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.'"

Comments

Geez.

[cbrichar]

Didn't expect that.

My thoughts

[cedars]

Surely the lab's directors should have seen this coming?

Credibility

[Steve Furlong]

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.

Re:Credibility

[poopdeville]

One editor famously told Dr. Jahn that he would consider a paper "if you can telepathically communicate it to me."

That's not exactly ideal academic objectivity.

I don't have any particular reason to believe these guys. At the same time, I have little reason to doubt their methodology. If their paper made a point, it should have at least seriously considered for publication, and not been rejected out of hand.

I'm disappointed in science today.

Um.... we believe you...

[Markmarkmark]

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.

The problems with PEAR

[FreelanceWizard]

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.

Re:The problems with PEAR

[flushingmemos]

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!

Re:Also

[Anomolous Cowturd]

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?

Belief vs reproducibility

[OriginalArlen]

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.'" That's rather the point. In science it doesn't really matter what results you can produce, if no-one else can reproduce them...

Re:No peers, indeed

[Xaroth]

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!

Re:Evolution and ESP

[I don't want to spen]

... Unless, of course, demonstrating such a 'gift' resulted them in, oh, being burned at the stake as a witch, treated as the weird person up the street, or merely made it uncomfortable to be around people. Imagine if someone could read your every thought - do you think they'd stay in a relationship with you for long? What if mind reading makes people want to live alone - for the peace and quiet? What if foreseeing the future means that you don't want to hang around with people when you know how they're going to die? What if your subconscious also has telekenesis, so that dream of falling from the 13th floor can actually come true?

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!