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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.'"
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.
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.
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publications.html
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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
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 don't believe in these phenomena without evidence, but I can foresee ways in which revealing them could be detrimental to someone's chance at off-spring!
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
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`'
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.
Thanks, this has the 50-page paper I was looking for when I saw this story - I remember it from years ago: On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness, With Application to Anomalous Phenomen (1986). Foundations of Physics, 16, No. 8, pp. 721-772 (PDF). Now, the Foundations of Physics is not exactly a top-tier journal, but there is some very minimal peer review. The figures present some results that are, on the surface, somewhat surprising. For example, look at Fig. 2, p. 726. I suggested to CSICOP (the Skeptical Inquirer magazine, that I subscribed to) that they have some of their experts do a rebuttal, but even though I got a response that they'd take it under consideration, it apparently never happened. I am still puzzled by this paper.
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?