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Soviet Union Spent $1 Billion On "Psychotronic" Arms Race With the US
KentuckyFC writes "During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union battled on many fronts to demonstrate their superior technical and scientific achievements. While the race to put a human in space and then on the Moon is famous, a much less well-known battlefront was the unconventional science of parapsychology, or psychotronics as the Soviets called it. Now a new review of unconventional research in the Soviet Union reveals the scale of this work for the first time and the cost: as much as $1 billion. The Soviets had programs studying how "human energy" could influence other objects and how this energy could be generated independently of humans using a device called 'cerpan'. The Soviets also had a mind control program similar to the CIA's infamous MKULTRA project. Interestingly, the Soviets included non-local physics in this work, such as the Aharonov-Bohm effect in which an electromagnetic field can influence a particle confined to region where the field strength is zero. And they built a number of devices that exploited the effect, although research in this area appears to have ended in 2003."
When man stare at goat man have heart attack.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Poppycock - computers were already a major thing - in UK even bakeries had started installing them in 1951. You Americans need to learn the computing history all over again.
I guess this goes to show you don't need religion to believe in nutty pseudoscience.
We cannot permit an imaginary weapons gap!
These same people also keep talking about all these "benefits" that space technology brings to a society, but when I point out that Russia beat America most of the time no one seems eager to move there. That is also very funny to me.
WWII was the biggest impetus for technology in the 20th century, THEN we went into space.
The program sounds like it had a nutty origin (like the analogous U.S. programs), but from this part:
That sounds like legitimate physics research. Research into the principle of locality is unlikely to produce a mind-controlled teleportation beam, but it has yielded a better understanding of quantum mechanics.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That commercial you watched last night where the screen changed so often your eyes couldn't focus on it, the deep voice talking with music playing at the same beats per minute as the desired heart rate the advertiser wants, displayed on a screen at 30hz, usually starting off with either a motherly women or a crowd of people looking at you.
MKUltra started that research. Want to learn mind control, go get a masters in motion video or advertising; what they teach is textbook psychological warfare with a domestic application.
Funny thing; once you know it's going on, it doesn't work anymore.
It wasn't really a race at all. The USSR didn't make a massive effort to get there first; they were more interested in space stations. It was hard for their head of space exploration to get funding for moon missions, so they couldn't just brute force the problem like America did.
It's like the missile gap race - pretty much all in America's mind.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There were "stories" of similar programs run by the CIA back then (and perhaps they are still doing it right now, as we speak), and I saw a documentary back in the 1980's of a soviet man who could sort of "imprint" what he thinks onto a film/negative.
Someone showed the guy a picture (a building) and then he hold a camera and then focus his "energy" into it, and then they took out the negative to develop and the picture that came out was blurry but still you could make out a "shape" of that building.
I am a science nerd, but still things like that really fascinate me to no end.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Well... while we may redicule the notion, perhaps... some of the things they did marginally worked? (e.g. is it 100% bullshit or 99.999% bullshit?, and what exactly could that 0.001% be?)
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
One to indicate whether the dollar amount is inflation adjusted or not. I Imagine a $ with an arrow hat on the | So it's an up arrow and an S. That will work for talking about historical figures in current day.
There is another problem though that is wanting to work backward, either by date or rate. So I would suggest the arrowed $, number and a divisor $14.7m/3.5 this would indicate to divide 14.7 by 3.5 to get the original dollar amount.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
It was a race. It is quite well known that the USSR build several rockets designed for moon launches (hence why they put a rover on the moon), but support dwindled after the U.S. landed humans, and the USSR refocused its efforts on space stations and abandoned their landing craft after the fact.
The difference between the USSR and the US was that NASA acted in public, while the USSR performed all development and launches in secret, so that they could publicize the successes and hide the failures. This strategy allowed them to save face whenever their program was inferior to their competitor.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
... the wisdom of putting our most paranoid citizens into our intelligence & defense agencies.
If you run 20 bullshit double blind experiments, 10 of them are going to show positive correlation to the hypothesis, and 1 will show improbably high correlation. Far more still if your testers have any unconscious control over the data.
Yes, but are we doing it by having people sit and wish really, really, hard? There's wasting money in the normal way, and there's wasting money in amazingly stupid ways, even when you consider the "normal way" includes $600.00 hammers and the like. It takes a truly unique and special brand of stupid to waste money in a way that's ridiculous even by the accepted standards of governments world-wide.
"Surely spending that kind of money on such a project had some merit, or it wouldn't have cost so much"
You've never studied history or held a job at a corporation, have you? Spending millions, billions, trillions on meritless projects is what any entity large enough to have that kind of money *does*. Constantly. Continuously. All the time.
The division I work(ed) for was just bought by another company, because they wanted to integrate our software and acquired expertise. The buyer, having spent this money, announced all employees would need to re-apply for their existing jobs, which is only a little silly, and also all relocate, which is a LOT silly, since all of us worked remotely, and many of us couldn't relocate even if we wanted to. So, pretty much, they just lost all the accumulated knowledge they just paid for, and what they've got is tens of thousands of lines of mostly undocumented code that's virtually impossible to maintain or understand without spending months stepping through it. (It was developed over a decade by dozens of transient programmers, and in-line documentation varies from "sparse" to "actually false".)
Multiply that little bit of stupidity by tens of thousands of corporations and hundreds of world governments, and you have the world we live in.
Because it's been rebuked by research. Conducting that research, however, is what science is all about: test claims to see if they're correct.
Heck, you could do parapsychology research today and, as long as it's properly conducted, it would be science. It's unlike such experiment would do more than confirm what's already known, but that doesn't make it "mumbo jumbo".
