ten times the size of the Randi prize, so it is fairly irrelevant compared to the scale of their research. Second, the Randi prize does not accept scientific evidence accumulated over large numbers of runs (perhaps because no one at the Randi foundation knows statistics well enough to understand such experiments), thus conveniently excluding all of the most rigorous and powerful scientific data on the phenomenon.
... the fact that so many Slashdot readers, a brilliant bunch by their own admission, will drop the same *obvious* wisecrack into the comments section even though they've been beaten to the punchline by a string of others?
If you're interested in debunking all pseudo-science, particularly the rampant blatherings of self proclaimed mediums and psychics, click here
My web domain.
This seems like a good time to link to James Randi's Project Alpha Hoax.
Part of the PEAR project's problem was their use of statistics. A classical p-test is guaranteed to eventually reject the null hypothesis (no ESP) if enough data is collected. This is related to the famous Lindley's paradox. A criticism of a particular PEAR analysis on these grounds may be found here from astrostatistician Bill Jefferys. There was a response from the study's author, which I don't have a link to, and a counterresponse here.
Jefferys advocates the Bayesian approach as an alternative to their p-value test (as do I), but even non-Bayesians admit such problems with p-values can happen (they just think the alternatives are worse); see here for some references, and here for some criticisms of and non-Bayesian alternatives to classical accept/reject significance testing. This paper (PDF) is an opinion piece which reviews the issue from a medical research perspective.
A good friend liked this book so much he bought a copy for me and hovered until I read it.
Bottom line: It's not a very well written book but the conclusions it draws are scientifically sound and inescapable. There is something going on which is poorly described and poorly understood by science. Also what ever it is, is above and beyond statistical randomness. (and well below these fools running around talking to dead, bending spoons, and reading minds)
This doesn't surprise me at all. Pity there's so much idiocy in the world that figuring it out is beyond us.
Oh and on a side note: you knee jerk deniers with your cutesy "They should have seen it coming" bullshit. Fuck Off; you aren't funny, you're lame and you are just as much part of the problem as the fools on Art Bell talking with Elvis.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I was going to make this identical point. Thanks for saving me the trouble.
In this day of trumped-up controversy over the difference between Science and nonsense/non-science, Princeton is missing a big opportunity to underscore the importance of this by underscoring that "lack of faith" has nothing to do with anything in Science. These were often not expensive experiments to try, and I'm sure there was plenty of money riding on a successful outcome, so budget was not what impeded opportunities to reproduce. Surely anyone would be proud to show they'd reproduced results as important as these would be if they could be reproduced in an independent lab.
I've never had occasion to stop and read Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, but the title has always said to me what needs to be said. Nevertheless, there's clearly some segment of the populace that doesn't understand what Scientific Method is and that thinks that anything scientific-sounding is science and that probably really does think that faith is a key component.
The sad part of a lot of the debate on so-called Intelligent Design is that people who don't get it often use words like "hypothesis" or "theory" as if they were criticisms of Science. They point to the Theory of Evolution as if the mere use of the word "theory" was a trump card over the more emotionally comforting yet more scientifically misleading term "fact". It is being spun in public debate as if it were an outright admission of failure. The fact is that what gives science its power is the willingness of the claim-maker to step forward and offer a thesis for possible falsification. Anything where you can't make a single testable statement that, if proven, would falsify your work makes for pretty questionable science.
There's also no shame or loss of face in thoroughly researching an area that doesn't show an original thesis. People get very bound up in the hope they'll show truth, but Science proceeds also by trying and failing, and we should do more to laud those who fail and are straightforward and honest about such failures. Because research dollars are often really a gamble on someone's part that a claim is true, we create both emotional and economic incentives for researchers to bias results toward the original claim. It may upset the funders, but it should not upset Science, to see a well-documented failure. But the researchers throw away all the honor they may have gained by properly exploring and documenting a set of failure results if they stubbornly insist that non-reproducible results are best described as "success that others refuse to have faith in" since there really isn't any outcome in any research that couldn't be described by such words if one wanted to... You could print those words on a stamp, buy a post office box, and open your own research lab with little more than that as your research facility.
Educated people should use opportunities like this to focus loudly on what Science is and what it is not. The Public can use all the education it can get on this issue, especially in the US, where the very notion of Science is under active attack.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Well, if you check one of their papers, you'll find the following sentence, on page 7: "While no statistically significant departures of the variance, skew, kurtosis, or higher moments from the appropriate chance values appear in the overall data, regular patterns of certain finer scale features can be discerned." That's an outright confession of fraud. They are saying they cannot find any evidence if they analyze a statistically significant amount of data, so they pick whatever small sample will suit them. It's as if I threw a coin a million times and said: "Oh look! Here I threw ten heads in sequence!"
