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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
1. There's no way they could possibly be unaware of the million dollar challenge, given their field of study.
2. Winning the challenge would not only get them a million dollars in funding, but *incredible* publicity leading to millions more.
3. They'd be crazy not to take the challenge if they knew they could win it.
4. They haven't taken the challenge.
Conclusion: They never discovered any repeatable paranormal phenomenon. Why am I not surprised?
Software patents delenda est.
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
No, see there's nothing magical about it.
Scattered throughout the world is an invisible compound called "pixie dust". It permeates the air, and is the primary component of the "magic smoke" that computers are made of. Because computers are naturally attuned to this pixie dust, they tend to work better whenever there are larger concentrations of it around.
Now, most normal people have a regular bathing and hygeine schedule. All this showering and teeth-brushing washes off whatever trace amounts of pixie dust they've accumulated throughout the day. Computer geeks, on the other hand, have no time for such fivolities as "showering". There's code to be written, dammit!
As a result, the pixie dust in the air naturally builds up on and around computer geeks. Whenever the intrepid geek gets near a computer, some of that dust shakes off, thereby increasing the local density of the stuff in the air. Picture Pigpen from Peanuts, only he's exuding a cloud of invisible dust that makes computers work better instead of mobile filth. Other properties of the filth cloud are probably unaffected in many cases, though.
This reasoning also explains why it is that computers will continue to work for a while after the geek has declared the computer working and left - it takes time for the air to circulate all that extra pixie dust away, so the computers have a while to be positively influenced by it. After a sufficient amount of time, though, it wears off and the computer goes back to its insufficient ambient levels, and thereby stops working again.
See? It's all perfectly reasonbly explained. Science!
That green slime had it coming.
I too have a subtle effect on machines. When I come near one, they instantly BSOD and usually try to install Linux preemptively much to the dismay of the machine's owner.
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.
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.
Come back when you've read the FAQ.
I have. From the FAQ:
1.4. How many people have passed the preliminary test?
None. Most applicants never agree to a proper test protocol, so most are never tested.
1.5. How many people have passed the formal test?
No one has ever taken the formal test, as one must first pass the preliminary test.
2.1. What do you mean by "mutually agreed upon"?
"Mutually agreed upon" means that neither side can force the other side into doing or saying something that they don't want to, and that if no agreement can be reached, the application process is terminated, with no blame or fault attributed to either side.
It's easy to point fingers after a Challenge claim comes to an impasse and say that the other side was being unreasonable. This phrase is used to insure that finger-pointing has no merit.
Randi claims that most applicants never agree to a "proper test protocol", and are never tested. But he also points out that both sides have to agree what that "proper test protocol" is. So either side can basically tank the process by being disagreeable. With a million dollars on the line (not to mention his reputation), you have to believe that Randi has a serious incentive to make sure that nobody passes the test. Apparently the easiest way to do so is to ensure that nobody (or only a very few people) actually gets to take the test.
Again, I'm not arguing that paranormal powers exist. I'm just pointing out that JREF's "Million Dollar Challenge" is little more than a publicity stunt, set up in such a way that they advertise a million dollars being available without ever having to pay out on it (or indeed, even attempt the challenge).
I think that there was a software company is Russia that recently offered a similar challenge. Apparently someone was disputing their claims of being unhackable or uncrackable or something, and the company offerred a large sum of money to anyone who could break their software. The only catch was that you had to fly to Russia on your own dime, and use systems that they configured, and meet all sorts of other restrictive criteria that were specifically constructed to ensure that you could not succeed. The contest wasn't designed to prove anything, it was merely a way for the company to get some free publicity and advertise to perspective customers that "even when offerred x amount of money for demonstrating flaws in our software, nobody has yet been able to do so".
Now if the criteria were set and judged by a neutral third party, then I might have a little more faith in the challenge. But I doubt that would ever happen because JREF would then face the chance (however minute) of actually losing the money and the bragging rights.
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?
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 ;)
I am the man with no sig!
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.