Moderated Is the Telekinesis Real?

I predict he'll say something like, "I showed this thread to a bunch of highly respected mathematicians and they said you're all incompetent." In other words, an univerifiable content-free testimonial that a 13-year-old could come up with.
 
Indeed, he seems very interested in getting away from PEAR, Palmer, and Jeffers.

We asked Buddha to discuss Jeffers, and all he can do is frantically search for where someone else has taken up Jeffers. As we predicted, Buddha himself cannot understand Jeffers or "demolish" him. Standard keyboard-warrior approach. And Williams really doesn't do anything either. It's the standard apologetics by which the psi camp seems to respond to all its critics.

I already touched on Williams' gross misrepresentation of the baseline bind issue. Jahn, not Jeffers, brought it to our attention. All Williams can do is try to throw a lot of obfuscation at it and trump up the illusion that Jeffers somehow didn't understand what Jahn was trying to do. There is no misundertanding; Jahn captured baseline data intending to use it as the null -- and, in fact, did use it as the null.

Williams criticizes Jeffers' own psi research, but doesn't offer any original criticism. He merely refers to Dobyns as Jeffers' major critic regarding methodology. But he doesn't say much about what Dobyns says. And that's probably because Jeffers himself in "The PEAR Proposition: Fact or Fallacy?" identifies Dobyns as his critic. Williams hasn't done anything more than copy Jeffers' own disclosure and attempt to take credit for it.

To understand this a bit better we have to return to Alcock, because there's some history there. Initially the psi camp was quite excited to have Stanley Jeffers taking their research seriously, doing his own research, and using their labs and their publishing organs to conduct that research. It was only after he got the "wrong" answer that the questions of methodology and bias came up. Alcock notes that after Jeffers failed to confirm Jahn's findings -- in Jahn's own lab, I might add -- the psi community dropped Jeffers like a hot potato. It's important to remember that Jeffers feared this might happen, so he took great pains in advance to engineer his experiment properly and to get buyoff from potential critics. This is included conversations with York Dobyns -- one of PEAR's researchers -- about the proper statistical treatment of the data. Dobyns' later criticism is somewhat untimely.

Further, Williams tries to drive a wedge between the Jahn apparatus and the Jeffers apparatus based on double-slit deposition of particles. The latter, Williams argues, may not be suitable to psi research. But Williams glosses over the fact that Jahn, not Jeffers, suggested other quantum-level phenomena that might be susceptible to psychokinesis, including the double-slit effect. Jahn certainly did not object to Jeffers' method on that basis, and indeed receives credit in Jeffers' writings for it. So it appears Williams is slightly rewriting history in order to cast unwarranted aspersions.

Let me hasten to remind the audience that Bryan Williams is critiquing work that Buddha prematurely claimed did not exist. I'll leave the reader to draw whatever conclusions he may from Buddha's conspicuous lack of correction or clarification of his error. I conclude, however, that he is simply operating in Keyboard-Warrior mode, having no appreciable knowledge of the subject and instead just randomly throwing out hastily-Googled items without regard to whether they are reliable scholarship or whether they fit into a consistent or credible argument. It seems to be a neverending ploy for "gotcha!" moments regardless of what was said in the previous posting cycle. Buddha even explicitly denies any need to look at criticism that arises from the previous day or two-days' worth of postings. Ever onward, never looking back, seems to be his motto.

Williams goes on to note the failure, acknowledged by PEAR, of other universities in Germany and elsewhere to replicate Jahn's initial findings. And in addressing those failures he devolves into the same old apologetics we hear from the fringe. He tries to draw attention away from the failure to achieve significance by saying the replication efforts nevertheless made interesting findings. Mere interest is a low and elastic bar. And while it would suggest further study, it does not redeem this one. There is a fair amount of fringe-standard post hoc hypothesization in Williams' apology. Palmer did this too -- the data-sorting argument. Here Williams speculates that the PK effect may have properties that defy the present protocols to identify, such as severe limits in amplitude and frequency, or aversion to laboratory settings. Again, this suggests further research but does not redeem the present studies; Williams and his colleagues want that speculation to stand in place of the failure of controlled studies to confirm their prior hypothesis, but their hypotheses arose only after seeing failure in their data. And finally Williams tries to sidestep the notion of significance altogether and note that something seemed to affect the REG machines in the right direction, albeit not to the level of significance. That's a fairly standard technique in pseudoscience: trying to rewrite the criteria for significance after receiving the data. It's consummate goalpost-shifting. The obvious statistical rebuttals aside, Williams ignores entirely that the initial PEAR protocol was deficient and did not preclude such things as tampering and other confounds that may explain favorable variance. He is basically begging the question that the proffered hypothesis explains marginally significant findings knowing full well that adequate controls were not in place to support that. The curious behavior of the volitional categorical variable especially tells us that a psi effect is probably not the cause.