Further on, in the next page, they state "Given the correlation of operator intentions with the anomalous mean shifts, it is reasonable to search the data for operator-specific features that might establish some pattern of individual operator contributions to the overall results. Unfortunately, quantitative statistical assessment of these is complicated by the unavoidably wide disparity among the operator database sizes, and by the small signal-to-noise ratio of the raw data,
Of course, if they *did* communicate their results by telepathy, then that would be an extraordinary proof. But what they have published is rather underwhelming, can we assume that if they did have any better results they would have published them?
The thing that gets me about the Randi prize, and indeed about any claim that attempts to prove the validity of psychics, is much the same argument that's brought up about magic in Harry Potter - do you really want to paint a gigantic target on yourself as the only scientifically proven psychic? Any true psychic (as well as anyone who reads celebrity magazines) would know what huge amounts of fame would do to them, and then you have the nutjobs who believe they're true psychics and would go to this person for self-validation and yadda yadda yadda. And then they get kidnapped by the CIA in order to fight terrorism.
I mean, they're psychic. They know what will happen. And the only thing they get out of it is $1 million and a life forever ruined in the name of science.
Invariably in any public setting there will be at least one female I can look at and think "hey now". I have never been slapped.
At the very least, hot chicks do not have telepathy.
well, I am surprised nobody mentioned our modern day personality dev gurus. They advocate cultivation of good thoughts in the mind. If you think negatively 'bad things' happen to you. Their reasoning however is that if you think in a way you see as 'positive' you start acting like that and the rest of the world will comply. Paulo Coelho wrote in his book 'The Alchemist' that if you want something badly the world conspires to bring it to you. Another book called 'As a man thinketh' also explored the effect of thoughts on events of daily life(search for it and you should find a free pdf copy). But affecting the operation of a machine just by sitting before it and thinking may not fall into this model.
Our brains carry mixed chemical and electronic signalling, and it's picked up routinely on entirely normal hospital equipment. There is no question there.
Electronic signals radiate, and they can be picked up remotely. There is no question there either.
So from an engineering standapoint, the only open question is the degree of coupling between the minds of different people, and how to increase it. We know that it is extraordinarily low, there is no question about that, or we'd see the effect all around us. It's probably effectively zero for all intents and purposes, and well below the noise floor, but it clearly cannot be exactly zero. Analogue signalling just doesn't work that way.
So, try to stick to science instead of dogmatically rejecting ESP. (But by all means reject bad use of the scientific method, that's entirely different.) Native ESP is almost certainly unusable, but we're way beyond relying on pure native human processes for communications. Speech doesn't carry very far either, but we augment it and talk daily to the other side of the world.
Getting mental processes to work usefully within a reliable communications system will take time, but that's merely an engineering problem. The signals are there to be harnessed and used, after all. Live with it.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/0 8/1355255
When it comes to quantum computing thought interference shows up.
Also there is the fact that humans do act upon abstract thinking which means it obvious that thought does in fact influence physical reality. I think I'll design and build this whatever, so I draw it up, research its needs, purchase the material needed and build it... all based on thought.
When it comes to mind reading and the likes, let me tell you about the majic dumpster.
All to often when I think of something I could use of find useful, it shows up set off to the side of the apartment dumpster. Most recently, on a friday at work I was thinking I coudl use a fan under my desk as the office was getting hot. At the end of the day, before leaving I go thru the warehouse and check all the that they are locked. This task takes be a good 15 minutes or more. I thought it'd be nice to have a scooter, the stand up kind, with or without a motor. The next day, saturday, the fan showed up, perfect for under the desk. Sunday a Razor e300 showed up (only needed a charger and charger connector plug, works great and now I can check teh doors in 8 minutes.
Those are the most recent. Some things are typical, like working vacume cleaners and even working computer, but When I though of a laptop, not so long after one showed up very carefully placed with it charger on the step up to the compactor. And I once needed a MAC classic keyboard and mouse to test a couple such MACs without. Another complete classic mac showed up. And there are many other things that have showed up after my thinking of them.
Perhaps the most unusual thing to show up at the Majic dumpster is a living breathing model, a good looking lady. I stopped to drop off some garbage and she was standing there and asked if I could give her a ride over to some place.
So now I've been thinking lottery ticket... we'll see...
Princeton just lacked a majic dumpster.
BTW, in the late 60's the US government researched hallucenogenics for ESP and such. It made TIME magazine cover.
Maybe princeton needed some such drugs... and a quantum computer
It's amazing the contortions people will go through to try and justify not taking one million dollars. If you're the real deal, you could just make a few billion on the stock market, buy a private island, set up an armored compound on it, and THEN take the James Randi challenge just to prove you can.
Everyone on my foe's list is an evolution denier.
"I don't believe in anything Bob is doing, but I support his right to do it," said Will Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton.
