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.'"
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
You're wrong. It's not the analysis, the methodology is flawed. The more runs you do the less pronounced the effects of "streaks of luck" on the final data. But the more runs you do, the more whatever lingering bias in your methods will come out. 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. That effect will come out when you have huge sample sizes, but random effects will disappear. That's the problem with PEAR: the things they purport to measure are so subtle as to be untestable. It's a methodology problem.
Still, I'm sad to see them go. A little openmimndedness can make the world much more fun. I mean, they were named after a fruit!
It's not magic, it's just the case that your presence causes people to pay more attention to what they are doing to their machines. The mere presence of a guru modifies their behavior even before you tell them to do anything, and in the case of mysterious computer problems even the slightest change of user behavior can have huge effects, possibly even resulting in a permanent fix to the problem (especially if the problem was simply a lack of attention in the first place, as is so often the case). It happens to me too and I'm guessing a significant percentage of the rest of the Slashdot population.
As for the alleged lack of peer review, that's the standard defense of wackos and nutjobs, and rarely true. I've heard of these guys before; it's not like they haven't gotten any exposure in the scientific community. They are just not very convincing. If they could demonstrate a mechanism, or harness their purported effect to actually *do* something, people would become interested.
Firebug. It will make your jaw hit the floor.
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.
(mods, if I missed an obscure quote then have mercy
That's an outright confession of fraud.
Not quite. Fraud is where you intentionally fool others. These guys are just unintentionally fooling themselves.
Is it evidence for ESP if I'm able to discern your identity? ;)
More seriously, the experience you describe is fairly common. There are a number of normal factors that can cause this impression. It's related to the opposite phenomenon that an application that works perfectly whenever the developers use it can break within 30 seconds of a new user trying it. It's not that it worked, and now it doesn't -- it's that the standard use-paths and expectations of the program were heavily ingrained in the people who used it, so without even thinking about it they did what the program expected. As soon as a new user, who doesn't have all the expectations and officially-approved metaphors in his head uses it, it falls over.
Similarly, something that appears to be broken can start working as soon as someone who understands it well tries to use it. It's not supernatural, it's just a lot of little habits of understanding that people don't even really notice, but that develop automatically over years of experience.
Another contributing factor is that this common impression overrides occasional negative experiences (I can't count the number of hard drives that have died on me :-P but in common situation I still get a lot of "things just working," enough to make me forget the bad times). It's a sort of opposite to the "I'm always in the slow lane" experience in traffic jams.
A nice illustration is the following joke from the Hacker's Dictionary:
This joke is funny precisely because so many people have had exactly this experience. I've had similar things happen to me many times, where I just look at the computer and (theoretically) do exactly what the previous user has been doing, only when I do it, it works. I doubt there's really anything supernatural about it, but after so many years of working with computers I automatically avoid potential problems because I understand how computers "think" (one reason a lot of techies prefer UNIX -- despite some limitations, its "thinking process" is extremely clear and consistent, allowing the "just works" experience more often for people who really know the system... Windows, even when stable, can have very erratic thinking patterns).
Anyway. That's my take on it ;)
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