An informed post. You, Jay, are what "Buddha" wishes to be.


abadon said:
Spoon bending and Uri Gellar.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA


Indeed. And """Buddha""" abandoned all the crap related to his own syncretic religion indistinguishable from badly understood Buddhism (creator-deity Adi-Him, no Darwin, reincarnation and telekinesis-levitation) and he's now in pure carnival mode.


Deliberate movements of him, like the ones of those escaping from a forest fire they caused.
 
Orange is the new black, and it looks Jahn's/Palmer's/Jeffers' is the new Popper. All of them misquoted, all of them made into target of loaded adjectives all of them used in support of """"Buddha"""" enlightened view, moving apart from them until they are finally ignored: "from the very beginning that wasn't what I wanted to talk about ... my oponents insist in bringing them back to the discussion"

""""Buddha"""": "They're on to me!"
 
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Indeed. And """Buddha""" abandoned all the crap related to his own syncretic religion indistinguishable from badly understood Buddhism (creator-deity Adi-Him, no Darwin, reincarnation and telekinesis-levitation) and he's now in pure carnival mode.


It’s almost as if all his religious claims are as made up as his academic and professional claims. It’s almost as if he were trolling and not sincere in anything.

Naturally I’d never suggest that was the case. Accusing someone of being a troll constitutes an attack on the person, not their arguments. That’s rightfully against the site’s ToS.

That said, he’s certainly posting like he’s the prime suspect in a club attack in an exclusive British boarding school back in the early 1990’s.
 
Orange is the new black, and it looks Jahn's/Palmer's/Jeffers' is the new Popper. All of them misquoted, all of them made into target of loaded adjectives all of them used in support of """"Buddha"""" enlightened view, moving apart from them until they are finally ignored: "from the very beginning that wasn't what I wanted to talk about ... my oponents insist in bringing them back to the discussion"

Buddha seems to think he's succeeding at discrediting John Palmer, whose one paper has become the straw man for the whole thread. So he wants to move on to whatever it is Palmer talks about. Not gonna happen, if I can help it. He hasn't finished with PEAR and Jeffers.

Buddha: Here's where Palmer made a mistake.
Jay: No, that's your misunderstanding of science and the math that's used in it. Here, I'll explain it...
Buddha: You're stupid and your argument is weak. Next subject!

As hallyscomet notes, it's largely indistinguishable from performance art. If today's posts from him are substantially more than another pontifical drive-by, I'll wear a kilt to work.

""""Buddha"""": "They're on to me!"

From the very beginning.
 
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As hallyscomet notes, it's largely indistinguishable from performance art. If today's posts from him are substantially more than another pontifical drive-by, I'll wear a kilt to work.

I'll join you in that wager.

Of course, my ancestors included Celts who invaded the Scottish Lowlands and drove out the Picts who wouldn't intermarry with them, taking the land for themselves, so I'm entitled to wear one.

I'm also told I have the legs for it, but I'm dubious as I haven't rock climbed regularly in ages.
 
For some reason I cannot download the Palmer report today (I use my company’s LAN, so I have to erase the files that are not job related every time I finish using them). Instead I am going to discuss Jeffers’ article that supposedly negated the Princeton research.
The title of the article is: A Double-slit Diffraction Experiment to Investigate Claims of Consciousness-related Anomalies. This is the link to the article

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/bb42/6f89414dfc4d3e3beafe4d0d3ce39e75a47c.pdf

The Jeffers’ “experiment” is not a reproduction of the Princeton experiment, it is bs.
Jeffers chose a double-slit diffraction set-up as a generator of random sequences. This is dome data on double-slit experiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

Double-slit diffraction doesn’t produce a Poisson process, instead it produces a diffraction pattern (wave interference pattern). Since this is not a Poisson process, the t-tests are not applicable to it. But Jeffers used a t-test to draw the conclusion that the experiment debunks the Princeton research.

