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"Many Scientists are Convinced that Man Can See the Future"

Orphia Nay

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Orphia Nay
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http://www.redorbit.com/news/scienc...vinced_that_man_can_see_the_future/index.html

The man behind the experiments is certainly convinced. 'We're satisfied that people can sense the future before it happens,' says Professor Bierman, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam. 'We'd now like to move on and see what kind of person is particularly good at it.' And Bierman is not alone: his findings mirror the data gathered by other scientists and paranormal researchers both here and abroad.

Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Cambridge University, says: 'So far, the evidence seems compelling. What seems to be happening is that information is coming from the future.
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It's my opinion these tests probably show activity related to the feeling of fear or suspense, not the glimpsing of the future.

The article's examples of "presentiment" of disaster seems to me to be the usual woo argument that focuses on the hits and ignores the misses, in a generalised way (from person to person), and I "predict" that if they study "psychics", they will also ignore their misses.

But am I being cynical, not skeptical? Is there a wonderful world of woo out there waiting to astound me? :D
 
So he's testing people to see if they have Spidey-sense?

This guy calls himself a scientist?! He needs to just spend more time in the red-light district and forget about science for a while.
 
Does anyone have a reference for the thing about planes being uncommonly empty on 9-11?
 
Dr. Dean Radin? Never heard of him. Oh, but he worked for the CIA, of course.

The machine he uses is a modified lie detector??!?

Other researchers from Cornell to Edinburgh have duplicated these "tests"?? But none are named.....

Excuse me while I become ill....
 
This is what I posted in the comment section of the article:

Posted by skeptigirl on 05/07/2007, 01:19
With 6 billion people on the planet, many people likely have what they believe are premonitions every day. If you only count the times the premonitions are correct and never count the times they are not correct, you really cannot tell random premonitions that are correct by coincidence from actual premonitions. It's a common fallacy. "Scientists" who understand the scientific process would know that you have to measure the background rate of events before you can determine the additional events specific to what you are testing (in this case real premonitions vs random premonitions that are only coincidentally correct). And "scientists" understand the effect selective memory has on the outcome of collecting these type of anecdotes. You remember the hits and forget the misses. This is not a scientific finding. Discuss and believe it all you want, but don't call it science. It isn't.
 
Apparently the author has a reputation:
From the quackometer blog
"Once Dismissed as Hokum" is how Dr Danny Penman begins with a less-than-half-truth in his quacktasticly exceptional article about Spiritual Healing in the Daily Mail, "Could spiritual healing actually work?"

This article ought to serve as a case study in how to write about nonsense quackery for the madder end of the British Press. I thought it worthwhile to dissect this piece to show how you can write supportively about completely ******* ideas without telling too many porkies.


2. As a journalist, flaunt your qualifications, awards and titles. Danny Penman signs the article with his title, 'Dr'. Note that Dr Danny Penman got his PhD in Biochemisty studying fungus on cocoa crops, not a medical subject. This is a blatant appeal to authority as we have previously discussed.
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The rest is great!

And Dr Penman apparently likes to write about junk science.

PSYCHIATRIST ACCEPTS EVIDENCE FOR THE AFTERLIFE:
One of the world’s most respected members of the Royal College of Psychiatrists consultant psychiatrist Dr Alan Sanderson has gone on public record for stating “…the spirit world is real.” Dr Sanderson’s comments appeared in the Daily Mail feature on exorcism by Dr Danny Penman. One advice given by Dr Sanderson is, “Don’t play with ouija boards, don’t drink too much or take illicit drugs and live a temperate life.” This Dr Sanderson, is referring to the weakening of the aura if anyone drinks too much, or takes illicit drugs. As to the ouija board, it is very well known there are great risks for the amateurs to use the ouija board. Professor Peter Fenwick of London’s University said that, “exorcism is gaining academic credibility.
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I think all people have premonitions, but not based upon any strange senses but experience, intelligence, imagination and the five normal senses. And this is nowhere near close to real "premonition" as in "I see that George W Bush will have to resign from the White House within a near future".

Normal premonitions we all have stops us from hurting ourselves or getting into trouble.
For example, if my experience is that the police have speed controls at a certain place at the road I usually go to work, I will after some time develop a "sixth sense" telling me to ease the speed since its a speed control up ahead. Of course, most of the times I will be wrong and quickly forget about it, but the day I'm right I will immediately put it down to my tingling spider-sense.
Of course, if I have no way of actually knowing what will happen, I can't have premonitions. If people knew what always would happen, accidents would never happen...
 
Warge, you are confusing intelligent interpretation of cues with premonitions. They differ. I can tell a dog I see is dangerous if he is exhibiting certain behaviors. That differs from a premonition which would be sensing the dog was around the corner before I saw or heard it.
 
Ersby said:
Does anyone have a reference for the thing about planes being uncommonly empty on 9-11?
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9/11 Myths gives a good debunk.

Therefore we have one plane with more passengers then expected, one with an average figure, one below but within an expected range, and one exceptionally low (in Flight 93). Subtract the hijackers and the figures fall a little more, but it’s been suggested that traffic does fall post-Labor day, and there's no real pattern here. Without further evidence it's hard to see anything significant in the load factor data.
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skeptigirl said:
This is what I posted in the comment section of the article:

Posted by skeptigirl on 05/07/2007, 01:19
With 6 billion people on the planet, many people likely have what they believe are premonitions every day. If you only count the times the premonitions are correct and never count the times they are not correct, you really cannot tell random premonitions that are correct by coincidence from actual premonitions. It's a common fallacy. "Scientists" who understand the scientific process would know that you have to measure the background rate of events before you can determine the additional events specific to what you are testing (in this case real premonitions vs random premonitions that are only coincidentally correct). And "scientists" understand the effect selective memory has on the outcome of collecting these type of anecdotes. You remember the hits and forget the misses. This is not a scientific finding. Discuss and believe it all you want, but don't call it science. It isn't.
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Nice post, skeptigirl, and nice research in your subsequent post above. :)
 
I believe! Before I got to the end of the OP, I was sure I was going to see it blown out of the water by the very logic skeptigirl used. I have the gift!
 
I am for one convinced that it is possible to predict the future. Moreover, it is done all the time, with exceptional accuracy.

For example, see this webpage:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=105&month=6&year=2011&obj=sun&afl=-11&day=1

Here you can see the predictions for the times of day that the sun will rise and set for the month of June in the year 2011, FOUR YEARS IN THE FUTURE.

Scientists predict the future all the time, in exceeding detail. Psychics got nothing on us.
 
skeptigirl said:
Warge, you are confusing intelligent interpretation of cues with premonitions. They differ. I can tell a dog I see is dangerous if he is exhibiting certain behaviors. That differs from a premonition which would be sensing the dog was around the corner before I saw or heard it.
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That was kind of the point since this IS premonition that works. Ok, it won't give a million bucks, but still.

But you can STILL sense the dog: we are humans and as such our senses are a lot weaker than almost any animal. However, we do still have traces of the animalic senses, most of it pheromones and smells. That means that you could still pick up traces of the dog and not even be aware of it - and a dangerous dog smells one way, a harmless in another way.

This was great when we lived in caves but it has lost some of it importance later except for people reading people...
 
skeptigirl said:
This is what I posted in the comment section of the article:

Posted by skeptigirl on 05/07/2007, 01:19
With 6 billion people on the planet, many people likely have what they believe are premonitions every day. If you only count the times the premonitions are correct and never count the times they are not correct, you really cannot tell random premonitions that are correct by coincidence from actual premonitions. It's a common fallacy. "Scientists" who understand the scientific process would know that you have to measure the background rate of events before you can determine the additional events specific to what you are testing (in this case real premonitions vs random premonitions that are only coincidentally correct). And "scientists" understand the effect selective memory has on the outcome of collecting these type of anecdotes. You remember the hits and forget the misses. This is not a scientific finding. Discuss and believe it all you want, but don't call it science. It isn't.
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I don't see where the author refers to the anecdotes as scientific findings. All he says is that the presentiment experiments might help explain some of those anecdotes, which is speculation. The science is the presentiment experiments, as you well know. I don't understand why you are trying to confuse the issue like this :confused:
 
Warge said:
...we are humans and as such our senses are a lot weaker than almost any animal....
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Is that really the case? Humans have color vision, and pretty good distance acuity -- far better than, say, rhinos. We have outstanding close vision; in fact, our retinas appear to be specially adapted to lap-work.

We have a good sense of taste, every bit as good as a chimp's.

Our sense of smell is better than you might think; some Australian Aborigines hunt using scent, and do a drastic sinus-clearing routine involving a length of cord (don't ask!) to sharpen their ability to smell game. In dense cover, I've detected deer using smell alone, as have others. (And, like dogs, we never lose the memory of a smell; the evocative power of a long-ago odor is a staple of romantic fiction writers -- with reason.)

Our fingers are quite sensitive, as you'd expect in a tool-making species.

Like any clambering animal (we're apes, after all), we have a good sense of body position, and it's notorious that one hand can find the other in the dark.

Normal human hearing may not detect as high or low frequencies as some animals, but our ability to hear the direction of a sound is quite good, especially when you consider the inefficiency of our ear-shells.

So let's not knock ourselves as animals. We do all right.
 
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So, let me get this right. The experiment is roughly this:

- Take 200 people, measure a whole whack of stuff, and test them with Zener cards (or some other ESP measure)
- Label the top 5% of scores as "ESP" and bottom 95% as "NON ESP"
- Build logistic regression models on :
"ESP"/"NON ESP" ~ a whole whack of stuff (Age, gender, shoe size, bad breath quota, number of times seeing Star Wars in theatres, ...)
- Out of 200 variables in initial data, label the ones as significant in your ESP/NON ESP model as descriptive of ESP characteristics

OR better yet
- Take 200 variables, use principle components, model on 200 PCs, and use weights and means from PC analysis to describe ESP population

Did I get the gist of it?
 
sackett said:
Is that really the case? Humans have color vision, and pretty good distance acuity -- far better than, say, rhinos. We have outstanding close vision; in fact, our retinas appear to be specially adapted to lap-work.
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You are right, which is why I said 'almost any animal'. Generally speaking however, our senses aren't up to par with most animals, especially when it comes to hearing, smelling and seeing. One sense that we do have better than most animals is taste - we must take a bite of something to realize that something is wrong with it. A dog smells that miles away however...
 
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