You must explore ALL the possibilities, this is science. Imagine if they were right? What is there ARE such things out there... I don't believe in god, but i believe in human potential. Amazing things happen all the time, I am not talking about miracles, but amazing capabilities of the human brain. Someone must study those aspects, either to proove they are right or wrong. Staying between right and wrong leads nowhere.
Yeah, and I'll believe that Linux works when it installs itself on my computers for me, and runs my business.
Obviously, that's a straw man.
I don't respond to AC's.
They closed the Anomalous Materials Lab? Now who's gonna produce a resonance cascade?
:-P Sorry, had to do it.
I read a bit of the JREF correspondence some time back, and I noticed the same thing. They rejected many tests which I would have considered highly indicative, if not absolute proof. If the subject had been able to pass those tests, it would have been worth it to spend some time and money verifying the claim. That absolute proof is worth a million bucks; it's an earth-shaking revolution.
They have to have an absolute prohibition on spending any time or money of their own, since they'd spend a fortune refuting tests. That sets a nearly impossible challenge for the subject, who has to fund the work himself and find his own volunteers. His own volunteers, however, would be suspect.
I remember one exchange (sadly, I did not bookmark it) in which the proposer was very open to reason, and kept modifying the experiment to suit their goals, but couldn't find something that would work. I wanted to contact him and say, "Look, I'll run this experiment with you, since it costs no money. If you succeed, I'll pay to have you run a real experiment for Randi."
Sadly, I didn't, partly because it just seemed incredibly unlikely. It involved predicting astronomical signs, and I can't imagine how that isn't garbage. Any real power seems like it would manifest itself in a way which was more easily verifiable. And that was probably the JREF's attitude: it's so wildly unlikely to succeed that it wasn't worth any effort on their part at all. But the seemed very snarky in the exchange, and the propose seemed very reasonable.
But that was never their claim.
They claims may have been (probably were) bad, based on bad analysis and/or faulty data. But to argue that inablity of anyone to demonstrate reliable claravoyance has any bearing on these guys' claims of small statistical anomalies in random mechanical processes, is either intellectually dishonest or the result of great confusion.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
m0nstr42.blogspot.com
There are several faith-based "sciences" that might not qualify as religion. These include, but are not limited to: crystals, pyramids, and trying to get funding from the NSF after recent budget cuts.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantu m_eraser
The experimental setup, described in much more detail at [2], is as follows. First, generate a photon and pass it through a double slit apparatus. After the photon goes through slit A or B, a special crystal (one at each slit) uses spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) to convert the photon into two identical entangled photons with 1/2 the frequency of the original photon. One of these photons continues to the target detector, while the other entangled photon is deflected by a prism to bounce off a mirror some distance away. Now, if the second photon (coming from slit A or slit B) is observed, it is known which slit the original photon went through, so the photon behaves like a particle. If the second photon's paths from slit A and B are combined, the which-way path is not observed, and the first photon behaves like a wave. The experimenter can choose to observe or not observe the which-way information by erasing (or detecting) information about the second photon's path.
The results from Kim, et al. have shown that, in fact, observing the second photon's path will determine the particle or wavelike behavior of the first photon at the detector, even if the second photon is not observed until after the first photon arrives at the detector. In other words, the delayed choice to observe or not observe the second photon will change the outcome of an event in the past.
Further, "mind reading" certainly does exist to a limited extent-- as empathy using mirror neurons. Even suppressed, emotions still manifest themselves on the face for brief periods of time. Those adept at reading them are naturally more compassionate and insightful into the mental state of others, and also make good poker players. Dr. Paul Ekman has done most of the research here identifying specific expressions for many emotions: http://www.paulekman.com/
I wouldn't be surprised if many of the notions of telepathy came about from this natural system of seeing, mirroring, and feeling into the emotions of others.
So PEAR's huge sample sizes don't indicate manipulating data, they indicate collecting so much data you end up measuring the effects of the ventilation system causing a person's left eye to be shut a bit longer when they blink, skewing the results, or somesuch.
If shutting their left eye a little longer causes a random physical process inside a sealed box to give skewed results, well, I'd certainly call that a big result.
hat's the problem with PEAR: the things they purport to measure are so subtle as to be untestable. It's a methodology problem.
If that were true, modern physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine would be impossible to do, since those often involve events that are much rarer than 1:10000.
I don't believe in telekinesis or ESP. Nevertheless, unless someone can identify a specific flaw in the experimental procedure or analysis, there is something to be explained.
I am not sure that what "ESP" is can be tested in such a straightforward manner.
I am thinking of a number between 1 and 1,000,000, what is it? Does not seem to me to be the right kind of test.
My experience with this kind of phenomenon is that it is very paradoxical.
I will not go through the whole story here, but I will say that I have personally experienced something that I still cannot explain. It was too specific to be chance and fortunately for me, I had communicated the premonition to a friend who was a witness to the event as it happened later.
The paradox is that in my precognitive vision, I was the actor in the event, but in the real time manifestation I was an observer of the same event. In my vision, I made decisions to perform specific actions based on reasons I thought out during the event. In the "real time" version, I was a very close bystander observing the same set of specific events unfold as I had determined them to be in the vision. So, if in real time, I was the observer, but in the vision, I was the actor. Then "Who" made the decisions to act out the sequence of events as they happened? There were two time lines, the first when I was deciding what to do and doing it in my vision. Then the second when I was watching it happen. So which should be measured, and how would you connect the perception with the manifestation.
I suppose that precognition is more of a subset of ESP. But maybe this is part of the problem with formulating tests to capture this kind of behavior. ESP is not one type of behavior or even measurable at a single instant in time. Things are separated in time and unpredictable. Not only did I not have any indication that I was going to have the vision... I was equally surprised when the actual "real time" event took place. But once it began to, there was no doubt that what I was seeing was real. My witness and I just sat there, in shock and her first words were... "That was your dream."
This has only happened to me once that I am aware of in 32 years and happened when I was about 19 years old. So with that kind of frequency, how would someone have been able to "measure" that. I have had many dreams since, some seemed as vivid and "real" as the one that I call a vision. But I have not been the observer of them happening at a later date.
Does this mean that they never happened? Or, was I not in the right place at the right time to observe it manifest? I will not know and they seem like difficult questions to answer.
I experienced something that was very real, and not just a vague sense that I had seen this before, but a very specific sequence of events that took place with an impossible level of correlation to a previous vision of them. If it didn't happen to me, I would never believe it was possible.
I would like for someone to figure out how and why something like this happens. But it seems that in my experience it would be very difficult to capture this kind of phenomena in a lab setting. But just because it is hard to capture, does not mean we should quit trying to understand it. Imagine how mysterious electrical effects were to our ancestors. Lightning was some strange power of the gods. But we have been able to figure it out more and more over time, and we are still learning how to harness it and make good use of it in our daily lives.
...says it all.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1. ESP the numbers for next weeks lotto
2. ?????
3. Profit!
Here's a ridiculous sci fi scenario for you to consider. An electro-chemical device that can analize and synthesize tiny variations in electromagnetic spectrum to form a coherent view of objects it never comes in contact with. This is, of course, your visual system. If you can have a device sensitive to small variations in electromagnetic wave patterns, why not a device doing the same for small variations in magnetic wave patterns? And, of course, changes in electrical charge always produce magnetic fields... So your brain does produce a visible and signature on the real outside of it. If a device can be constructed that sees e.m. wave differences, why not magnetic wave differences? Extra sensory just means not detectable by senses we have right now. But there are other physical phenomena to detect. Sharks have an organ that can detect elctrical variations from a distance... But their sensitivity is to coarse. Sort of like the visual sensitivity of flies... only worse. But what is to say that Sharks' sensitivity cannot be refined? Why is this not a subject worth academic research?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
that I have forseen this to happen 20 years ago...
Look. With the trivial results they've produced, I have to say I just don't believe any of it. ESP doesn't exist. I'll even go further, and say that I'll never believe any of it.
"If people don't believe us after all the results we've produced, then they never will."
Whoa.... that's uncanny!
Maybe there is something in this after all...
(But wait... that would mean his prediction was wrong... agh!)
I am the man with no sig!
Who we gonna call?
The James Randi foundation and their million dollar prize is just a CIA Dragnet!
When people with ACTUAL abilities show up, they don't get a prize, they are quickly whisked away in black vans to underground CIA facilities where they spend the rest of their publicly-erased lives working for their star chamber masters.
No wonder the really gifted won't go near James Randi with a ten foot clown pole - they already know it's a trap!
Blerg.
Some prominent quantum physicists -- including Von Neumann, the founder of Quantum Mechanics -- believed that consciousness plays the key role in the outcome of quantum events ("collapse of the wave function"). Your macro world is built from quantum elements, whether their fuzziness disappears at the macro level or not (we don't know). Today's science has no idea what consciousness is or how to measure it.
Given all that, is it really that ridiculous to try and see if there are any subtle effects of what we call consciousness on the macro world?
Like much of any religion, bad science is full of zealotry and fundamentalist attacking of anyone daring to question the dogma, the "implied" truth, the "what we believe in our heart" is truth -- in this case, that consciousness does nothing and there's no such thing as ESP.
Good science would be glad to see a few labs like this one running, occasionally offering to review their results and suggest improvements in methodology.
I hears that Miss Cleo and David Copperfield checked themselves into a Mental Health facility after the news broke.