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
No, it really wouldn't. Science only concerns itself with non-supernatural/non-metaphysical claims, and there's a reason for that. If you're willing to entertain anything more than that then you're dealing with quasi-claims for which no amount of evidence can be used to substantiate or disprove them.
Happy people make bad consumers.
We do it with the media
Parapsychology theories have been given every chance. They've been tested under proper laboratory conditions according to the scientific method. They've been tested again and again, over and over, given far more chances than any ordinary scientist might expect to be given. The tests were scientific, and the theories failed those tests.
Hanging on to disproven theories is what makes parapsychology a non-science. The -ology suffix is just a desperate attempt to associate with proven laws of nature. Science is right to give crazy ideas a chance, but also right to shun them when they are emphatically shown to be wrong.
And when the pseudo-scientists persist in dressing up their mumbo-jumbo, quackery, and bullshit as respectable ideas as, you can forgive the real scientists for getting a little bit cross.
Parapsychology has a lot of problems from a reproducible experiment POV, but many of them are due to a complete lack of theory as to how a possible mechanism for a given extra-sensory phenomenon might work. Without a working theory, how do you develop an experiment to test it?
Couple of examples to illustrate the difficulties:
I am an ancient experimenter. I have lots of black rocks. One or two of the black rocks attract one another, but the vast majority do not. (the ones that do are lodestones, natural magnets) I publish a paper saying that some black rocks attract one another. Other experimenters get black rocks and cannot reproduce my experiment. Jamius Randius says I'm a fake, and even when I demonstrate black rocks that attract one another, says I am a huckster. An investigating committee bangs my black rocks together, making them lose their magnetism, so even I cannot make them attract anymore. I lose my patron, and rocks that attract one another is branded pseudo-science.
Other experimenters try this out with other black rocks, but so few have successful results that future researchers need to depend on meta-analysis of thousands of experiments to get possibly statistically meaningful results. Statistics is hard, so the research descends into sniping about statistical techniques. (See http://therandomtexan.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/the-beginning-of-the-end-for-5/ for recent discussions about how p values are too loose across many disciplines.)
Second example closer to home in parapsychology. There are thought experiments proposing that all ESP related phenomena like remote viewing or telepathy may just be specific cases of precognition, since validating experimental results involves knowing the outcome at some point in the future.
Last idea: Since parapsychological phenomena (whether 'real' or not) involve people and effects at a distance, how to ensure the experimenter is not having an effect on the experiment. This is one idea behind the 'sheep/goat' effect in parapsychology (other explanation is that all sheep are cheating and all goats are honest experimenters)
it's a really interesting field that rewards study, just in terms of figuring out how to create good experiments in such a vacuum. Govt. research and specifically application to gathering intelligence has always been saddled with extremely low reproducibility but occasional spectacular successes.
Yes, it really would. At one point just about every major piece of technology and science we have today would have been considered supernatural/metaphysical. Given the abundance of anecdotal evidence of "parapsychological" effects, it is completely reasonable to perform controlled experiments in order to evaluate whether those effects can be reproduced. That is the very nature of science.
It is also completely reasonable and scientific to periodically continue to perform those experiments as our tools and understanding grow, and to continue to ensure that the earlier falsification was justified and correct.
. If you're willing to entertain anything more than that then you're dealing with quasi-claims for which no amount of evidence can be used to substantiate or disprove them.
String theory?
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
However we are current pursuing efforts at mind reading and using minds to control devices using a feedback device which measures activity in regions of the brain. 50 years ago, this would have been considered bunk, so there obviously has been some progress.
Have gnu, will travel.
If they keep testing ideas and don't falsify results it is still science, even if everything proves false or the ideas are crazy. There are an infinite number of things to test and while it saves a lot of resources to make educated guesses on what to test, sometimes the crazy stuff yields results... which is likely the main excuse to waste time in fringe areas that don't get attention because 'it's crazy.'
Of course, if the topic being explored is idiotic they are only going to have negative test results and that doesn't provide much in the way of guidance for future tests.
Science is done by humans, so you have the same issues as anywhere else-- systems where somebody's job is connected to signs of progress...
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What baffles me is that while the existence of an arms race between the USSR and the United States during the cold war is common knowledge a lot of people seem to think the 'race' is now over and that intelligence agencies such as the C.I.A don't continue their infamous work.
He may mean the Soviet version. Looked just like him except he had a beard.
That was quite common during the cold war.
In other word, the Soviet union went with a market based approach and so got an early victory followed by a bunch of in-fighting while the U.S. went with central planning and so got the last laugh but then got mired in a bureaucratic tar pit.
The world is a funny place.
I think an important aspect in the US is that the politicians told NASA to go for it and then stepped aside (at least until after the first couple moon shots), while the politicians were micromanaging all the way through the Soviet program.
So it seems that consciousness and attention can have effects in the physical world
Of course it can, what do you think is controlling my arms as I scratch my arse? It has other names, spirit, soul, mind, etc. There's a reason scientists and philosophers alike call consciousness "The hard problem", it all boils down to the fact that you can never fully understand yourself. You are not separate from the rest of the universe, you and the universe are one (or as Sagan put it) "We are the part of the universe that observes itself", and by extension that implies we can never fully understand the universe. I don't know about anyone else but like Feynman "I'm ok with that, I'm not afraid of not knowing, I find it more interesting".
Having said that the world is full of scammers who use very clever magic tricks to separate the gullible from their wallets. The "clever" part is that they know enough about the human mind to be able to distract it from what's really happening. Of course there are others who truly believe they have special powers but they always turn out to be mistaken when put to the test.
To summarise: Wake me up when James Randi pays out on his million dollar challenge.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
How do you know the researchers who fail to find psi evidence don't have unconscious control over the data?
From http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/the_semiconductor_revolution_m: