Dean Radin - harmless pseudo-psientist.

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Having a few moments free and having followed both Radin threads with great interest, Googles lead me to:
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
and the table on the page titled "Current Results, Empirical Normalization".

Scientists select their data??

Look at the column "Event Description".

What sort of **** is that? Annual events do not replicate the results on an annual basis. If Miss World triggers the EGGs to emote in 2003 why not any other year? As a "scientist" you don't even bother looking?

How freaking Global is the "Children Pledge Allegiance"?

What can be made of this (referring to the December 26, 2004 tsunami)

Looking at a larger context is interesting, though it is difficult to interpret with any certainty. Almost exactly 24 hours before the Sumatra shock, the GCP data show a huge and unlikely spike. Then during the first day of the developing tragedy, a wavelike oscillation dominates the data. Early on Monday, a strong trend begins, which continues for the next 24 hours. The week following the tsunami shows mostly a noisy oscillation, but after five days, a steep gradient begins. Scientific interpretation is inappropriate, but perhaps we could let this symbolize a return of hope after the days of unimaginable devastation.

?????
Bolding mine. I'd ignore the speculative comment except suggest that maybe it "symbolizes" despair setting in upon realization of the true magnitude of the disaster.

Please look up the word co-incidence. Events happen at random. EGGs create random outputs. If you ignore the EGG outputs that don't match the Global Events, if even the most trivial events map to EGGs and if there are events that happen without being EGGed (how about the winning of "America's Best Whatever"?) then it is all imagination.

 

[The Atheist]

Having a few moments free and having followed both Radin threads with great interest, Googles lead me to:
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
and the table on the page titled "Current Results, Empirical Normalization".

Scientists select their data??

there will come a time when "... an uncontrollable joy will ripple through the thinking layer of the earth. The co-creative systems, which are lying psychologically dormant in humanity will be activated. From within, all sensitive persons will feel the joy of the force, flooding their systems with love and attraction...as this joy flashes through the nervous systems of the most sensitive peoples on earth, it will create a psycho magnetic field of empathy, which will align the next wave of people in synchrony, everywhere on Earth. This massive, sudden empathic alignment will cause a shift in the consciousness of Earth"

Mate, we're talking about actual science and actual universities, not some dodgy bucket-shop, mail-order PhD joke like Princeton.

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

Anyone have any comments on Radin's Presentiment paper I posted earlier?

 

[The Atheist]

Anyone have any comments on Radin's Presentiment paper I posted earlier?

I've read and seen that one before. What are your particular criticisms of it?

 

[CFLarsen]

I have asked you on many, many occasions to answer a yes/no question, but never succeeded, no matter how simplistic or relvant those questions were in effort to make you state a position. Now, you are insisting that I be drawn into a little game of it. The irony level when conversing with you is such that I have been asked to shift house. We live on the flight-path and pilots are having trouble with their compasses when they fly over.

Neither of your questions has any relevance whatsoever to this or any other discussion I'm involved in. This thread is about Dean Radin, not me.

I have been forced to come to the conclusion that you are either a troll or mentally ill. (have you read that Prozac doesn't actually work most of the time?)

Each and every time you involve yourself in a thread I am in, you do nothing more than troll, lie, and ask questions to avoid the point - exactly as you're doing here. All the way through this and the other thread, you have consistently refused to place evidence that you can refute Radin's claims. And when you attempt to do so, you quote yourself! If that isn't either a sign of mental disturbance or trolling, then there's obviously some third alternative I haven't seen to date. You are quite clearly obsessive and prepared to lie to make points, the purpose of which is only known to you. That itself is highly suggestive of problems.

The final nail in your coffin is that I have stated on several occasions that I am aware of what Radin claims and that I cannot refute his evidence. Anyone with even your standard of English would not equate that to me supporting any of Radin's statements as true. Those questions have been asked and answered several times, yet here you are asking them again so as to ensure the last post in the series is of you asking some absurdly irrelevant question to avoid the real point.

Further evidence is, despite your bluster and obfuscation, you're clearly the softest poster in the forum. How many other posters have had people suspended for having their name changed by one single letter? I bet none.

CFLarsen, this is a long post in answer to two irrelvant and already-answered questions, but alas, it is time for us to part. Congratulations on being the first person to be consigned to the rubbish bin. Iamme, DOC, Minister of Truth, dear KuriousKathy, young Amy Wilson, even your good countryman, DanishDynamite, Articulett, ChistopherA even! Take your pick - posters whose money I wouldn't use to wipe my backside - not one on ignore.

Still, I guess you're used to being lonely!

In the absence of a clear answer, we'll have to go with your own posts, then. Fortunately, those are very clear:

I'll cordially disagree with you here - I'm pretty familiar with the guys he mentions in the article and have researched Radin & Co thoroughly and no glaring errors struck me.

No, you do not deny that Radin made the claims I posted in post#49, since you clearly think that you understand what Radin claims.

I'll make this very easy for you:

Instead of focusing on being wrong about me, be wrong about Radin. Or maybe even right. You are critical of him, give us some relevant criticism of his lethodology and results. As Baron noted, you have so far given nothing.

Go ahead, present some evidence, stop the pussy-footing around and refute Radin's claims.
...
If you are able to refute those claims, please do so.
...
If you can refute Radin's claims, please do so.
...
If you can refute Radin's claims, please go ahead.

No, you do not deny that you said that Radin's claim hadn't been refuted.

Ergo, you think Radin's claims haven't been refuted - and you insist that you haven't misunderstood what Radin claims.

Ergo, it is up to you to defend that:

1. Psi exists.
   
2. Psi is strong enough to influence gambling at casinos and playing the lottery.

The onus is on you.

 

[fls]

How do we know that? I'm not 100% sure it's at all true.

I'm not 100% sure either (I thought I made that clear by using statements like "I'm changing my mind" (meant to indicate waffling)). I tried to give some specific examples in my earlier post - in particular, allowing quack medical therapies to propagate unchecked by formal criticism. I think the jury is out on whether Dawkins and Harris have made the case against the harmlessness of religion. My point is that the assumption that ignoring stuff makes it go away doesn't seem to be supported by the evidence.

A lot of the time, I wonder whether the old adage, "Any publicity is good publicity" comes into play and we might end up doing more harm than good attacking things. Add into that the fact that to attack psi or any other silliness, we muct take the negative approach. In a time when positivity and inclusion are rammed down throats of children at school and adults at work, we can end up looking like grumpy old buggers with only negative comments.

I think we have examples showing that isn't the case - our own Robert Lancaster, Phil Plait, Carl Sagan...

This thread's a classic example of it - loads of innuendo but no evidence to refute the thousands of hours of research Radin has put into it. People who believe his work see it being funded by taxpayers and reputable organisations worldwide. To counter that needs something we don't have.

Speak for yourself.

Take a woman who has questions about Sylvia Browne's skills, for instance. She comes to this site and sees Browne and Radin being attacked equally. Scanning the evidence, she finds none against Radin which stacks up to any kind of analysis, while recognising that actual universities pay for his research. Why should she think our analysis of Sylvia Browne is any more accurate?

I have spent a fair bit of time analyzing Radin's claims, and those of other parapsychologists, here. I know Ersby has as well. And I bet that there are others (and I apologize if I have missed anyone - I don't mean to exclude anyone's contributions). I realize that in the setting of a forum, this information isn't always obvious.

I don't actually think this is the place to go if people are looking for reliable and valid critiques on any particular subject. I think that if we want to clarify the message, "this is what the scientific process finds", people with expertise need to make a more concerted effort to convey that information in a way that makes it easily available, and conveys its reliability and validity.

I think Robert's site allows someone to be exposed to an analysis that they can see is accurate in a way that the various threads on Sylvia Browne here cannot.

Linda

 

[The Atheist]

I'm not 100% sure either (I thought I made that clear by using statements like "I'm changing my mind" (meant to indicate waffling)). I tried to give some specific examples in my earlier post - in particular, allowing quack medical therapies to propagate unchecked by formal criticism.

I see the current Prozac issue as an absolute disaster for medicine. How long is it before the homeopaths and helbalists start making mileage out of it? People have trouble seeing the difference between quack and real medicine already and Prozac is just fuel on the fire.

I don't actually think this is the place to go if people are looking for reliable and valid critiques on any particular subject. I think that if we want to clarify the message, "this is what the scientific process finds", people with expertise need to make a more concerted effort to convey that information in a way that makes it easily available, and conveys its reliability and validity.

That's fair, but for Radin, I don't think there is any place better than another. He can point to thousands of studies, while those interested enough to check out his work generally look at a very limited number of studies.

I agree with the point you make about RSL's Stop Sylvia - if someone did that with Radin and collated all of the opposing views and conflicting evidence into one place, it may be sufficient to knock him off his perch, but what incentive is there? Sylvia Browne is demonstrably harmful to some people. Radin's claims just don't make it worthwhile.

I can see obvious fishhooks like post-hoc reasoning in Radin's work, but it doesn't make it wrong, just bad science; which turns us neatly around to Prozac. How much money has been spent on Prozac compared to how much on Radin's research? I worry that we have our priorities wrong targeting someone like Radin. On my scale of worrying things, he rates around 1,000,000th. Sure, he's almost certainly talking through a hole in his derriere, but so are most politicians and we let them run our countries.

Taking Radin's claims and research on their own, are you able to point to any instances where someone believing his claims could be harmed by that belief?

 

[cj.23]

I think that's a very useful comparison.

What is the attitude among the parapsychology community of researchers? Do they make a point of denouncing those psychics who are obviously fraudulent or deluded?

Linda

I generally make a point of it, and so do most I know.

cj x

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Mate, we're talking about actual science and actual universities, not some dodgy bucket-shop, mail-order PhD joke like Princeton.

I pretty much gave up on PSI some years ago when I spent a lot of time researching JB Rhine and his PSI "confirming" experiments. But of course he was at another "dodgy bucket-shop, mail-order PhD joke" like http://www.duke.edu/

Is this some new variant of "Argument from Authority" -- "Argument from 'it's a Great Big University'"?

 

[The Atheist]

Is this some new variant of "Argument from Authority" -- "Argument from 'it's a Great Big University'"?

That Duke? They puke!

I started to collate a list of actual universities which purvey some form or other of "parapsychology" but got depressed and gave up.

I think it would be more pertinent to make a list of actual universities which do not sponsor some form of paranormality/psi/woo. The trouble is, some woo has turned out to be science, while some science has turned out to be woo.

 

[CFLarsen]

I see the current Prozac issue as an absolute disaster for medicine. How long is it before the homeopaths and helbalists start making mileage out of it? People have trouble seeing the difference between quack and real medicine already and Prozac is just fuel on the fire.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

If anything, if it turns out that Prozac is as ineffective as the new information indicates, it only shows that the inherent self-correcting mechanisms of science ensures that we learn from the mistakes. Without them, we wouldn't progress.

Sylvia Browne is demonstrably harmful to some people. Radin's claims just don't make it worthwhile.

To call Radin "harmless" is to ignore - intentionally or not - his vast influence on the New Age scene. His involvement with the Institute of Noetic Science is but one example of this. "The Conscious Universe" is, of course, another.

Radin's attempt of producing scientific evidence of paranormal phenomena only serves to prolong ignorance. That is just as harmful as what Sylvia Browne does, and in some ways even more harmful, due to the scientific credibility that Radin's research claims. It erodes real science, because it fuzzies the line between real science and the pseudoscience that Radin does.

Some - like you - fall for it, hook, line and sinker. Which brings us back to:

Please defend your claim that:

1. Psi exists.
   
2. Psi is strong enough to influence gambling at casinos and playing the lottery.

The onus is on you.

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

I've read and seen that one before. What are your particular criticisms of it?

1) Leakage in experiment 1, which produced one of the lowest p-values, from the photo being loaded from disk at the start of the trial period.

2) When the experiment was run with tighter protocols (experiments 2 and 4), the difference gets much smaller, as indicated by the much larger p-values.

3) What was the purpose of using a 2:1 ratio of calm to emotional photos in experiment 3, other than to enable participants to learn calm photos were twice as likely to appear than emotional photos* during the experiment?

IMO, the correct way to run the experiment is to load into memory one photo from a randomised calm list and one photo from a randomised emotional list at the start of each trial (t=-5s). Then, at t=0, a randomly generated binary value (i.e. 0 or 1) is used to select which one of these pre-loaded images is displayed. I would have thought removing the PC hardware from the room, leaving only the display, physiological monitoring equipment and a push button would have be a simple measure to avoid a source of possible leakage.

BTW, re-seeding the random number generator on every trial with the PC timer reduces the "randomness" of the output considerably, from about 4 billion cycles before repeating to a mere 86 million. Probably not important in this experiment, but it's been used to win at online poker.

*I'm assuming the 120 photos (80 calm, 40 emotional) were in a sorted list and the random number generator was used as an index on each trial to select one of them.

 

[baron]

I think Robert's site allows someone to be exposed to an analysis that they can see is accurate in a way that the various threads on Sylvia Browne here cannot.

Why is the Sylvia Browne site being mentioned in this thread? Radin is a scientist. Sylvia Browne is a con-woman. What's the link?

 

[baron]

Radin's attempt of producing scientific evidence of paranormal phenomena only serves to prolong ignorance. That is just as harmful as what Sylvia Browne does, and in some ways even more harmful, due to the scientific credibility that Radin's research claims. It erodes real science, because it fuzzies the line between real science and the pseudoscience that Radin does.

Sorry, but the ignorance is all yours. There is no connection between Sylvia Browne and Radin except in your head. You have dismissed Radin's work and method purely because you have made the groundless assumption that there's nothing worth studying in that field.

If you can scientifically disprove Radin's claims (rather than referring to some guy's book review on your site) then I'll take some notice of what you're saying. Until then, I'm happy to dismiss you as an armchair debunker rather than a true skeptic.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Why is the Sylvia Browne site being mentioned in this thread? Radin is a scientist. Sylvia Browne is a con-woman. What's the link?

They are both wrong?

They are both fooling themselves?

They are both fooling other people?

Other than those? Probably nothing?

 

[humber]

They are both Quantumly-entangled deluded con-folk

 

[baron]

They are both wrong?

They are both fooling themselves?

They are both fooling other people?

Other than those? Probably nothing?

They are both Quantumly-entangled deluded con-folk

It must be so easy to be an armchair debunker. Nevertheless, I won't be giving it a try. I prefer to examine the evidence and come to a conclusion that way.

 

[R.A.F.]

If you can scientifically disprove Radin's claims...snip...then I'll take some notice of what you're saying.

Are you seriously suggesting that the onus is on the scientific community to prove that psi doesn't exist?

Sorry, but that's not how science "works".

 

[humber]

It must be so easy to be an armchair debunker. Nevertheless, I won't be giving it a try. I prefer to examine the evidence and come to a conclusion that way.

Not so much an armchair debunker. Did some psi testing when I was more open-minded - I mean naive.
You will never see the evidence you need. Why are all these tests so complicated and the results so nebulous? Answer; to successfully fool you, they first need to fool themselves.

 

[CFLarsen]

Sorry, but the ignorance is all yours. There is no connection between Sylvia Browne and Radin except in your head.

Oh? What's the difference?

You have dismissed Radin's work and method purely because you have made the groundless assumption that there's nothing worth studying in that field.

Nope. I have dismissed Radin's work and method purely because I have looked carefully at his research and come to the conclusion that it's all bunk.

If you can scientifically disprove Radin's claims (rather than referring to some guy's book review on your site) then I'll take some notice of what you're saying. Until then, I'm happy to dismiss you as an armchair debunker rather than a true skeptic.

Already pointed out by R.A.F., but I'll chip in: That's not how science works.

You know better.