Apparently, they can't handle being frauds.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Forget MIT or Stanford now...they wouldn't touch us with a ten meter cattleprod. :)
Study everything, you'll find something you can use - Jason Bourne
Have a look at the Pauli effect, so named after Wolfgang Pauli (Nobel physics, 1945).
Dr. Jahn, we believe that the purpose of science is to serve mankind. You, however, seem to regard science as some kind of dodge or hustle. Your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy, and your conclusions are highly questionable. You are a poor scientist, Dr. Jahn.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this margin is too small to contain.
Hold on to your above-ground science while you can! Oh noes! Look! Star Castle! We've dug too deep!!
and I can sell you 1 gram of pixie dust for only $99.99 which is the cheapest offer available on the Internet, call now 1-800-DUST.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Man, that weed must be good....
No, wrong. They are saying there is no pattern in the HIGHER moments, but the CENTRAL claim of positive results that is presented in the paper is the statistically significant 7-sigma deviation of the MEAN when considering the entire set of data. This is not picking a small sample, it is considering everything and getting a consistent and extremely significant positive result. The rest of the paper is dedicated to seeing if there are any additional patterns, such as individual participants being more successful, and so forth.
This is a silly thing to complain about. First of all, training has nothing to do with experimental quality, because the operators have no physical contact with the device anyway, and thus can have no practical or theoretical influence except through a psi result. Training of operators can therefore only affect the strength of a result, and in fact, how to train operators to receive good performance is still a somewhat open-ended question. It's known that participants yield significantly stronger results after meditation, and that the beliefs and expectations of the participants correlate significantly with the successfulness of results. But neither one of these can invalidate a positive result, because NO training method for participants can produce a false positive, as there is no conventional physical mechanism by which a false positive can be obtained given their experimental setup.
Also, having different operator database sizes simply means some participants participated in the experiment more often than other participants. This says nothing about the protocol, it simply says they were not trying to keep each participant limited to an equal number of runs. Critics who have actually visited that lab have failed repeatedly to find any specific problems with their experimental protocol.
And "small signal to noise" does NOT mean that the data is too weak to draw conclusions, it only means that large datasets must be considered to draw statistical conclusions, and so it is not meaningful to consider very small datasets. Just above you were trying to accuse them of using small datasets, when in fact they are saying outright that they cannot use small datasets, and you are just failing to understand what they are saying.
Take it as a mod who was probably too ignorant about math and science to understand that what you were posting was not an attack on either.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
What a great post! Consider yourself added to my slashdot hall of fame, sir!
And thank you for the laugh.
The delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment by Kim has nothing to do with ESP. It is easily reproducible in the lab, and the effect can even be explained by classical electromagnetism alone.
IAAP. (I am a Physicist.)
Ekman's work on identifying facial muscles related to an emation has nothing to with ESP. His comprehensive works simply maps contraction of muscles to human emotions.
IAHAMIP. (I also have a minor in Psychology.)
Please don't confuse real science done by real scientists (Kim, Ekman) with shams like Jahn.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Nope.
The thing I find interesting about the Global Consciousness Project is that random number generators placed all over the globe all spike at the same time.
Isn't it odd how this and other such amazing items of note are apparently rendered invisible to the sceptic while boring strawman ideas are tilted at with such vigor?
-FL
99% of you would have said the same thing about quantum theory 40 years ago.
Yeah, it's probably bullshit...but to dismiss something offhand because "it can't be" demonstrates that most of you are ignorant of science.
Science is the attempt to document and reduce observation and learn from it without bias. But look at this entire series of over 200 posts; we have in evidence mountains of unsupported claims: "PEAR used faulty experiments!" "PEAR uses faulty statistical analysis!" "If PEAR had real evidence, why not apply to James Randi?" and similar mindless blather. How many of these posters have actually read the source material before rendering their judgments? How many links are provided? How many of them are self-referencing nonsense? I don't know; I've not looked myself; I don't actually know anything much about PEAR, but at least I am willing to admit that much!
Indeed. Fume and spit and fill the air with noise, but please do not mistake this for meaningful discourse. It's just the sound of fear and bias. If people honestly used the science they claim to love properly, then I suspect this whole site would look rather different!
-FL
but I think we all saw this one coming.
Placebo is a phenomenon by which medical subjects given an inert treatment still tend to exhibit positive effects. Far from being extraordinary, it is a mundane and well known phenomenon.
If science is currently unable to explain mechanisms behind phenomena such as the "placebo effect", how might one go about increasing scientific knowledge in this area?
I'm not directly familiar with the work of PEAR, but on the other hand, it's easy to see the amount of negativity this type of non-mainstream study tends to face.
So you have the "loophole" that a contract won't be signed unless both parties agree to its terms. Therefore one party could in theory stall indefinitely. And from this you conclude that the challenge is fake? How about this: do you have any evidence that the JREF actually does this to their applicants? All I see here is the argument that they could stall in theory, and they have an incentive to not lose money (tho it isn't Randi's money being wagered here.) That's not a lot to go on. Xcott
Yes they did, but perhaps if the lab didn't exist all those donations _might_ have gone into some useful research like cancer or some other disease.
Or you could use your powers to fuck with Randi's mind, and rewrite his webpage. Your identity need never be known.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
rocks, the earth, trees, everything.
...
Including man-made objects, including machines.
So, yes, those computers have souls. Those souls are the combination of the plans (schematics, etc.,) by which they are made and the hardware of which they are made, influenced to a smaller or greater extent by patterns of use which leave effects behind. (We talk about reading bits off of magnetic surfaces which have been overwritten, for instance.) One of the important tricks with digital computers is to restrict the chain of causality using hysteresis so that after-effects of useage patterns don't effect the chain until the machine falls apart, but the operator can and often does operate the machine out-of-spec, where those patterns do matter.
Now, whether it is within the nature of those souls to hate or not, I'm not sure.
And it's possibly not relevent here.
When people are being observed, they generally tend not to use techniques they think the observer might find questionable. It's a very common problem in testing human interfaces. Sometimes the testers are far too willing to cooperate with the techs and engineers.
What it appears these guys were focused on were out-of-band data and control paths. If I were going to find fault, I would be asking why they didn't try to find those data and control paths. Finding the effects of unknown processes is easy. Finding the processes themselves is much more interesting, even when it may not yield processes of practical use.
There does seem to be some conservation of probability, though. You may be able to push a machine a little, but when you release it it tends to balance out. This is particularly true when you are slapping a pinball machine or tapping a roulette table. One of the tricks is to quit while you're ahead, or to know which side of the table to bet on when you are pushing, and which when you aren't. And to keep the slaps small enough that the machine doesn't go to tilt and the guy running the table doesn't notice. Or to use slaps they don't know how to detect.
I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here,
If on page 7 you continue to read the "finer scale features" you will see that there are other deviations, in particular you will see that the mean shifted from .05 to (.5 + epsilon_mu).
Upon reading the abstract you can quickly see that there were small deviations (7 sigma). While at the same time their pseudorandom source yielded no mean shift.
Essentially it appears as if there is something very small going on here, which should be tested and either confirmed or denied by future research.
because there are only two or three who know why --
God,
you,
and maybe the person observed.
There may be demons involved, but they always seem to misunderstand everything. (You can't understand much of anything if you persistently lie because you know the other person is not going to tell the whole truth, and such things.)
You say you don't know why? Then you must ask God, or you must be satisfied with thinking you don't know why.
The problem with trying to explain God and prayer, etc., scientifically, is precisely the problem of reproducibility. What God is going to sit still so that a bunch of silly (essentially) children can measure him/her with mostly irrelevent instruments? I mean, say one of your kids came up to you and said, "Dad, I don't believe you exist. Sit still while I put a voltmeter across your eyelids."
Or, how about,
"Hey, Dad, last time we were here you bought us all ice cream sundaes."
"Yeah?"
"Well, are you going to buy us ice cream sundaes today?"
"No."
"Okay, the experiment is not reproducible. Therefore you must not exist."
"Fine, buy your own ice cream sundaes from now on."
Of course, football is a kind of religion, I think.
I didn't think that was supposed to happen to universities, especially not just from comments.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I hate to admit this but the first project I had as a UNIVAC II programmer was to review the results of the ESP tests. What I found was that the results were cascaded. That is, if a group from sheer extraction from the theory of probablility had better scores than the rest, then the winning group was considered more ESP capable. That group then became the new group used for testing and on and on. Finally a very ESP sensitive group was heralded as worthy of more testing AND GRANTS. Yup, we proved it was sham ststistics but the grants just came rolloing in.
We went on to complete a concordance of the Bible. AND then our first cut and fill program which was a commercial success.
says absolutely nothing to those of us not logged in.
So, you say they are cherry-picking the data to prove their pre-determined opinion. How is what you're doing here any different?
Let's assume - completely hypothetically of course - that you are biased against ESP research, and would seek to discredit researchers in that field who have come up with results you don't like. One way would be to quote some carefully selected sections from their work - the ones with the least significant results. Then present them out of context, and suggest that this is representative of the overall significance of their findings.
That wouldn't be exactly fair now, would it?
And yet that is exactly what you did.
Here's the context of your first quote. Before page 7, the authors state their main result: operator intent influences the outcome of REG data with a probability against chance of better than 1 in 10000.
They then introduce a section on 'count distributions' with: "Any structural details of the trial count distributions that compound to the observed anomalous mean shifts may hold useful implications for modeling such correlations." This is followed by the sentence you quoted.
Seen in its proper context, it is clear that after establishing the main effect (with a probability of less than 1 in 10000), the authors look for clues as to how this main effect could be explained. That is all.
No reasonable and intelligent person acting in good faith would see the selected quote in context as " an outright confession of fraud." This leaves us with only two possibilities: either you are unreasonable and unintelligent, or you're not acting in good faith...
He was modded down as overrated before he had been modded as anything else. That made no sense to me, nor to the GP. I suspect the mods were, in fact, simply ignorant. If it had been set at 4 or 5, insightful, and the mods thought this a tad high, I'd agree with the rest of your sentiment.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
What you're describing is what I'd call ignorance. Fear of what you don't understand. Only the confident are comfortable with having their own weaknesses pointed out.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
No need to become personal (nor offensive). You do understand the 'fruitcake'-part was meant as a joke, right? The smiley and the 'and now serious' should have given it away. I just thought you had more sense of self-mockery then you apparently have.
;-p
... if it's not reproducable or notable by others *under controlled* circumstances (a 'double blind' falsification') then still we can't do anything with it.
And, ermm...you cared enough to respond
I'm not sure what response you wanted or expected, actually. If you agree that personal anecdotal observations do not constitute a real basis for concluding the truthfulness of a conclusion ('like ESP exists'), then merely by the fact that you experienced such observations one CAN NOT draw the concusion there is anything going on that can't be explained by more down-to-earth explanations (Occams' razor, indeed). It's strange that you would use Occam's Razor to defend your position, but the fact is, it's far more reasonable to assume already known biases (in biased remembering, in incorrect turving, in taking correlation to mean causality, etc.) then to come up with a completely unknown and unsupported (at least in a scientific sense) sort of energy or physics or whatevber you want to call it, to explain your anecdotal observations.
Occam's razor does not mean: 'just keep it as simple as possible', after all. If that were the case, one could just say it's all comming from god. The late Carl Sagan already explained this issue very well in his books, especially with the 'magical dragon in the garage' example. and the conclusion is; even if you were right; even if you have meticulously noted every time a computer worked when you arrived, and when it not worked, even if you have statistically analysed that the number of times it did work suddenly when you arrived is significantly more then just a fluke, etc.
It might be difficult for you to understand this reasoning, convinced as you are that there IS something 'weird' going on, but try to visualise it like this:
Imagine, some guy claims he has some invisible tooth fairies who often magically repair stuff he gets near to. He's making a post on slashdot about it. No doubt he will be mocked a bit; maybe this is not nice, especially if he feels offended by it (low level of self-mockery, for instance), but then again, it might be expected. In any case, he calls the skeptics assholes, because they point out there are far more easier, normal ways of explaining what he has encountered, without invoking fairies.
Now, can one actually totally exclude that guy isn't helped by invisible tooth-fairies? No. Does it make more sense to support his fairy-tale because he believes it and 'has observed' it? No. As Carl Sagan said: extra-ordinary claims need extra-ordinary proof. when that guy only supports his claims by personal anecdotes/observations, then we can not give much credibility to him, ot his tooth-fairies.
The same goes for you.
Yes, I know: you're not claiming tooth-fairies exist. The point and the principle remains the same, however: you do not provide any proof, only anecdotes. Anecdotal 'evidence' in not scientifically-controlled (and reproducable) experiments or without statistical analysis have no sway whatsoever; they are worth next to nothing in providing a solid conclusion for a true effect. That's just the way it is. If you think that is unreasonable, then you also find it unreasonable that a dude believing fairies help him should provide a bit more proof then just him saying he's seen the fairies repair stuff when he arrives. From the stance of an objective third party, your claim is as unsubstatiated as one claiming fairies help him out, you must realise this. (And, in fact, I've seen posts on slashdot from people who actually claim they can bend spoons by just looking at it, and some even claimed they could see right through walls and what not... all those claims are equally worthless, if they are not susbstantiated - and that's irre
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Perhaps. However, maintaining journalist friends both of the print and television variety has taught me the value in avoiding state-installed lies masquerading as 'truth'. I have little patience for newspapers. Though, I do now recall hearing that Sagan had died. I just can't have cared very much and so promptly forgot it. Popular figures are generally full of nonsense by the time they are 'newsworthy'.
It's your job to convince me. You fail.
Hm. That's a common misnomer. --That is, if I happen to know something of which you are ignorant, then how exactly have I failed if you continue being ignorant while I continue knowing more than you? I measure success in terms of how much I learn, not by how stubbornly unaware I manage to remain.
--The weird tendency to make the fortification of ignorance into a virtue is a tactic used by the same people who brought us newspapers.
-FL
Showing evidence of a rock in my back yard versus an alien in my back yard should be a nearly identical exercise; that of pointing to a rock or an alien. That one should remain mundane while the other extraordinary speaks not of the quality of evidence but of the mental state of the observer.
