Moderated Is the Telekinesis Real?
- Thread starter Buddha
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Thermal
August Member
Why is this question n SMM&T?
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Because, according to Buddha's announcement in his last thread, this is actual science done by real scientists at Princeton, hence it's a scientific question and not an attempt to prove the paranormal, spiritual, or supernatural (like all his other threads). He attempted to prove the existence of God using a deductive formula. He believed he ended up proving the necessity of a creator, which could be, but doesn't have to be, the creator god in Christianity. He attempted to prove the reality of the Buddhist formulation of reincarnation. Funny how telekinesis, his latest attempt, is yet another concept that relates to one of the religions he professes. Buddhism believes that telekinesis is possible once one reaches a suitable stage of spiritual development. So it's hard to shake the the impression that Buddha the Claimant (as distinct from Buddha the avatar of Vishnu) is following a well worn path of claiming his religious beliefs have objective scientific proof.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
The Telekinesis Real is the name of my Tito and the Tarantulas cover band.
It's pronounced "rey-AL".
Hans
Philosopher
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...could we have a useful one like the best ways to prepare unicorn for stews?
Thermal
August Member
Nice synopsis. So Buddah the Poster is trying to give scientific credibility to a General Skepticism and Paranormal claim, so as not to seem silly. He's a clever one, that Buddah.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
No. You're conflating the well-known essential probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics with uncontrolled statistical variance masquerading in PEAR studies as significance. Be assured that your audience here understands quantum mechanics at least as well as, and probably better than, you do. You can see already that they are not fooled by your vague handwaving dismissals. To be considered reproducible for empirical purposes, a double-slit experiment does not have to land particles in exactly the same places every time. It merely has to land particles in groupings that show statistical affinity for the quantum effect more so than an effect that can be modeled with a single random variable. Be assured that your audience here understands statistics at least as well as, if not better than, you do. You are not the unimpeachable master of all topics you choose to bring up.
Your critics are not talking about reproducibility in terms of statistical variance. The critics of PEAR noted the lack of empirical controls in the design of experiments, and the lean descriptions of the experiment design in their papers. Reproducibility in an empirical study means the ability to describe the experiment in enough detail that another experimenter, using only the description of your experiment, can build his own experiment according to the specified design and reach the same results as you did. If you don't describe your experiment in sufficient detail, it is not considered reproducible. It is assumed in that case that sources of error and uncontrolled variance may very well lie in the parts you left out of the description. That's what reproducibility means -- a standard of disclosure. You're trying to foist the layman's common misconceptions of reproducibility, wrapped in an irrelevant ribbon of unrelated effects.
You demonstrated in your reincarnation proof that the notion of empirical controls is entirely foreign to you. That means you don't have the wherewithal to accuse your audience of misunderstanding different causes of variance. Once again your argument boils down simply to pretending you're smarter than everyone else and browbeating or gaslighting everyone else to accept that they are ignorant and stupid.
You are in the section of the forum that includes science and mathematics. So make with the science and the math. You seem to be well aware of the criticism against PEAR in terms of their method. Your argument is that that criticism is naive and incorrect.
Prove it.
Don't just say it is, prove it is. Use your purported expertise in statistical analysis and show, using appropriate formulas and mathematical proofs, that the criticism is ill-founded as you claim. No punting. No deflection with, "Well, this is over your head," or "I don't have time to get into the details." You're in the section of the forum that's all about the details, so make with them.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Jabba tried to do the same thing. He started out his proof for reincarnation in the mathematics section because it used Bayesian inference to arrive at its conclusion. His argument was that since he was using math it should be in the math section, not that it should be in the religion or paranormal sections because the conclusion he was trying to prove was the factual reality of a religious tenet or paranormal belief.
As long as Buddha is willing to confine the discussion to statistical methodology and the structure of scientific empiricism, I'm content to leave it here. I would consider it on-topic to discuss how properly to design an experiment to test for an effect, even if the purported cause is supernatural. I would consider it on-topic to discuss statistical methods even if the variables relate to claims of the supernatural.
What I suspect is that this thread will devolve in the same manner as Buddha the Claimant's previous two threads. It will quickly shift into advocacy for those beliefs, as the thread title here implies. It will shift into a pissing match over whether our Buddha is as smart as he claims, or smarter than his critics. It will decay into an application of social-engineering techniques he has employed in the past to avoid having to address his critics. It will start to smell of the same ego-reinforcement motives that plagued his other threads. And it will end, I predict, in his abject failure to prove anything he has set out to prove, but then redefining the purpose of the thread as some sort of strengthen-my-argument exercise or data-gathering exercise that allows him to fail in the proof while still "achieving my goals." (That's why I'm asking up front for him to confirm what his goal in this thread is.)
pgwenthold
Penultimate Amazing
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Why in the heck does a demonstration of telekinesis need a statistical analysis?
Show me something that moves by thoughts. Even if it's an undersea, unexplained mass sponge migration. Either something moved, or it didn't.
Show me something that moves by thoughts. Even if it's an undersea, unexplained mass sponge migration. Either something moved, or it didn't.
