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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.
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!
Only if it happened long enough ago and it was strong enough to actually make a difference which made those individuals breed more and the advantage was inherited...
That's a lot of ifs.
Just think about all the people with a very high IQ which aren't even capable of dealing with everyday life and/or never get married and have kids, that could be everything from people with ADHD to professors that spend so much time within their own research that they hardly know what day of the week (or month) it is.
So being very smart, which should give them advantage, doesn't mean that they've actually got an advantage which will be spread using breeding; and it could be the same with people with (weak) ESP (if it exists), they could for instance have a greater chance of having a personality which makes them second guess their ESP to the extent that the positive side of it are negated, or maybe those are the nutcases we laugh about because they leave their citylife and move out into the country (as they have a closer connection to nature).
Some people are tempted to say that some, like very successfull businessmen, might be using (weak) ESP to optimize the work and deals they do; so within what's usually refered to as instinct there might be some ESP (if it exists).
So just because we don't have psi-cops running around reading peoples minds we don't have proof that ESP does or doesn't exist, we can't just say that evolution should have resulted in individuals with strong ESP today if it exists - that's just like arriving in a spaceship on earth milions of years ago and saying that there will be no smart humans there because if there would be smart humans there would already be smart humans there. (it's of course debatable if there are any smart humans here today...)
If ESP really exists today it might be different from what we expect it to be, ie not a single clear talent, and it might be so weak that it'll take 100's or 1000's of year before it's so obvious that no one can deny that it truly exists; and even if we knew that to be possible, we can't say for sure that those with the right genes will be around long enough to acctually produce those children with strong ESP.
So what do we really know? Nothing more than that we can't prove anything beyond any doubts... which today goes for both ESP and string theory and a whole lot more that we're currently researching...
perl -e'print$_{$_} for sort%_=`lynx -dump svanstrom.com/t`'
(mods, if I missed an obscure quote then have mercy