The problem is that Sagan's famous little catch-phrase suggests otherwise, and people have certainly bought into it, thus neatly invalidating, as you point out, anecdotal evidence, photographic evidence and other varieties of evidence which would normally be acceptable in at least raising curiosity in most other circumstances. And why? Because the public belief system has chosen to pretend that a significant piece of reality does not exist and refuses to budge from that position.
anecdotal accounts are unpersuasive because even highly intelligent people are fully capable of grand self-delusion.
This is true, but there is a point when the balance must tip. I often point to Richard Dolan's research. He detailed nearly 300 UFO encounters in his book, though he only chose to include encounters which had a) multiple witnesses, and b) witnesses who were military personnel, police or pilots, all of whom were required to keep official records of the events in question. Many of the encounters were utterly stunning in scope; not mere mystery lights but close encounters. He also detailed clearly through official documents how the government was deliberately misleading the American people into thinking that the UFO's they were seeing were little more than figments and errors of perception, essentially hoodwinking the public through agencies such as Project Blue Book.
Why should Sagan have bothered to state such a meaningless thing as, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" except to cash in on the sensationalist value of a cute sound-bite? Sagan was a pop-culture figure of little worth, in my opinion, with regard to the question of UFO's and extraterrestrial life. Just because one is a clever astrophysicist does not mean one holds useful insight. I'd feel more confidence in asking a military pilot about the nature of flying objects than a man who spent his life thinking about the mathematics behind black holes.
-FL
Ok, this has degraded to childish bickering. But I'll give it another try, maybe things have to be defined more clearly about what we both are talking about.
;-) that you knew full well what I meant by 'sense', so you deliberatly making it an issue is rather weak. It may be that my judgement was wrong; contrary to you, I have no trouble adjusting my conclsusion, and I'm open for new input from you to prove me wrong. But you DID use the argument about 'science doesn't know everything' several times; if it's not in support of your viewpoint, why did you say it, then? Just as a general remark? Well, in that case; yes, I agree, science doesn't know everything. And? If it has no relevance to the discussed topic, why bring it up? If it does have relevance, what do you imply with it?
;-)
:-)
You're getting pedantic. The 'sense' I mentionned has nothing to do with anything supernatural; I just meant I made that assumption based on your recurrent theme that 'science doesn't know everything'. Surely, this must have some significance to your argumentation, since you repeatedly use it in your posts as if it were a counter-argument. I also suspect (no, not ESP again
"Anyway, your line of mocking explanations is irrelevant. I've never tried to explain, just observe. That's the, what, fourth time I've said that? I've not made a hypothesis. Except I how hypothesize that you're a troll."
That hypothesis would be false too.
But, you did say: "This odd effect I have on machines has happened so often, for decades, that I can't really deny it. It's subtle, but it's been observed by people around me, for as long as I can remember." With that sentence you indicated that it is a *real* thing, and that it is observable. How does this rime with your claim it's not measurable? Surely, if it's been happening for decades, and people have observed it, it *is* observable? You are making a statement that you *have* such odd effects, and you imply that the cause is supernatural. You made a conclusion from your observations, you didn't make just the observations, which is contrary of what you're claiming you said now. Furthermore, you said that it's unmeasurable, yet people seem to have noticed it. This is one other example of a contradictio in terminis.
I think you're not being honest here, and you never really responded to this: is it your claim that you *have* such powers, or not? From your first post, one must conclude you have, from your later ones, one might conclude you were just talking about your anecdotal observations, without making (or implying) any conclusions about it. Alas, you can not deny that saying 'this odd effect I have' is a clear conclusion that you actually possess such powers, not that you are just retelling your experiences and leave everything open as to the possible causes of it.
So, which is it? Do you claim to have such powers, or not? It's quit a simple question to answer, and it goes to the core of this thread, because if you're truelly just talking about your observations and the fact they aren't measurable, I will concede that point gladly.
"Yeah, you seem to be trapped in that."
Lol. Yes, I'm trapped in thinking a meaningful discussion should be based on logical reasonings supported by rational arguments. My fault!
"Carry on."
I will. The only strawman here, is perhaps the one you set up. Saying "I've never tried to explain, just observe. That's the, what, fourth time I've said that?" is obviously false, seen your earlier statement that you had those powers. You apparently reached that conclusion based on your observations, so you can't claim you didn't make any hypothesis (it's obvious your hypothesis is, that the observations you made are caused by a super-natural power that you have, since you've stated as much).
So you see, saying it 4 times does not actually make it more reliable...it just means it was 4 times not true. You DID make a conclusion, and that claim was made as if it was f
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Then you obviously know better then the Skeptical Inquirer and Carl Sagan himself (and all the scientists dealing with the project).
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---