T"he operators at Princeton were given a slightly more goal-directed task.
Though it was explained that the experiment was designed to measure
anomalous wave-function collapse, operators were told that their primary task
was to intend the analogue indicator bar to remain as low as possible. Due
to already heavy demands on operator time, a prior decision was made at
Princeton to run the experiment for just 20 series, and then to analyze the data
and report the results.” Jeffers, page 546

This is a “slightly more goal-oriented task”, this is a drastic departure from the Princeton objective.

“Note however that the column headings therein
were incorrectly labeled: the active and inactive data were transposed. The
reported conclusion, that there was no effect of operator intention on the
contrast, was based upon analysis of the inactive data. Nonetheless, the
conclusion here is the same; the correctly labeled results also show no
statistically significant effect of operator intention (Z = - 0.481).” Jeffers, page 547

If this was inactive data, it doesn’t depend on the operator intention, so this conclusion is expected, and it doesn’t prove anything.

It seems to me that Jeffers set his experiment to fail to come to conclusion that it negates the Princeton research conclusion.
 
""""Buddha"""" said:
Double-slit diffraction doesn’t produce a Poisson process, instead it produces a diffraction pattern (wave interference pattern). Since this is not a Poisson process, the t-tests are not applicable to it. But Jeffers used a t-test to draw the conclusion that the experiment debunks the Princeton research.


:jaw-dropp:jaw-dropp:jaw-dropp:jaw-dropp:jaw-dropp:jaw-dropp:jaw-dropp:jaw-dropp
 
""""Buddha""""" said:
If this was inactive data, it doesn’t depend on the operator intention, so this conclusion is expected, and it doesn’t prove anything.

It seems to me that Jeffers set his experiment to fail to come to conclusion that it negates the Princeton research conclusion.


It is surer to say you didn't understand a thing...


Stop the presses!!!! "Wanting and Clumsy Arguer Proposes Fine Scientist Did a Wanting Job in Order to Reach Clumsy Conclusion"
 
It is surer to say you didn't understand a thing...


Stop the presses!!!! "Wanting and Clumsy Arguer Proposes Fine Scientist Did a Wanting Job in Order to Reach Clumsy Conclusion"

He's still pissing and moaning about a baseline that we already know is worthless. He's not just beating the dead horse, he's got a saddle on it and is dragging it around screaming "giddy up!" while admonishing us for not knocking empty coconut halves together for him.
 
Since this is not a Poisson process, the t-tests are not applicable to it.

You still don't have a clue what the t-test is or how it works. The t-test always uses the t-distribution, not a normal distribution. It is specifically the test you use when the data are not expected to conform to any of the normal distributions. Once again you manifest your abject ignorance of descriptive statistics and significance testing.

What's worse is that the two sources you previously cited to describe the t-test amply explain this. It's one thing initially not to understand the t-test test; that's forgivable. It's another thing to cite sources that explain them, insinuate that only you can understand them, and then spectacularly demonstrate your failure to understand them. That takes a special commitment to gaslighting.

This is a “slightly more goal-oriented task”, this is a drastic departure from the Princeton objective.

Jeffers goes to great lengths (Jeffers, op. cit., pp. 548ff) to explain how his experiments differ in method from the PEAR experiments and why that's a good thing. The problem with PEAR's results was exactly in its methodology. Jeffers was not trying to duplicate PEAR's results using their methodology. He was trying to see if an improved methodology would duplicate the results PEAR obtained (i.e., with a vastly improved methodology that was hoped would eliminate the ways in which critics of PK research could find fault with it). If he achieved a significant result with a similar (but importantly different) methodology, then PEAR's results would have been somewhat vindicated.

The shift in methodology was crucial to Jeffers' stated goal. "[T]he major motivation for this effort was to improve our understanding of the dependencies and invariants of the process, rather than simply to provide more evidence of such anomalies." (Ibid., p. 547) In this particular paper, Jeffers is helping PEAR and others find the possible confounds to inform further research. This is different than the articles he wrote for Skeptical Inquirer in which he more directly criticizes PEAR. That you think Jeffers had, or should have had, some different goal in this research is irrelevant. The German scientists attempted to duplicate PEAR's research using their protocol and failed. Jeffers developed his own protocol -- with PEAR's assistance, in some cases -- attempting to study the same PK effect on the same sorts of phenomenon (a protocol that was supposed to correct for PEAR's protocol issues) and achieved only marginal significance that correlated to which test site was used.