Thermal
August Member
It would be a treat for Buddah to have the intellectual honesty to address your criticisms directly, but I am not optimistic. He'd need some thus far undisclosed evidentiary silver bullets
Eta: replying to JayUtah. Damned cel phone
Eta: replying to JayUtah. Damned cel phone
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The Sparrow
Graduate Poster
I'm guessing his goal is to be able to claim elsewhere in the future that he took his ideas to some 'hardcore skeptics' and they 'had no legitimate rebuttals'.
Thermal
August Member
Virtually speaking, of course
Cat Not Included
Critical Thinker
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Yeah. Get someone going all Jean Grey and throwing cars with their mind, and nobody's going to be wondering 'what's the margin of error on that'?
pgwenthold
Penultimate Amazing
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For some reason, I get the impression of that Yogi guy who used to claim he could "levitate" and totally suckered Doug Henning into believing it. Cool, levitation! Show us!
And all you see are guys with their legs crossed hopping around on mats.
Buddah is going to prove they are levitating by showing that they are spending a statistically significant more time in the air than would be predicted by physics and gravity.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Because telekinesis (really psychokinesis) is more broadly defined. It is defined as the ability of someone to influence a remote physical system using only thought. ("Remote" meaning, of course, not connected to the brain. Obviously thoughts control the physical system of the organism the thoughts arise in.)
Commonly we define psychokinesis as the ability to move things with the mind, but remote locomotion is not the only purported effect. Adding heat, for example. The PEAR experiments centered around a random number generator. That is, a random bit generator. This is a problem computer scientists should be familiar with, as a bottomless source of true entropy is an attractive goal for many applications. For purposes of understanding the experiment, just imagine it as a machine where you push a button and one of two lights comes on -- one for a 1-bit and the other for a 0-bit. Which light comes on for each trial is, it is alleged. completely random. It is said to be theoretically impossible to predict from any sequence of prior of outcomes, however long, what the next outcome will be.
Over time, the law of large numbers says you should accumulate an equal number of ones and zeros. More precisely, this translates into an ability of a human predictor to predict the next outcome of the machine with an accuracy that, over a large number of trials, approaches 50 percent. But the law of pretty-large (as opposed to truly large) numbers says that there will be a statistical variance in the actual demonstrated ability. That is, if you do 10 trials at predicting a truly random binary event, you will most probably succeed five times, plus-or-minus some variance attributable to sampling granularity. And that granularity is most likely to give you four or six correct guesses if not five. You can't reckon fractions of guesses. The more trials you do, the more you can expect your performance to approach the true center of the distribution, with decreasing variance because the granularity increases.
So the null hypothesis here looks like a random variable that is the likelihood function of conflating the actual probability of the machine to exhibit a truly random bit with the statistical parameters of the sampling factors.
The psychokinesis variable comes from the subject being able to actually influence the machine to produce an outcome that she has predetermined regardless of what its mechanism or algorithm would otherwise have produced. That is, the pyschokinetic effect is assumed to arise when the subject can psychically compel the machine to produce a string of outcomes that are, naturally enough, predicted at a higher rate because the person predicting is the person psychokinetically influencing. One parameter of the model is the baseline performance of the machine. Another is the baseline performance of a non-psychokinetic subject. Also you have the suspected performance of the machine in a run of N trials, absent any external effect. And at the end you have the discrete set out outcomes, both from the machine and from the human subject.
The statistical methodology centers on properly computing likelihoods, properly accounting for these parameters for that trial. The result is a likelihood function that represents the null hypothesis quantitatively. The goal then, most simply put, is to determine whether the properly parameterized null hypothesis has a probability p < 0.05 of explaining the outcomes. Or more accurately stated, whether the subject truly has predicted more outcomes than chance would allow -- presumably because she affected the machine to do so. But because we have a finite number of trials, the question of whether the outcomes were anomalous is always that statistical question that includes a margin of error. Thus one way to fudge your numbers is to complicate the reckoning of the null hypothesis and thereby get a better P-value that you would have otherwise seen. It effectively narrows the expected outcomes such that small changes within the margin of error can be improperly attributed to changes in the variable.
Another way to fudge your numbers is simply to relax the empiricism so that other variables creep in, such as experimenter bias. We find that PEAR did all of that, but Buddha seems to want to talk about only the few straw men he's trotted out.
P.J. Denyer
Penultimate Amazing
FTFY
P.J. Denyer
Penultimate Amazing
Come on, there's already one poster filling the thread with unevidenced claims, that's not an excuse to join in.
BStrong
Penultimate Amazing
No.
But over the years I've run into a few folks who had bad breath to the point that I attempted to stay out of the stink zone.
But over the years I've run into a few folks who had bad breath to the point that I attempted to stay out of the stink zone.
BStrong
Penultimate Amazing
Agreed, but the bad science involved might qualify for its inclusion.
P.J. Denyer
Penultimate Amazing
A number of finely balanced 'targets' in an isolated container. One is selected at random and is moved within an agreed period, the others remain untouched. Designed properly the required force could be tiny, less than that required to change the course of a ball bearing for example.