As usual, in a broader sense you fail to put this in context that Alcock provides. Jeffers wasn't a mainstream scientist out to discredit psi research at all costs. He was a famous physicist welcomed by PEAR and their colleagues -- initially -- with open arms and an ear to how his insight would improve their plight. You insist on painting him as a mustache-twirling villain and, as a result, not competent to worship the water you walk on.

If this was inactive data, it doesn’t depend on the operator intention, so this conclusion is expected, and it doesn’t prove anything.

Uh, what you write has absolutely nothing to do with what Jeffers is trying to illustrate in that passage. Once again it's as if you don't understand what's being said at all, but you think that if you just say something that sounds vaguely statisticky you can fool people into think you're leveling valid criticism and that anyone who objects "obviously" isn't privy to your brilliance.

It seems to me that Jeffers set his experiment to fail to come to conclusion that it negates the Princeton research conclusion.

No, using a different methodology and protocol than PEAR is not an attempt to "set his experiment to fail" to confirm PEAR, nor does it qualify Jeffers' work as "bs." You're simply trying to shoehorn Jeffers' actual work in this paper into what you preconceived it should have been, and faulting him for little more than failing to validate your preconception. And no, you clearly don't understand what Jeffers actually did to vet the initial PEAR studies in Skeptical Inquirer. And no, you're still as ignorant as can be over what statistics properly apply to this sort of research.

You declared Jeffers to be biased and "irrelevant" before you even looked at his work, so now you're just cherry-picking stuff from his research that you can spin to make it seem like that's still true.

Also, some bookkeeping. We initially asked you to comment on Jeffers' interpretation of the baseline-bind situation reported by Jahn. Instead, you've decided you're going to attack Jeffers' own original research. Although you're finally addressing the critic we wanted you to focus on, you're not addressing the specific criticism we asked you to look at. You hastily posted a link to an Internet post by Williams, claiming that it answers Jeffers, but as I pointed out Williams clearly offers nothing but thinly-veiled prevarication on that point. It is unsuitable as an answer. I'm asking you to address that specific criticism -- the baseline bind -- because it requires you to demonstrate an actual understanding of sample variance in statistical analysis, a topic you've repeatedly demonstrated yourself deficient in. I want to see if you're able and willing to correct your misunderstanding and misattribution of the underlying statistical phenomenon to margin of error.

And we're still waiting for you to clarify whether you believe Jeffers has done any original research. Earlier you claimed he hadn't, because you claimed Alcock hadn't mentioned any. Today you're clearly looking at, and cherry-picking from, what is obviously original research done by Jeffers in psychokinesis, informed and assisted by PEAR with the aim of following it up. We're wondering when you're going to get around to admitting and taking responsibility for your original error in claiming nothing of the sort existed. If you're never going to acknowledge errors, then it is fruitless for a thinking person to attempt to engage you and correct them.
 
He's still pissing and moaning about a baseline that we already know is worthless. He's not just beating the dead horse, he's got a saddle on it and is dragging it around screaming "giddy up!" while admonishing us for not knocking empty coconut halves together for him.

If we wanted written definitive evidence """Buddha""" hasn't the slightest idea about Statistics, today is the day. For instance he's still completely lost regarding t-tests.

Maybe the skilled mathematicians he wanted to entice, Melchior, Gaspar and Balthasar, will come in his help.


ETA:
Ninja'ed by JayUtah said:
"You still don't have a clue what the t-test is or how it works. The t-test always uses the t-distribution, not a normal distribution. It is specifically the test you use when the data are not expected to conform to any of the normal distributions. Once again you manifest your abject ignorance of descriptive statistics and significance testing."
 
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""""Buddha"""" said:
For some reason I cannot download the Palmer report today (I use my company’s LAN, so I have to erase the files that are not job related every time I finish using them). Instead I am going to discuss Jeffers’ article that supposedly negated the Princeton research.


Have you tried something different than America On-Line?
 
He's still pissing and moaning about a baseline that we already know is worthless.

Not so much this time, although that's still an operative criticism to the thread as a whole. He absolutely cannot deal with the baseline issue. Jahn published comments on it and noted it as a curious effect. Jeffers took that ball and ran with it, noting how it had a more profound effect on the integrity of the study than was perhaps originally seen. Williams the paranormal circuit-show rider can't address it, so he makes up a lame, factually-wrong allegation about Jeffers "somehow" not understanding how the empiricism was structured, and therefore "somehow" being unfair with his criticism. And just as infamously, Buddha doesn't understand the basis of the Jeffers commentary on the baselines. He thinks (wrongly) that it might have something to do with margin of error.* So Buddha pretends it's not something he has to deal with.

He's not just beating the dead horse, he's got a saddle on it and is dragging it around screaming "giddy up!" while admonishing us for not knocking empty coconut halves together for him.

Pretty much. It's just a lengthier version of the same equivocation he attempted in this post. He can ignore the SI articles because they don't go into detail about his original research, even though what we wanted from him was to address the baselines. He can ignore the Alcock book because (he says) Jeffers didn't write anything in it about duplicating PEAR research, even though it goes into considerable depth about the story of that research. He can ignore this one paper because it didn't follow PEAR's method and protocol, and thus doesn't "attempt duplicate their findings." It's a never-ending exercise in hastily contriving new criteria for acceptance/rejection of Jeffers' work (i.e., frantically shifting the goalposts) that mean he has to address as little of its actual content as possible each time.

_______________________
* Buddha might say, "I never claimed this." What he doesn't realize is that the part of Jeffers' baseline commentary that he doesn't understand is the part of the Palmer data-sorting commentary that he doesn't understand. They're one and the same phenomenon, at the core, and Buddha has no zarking clue what it's all about.
 
If we wanted written definitive evidence """Buddha""" hasn't the slightest idea about Statistics, today is the day. For instance he's still completely lost regarding t-tests.

Yes, this cannot be emphasized strongly enough, so the fact that Alec and I risked ninja-ing each other to point it out is significant. What Buddha is insinuating about the t-test for significance is exactly the opposite of what the t-test is all about. He has no clue what it's for or how it works.

Buddha has, at this point, frankly forfeited any claim to be an expert of any kind in statistics. I realize that for many of you this was already painfully obvious. But I realize that others may not have the energy to follow along my detailed rebuttals to him and are relying upon other posters to interpret the state of the debate for them. The defensible interpretation at this point is that any claim Buddha makes on the basis of his own authority as a statistician is non-probative.
 
Alright, that is utter bovine excrement.

It may not be. The link he's been using is to a U.S. defense serve that is notoriously slow. I can see it becoming so slow that intervening Internet nodes time out. It works to our advantage in this case because he has been precluded from leaving PEAR and Jeffers behind (as he evidently wants to do) and moving on to new material he can mangle with presumably more impunity.

Everything after that was worse.

Or just objectively bad. He splorked the bed on t-tests. That's unrecoverable. Then he tried to dismiss the whole Jeffers paper on a pretext, because it wasn't what he predetermined it should have been. Finally he drops another misguided, content-free bluff and concludes that Jeffers is hopelessly biased.

Yesterday he invoked Williams to ride to his aid, but Williams in turn only invokes Dobyns and, in a spectacular stroke of apathy, manages to say less about Dobyns that Jeffers himself does in Skeptical Inquirer. One wonders, given yesterday's performance, why Buddha didn't skip all these intermediaries and go right to the source that both Jeffers and Williams identify. I could be charitable and say that it's because Buddha heeded my reminder and took it upon himself to address the issue, instead of deferring to others. But what's more likely is his reluctance to deep-dive into Dobyns.

Dobyns' commentary falls into two broad categories: criticism of protocol and criticism of analysis. The criticism of protocol is a non-starter. Jeffers specifically created his own protocol to be different than PEAR's. So complaints along the lines, "But that's not the protocol we followed in our study," should be falling on deaf ears. (This is why it's salient to point out that Dobyns' criticism is untimely. It's pretty lame criticism, given what Jeffers clearly said he was trying to determine and how. Dobyns knew of Jeffers' protocol well in advance, but didn't feel it right to point out the "mismatch" until Jeffers got the wrong answer.) The criticism of analysis is way over Buddha's head. And I'm not going to interpret it for him. If, on the basis of Williams and Jeffers himself, Buddha wants to try to explain Dobyns, he's welcome to. I'm sure it will be highly amusing. And I bet Buddha is sure too, which is likely why he's leaving Williams and Dobyns in the dust rather than risk further exposition of his own ignorance.
 

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