Huh? I would gone out into my backyard and watched the birds. You can't have meant to ask something so inane, so please clarify what you are talking about.
Linda
Richard Wiseman
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Huh? I would gone out into my backyard and watched the birds. You can't have meant to ask something so inane, so please clarify what you are talking about.
Linda
Yes, I was referring to UFOs from planets other than earth. And, even though an experiment isn't possible, you can evaluate the evidence. So, if you believed that the evidence demonstrated with 90% certainty that there are such things, would that be enough to convince you of their reality? Or would the percentage have to be 95%, 99%, 99.9%, or even higher?
How do you reconcile these differences? For example, what if remote viewing is real, but it is too unreliable to produce significance levels better than 0.01?
Does that matter? Those who are interested can pursue it and demonstrate that it is possible by building heavier than air flight machines.
Linda
You are mixing up significance levels and effect sizes. Even a tiny effect can achieve a high significance level, depending upon the experimental setup. Your concern about significance levels (generating false positives) is not relevant to your concern about small and inconsistent effects (generating true positives). You don't fix the problem of missing true positives by increasing the number of false positives.
Linda
Beth
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I would want it to be 99.9% or higher.
I don't consider chiropractic being able to ease back pain an extraordinary claim.
Significance levels are based on sample size as well as effect size. If remote viewing is real but unreliable, then a sufficiently large sample size can produce any significance level that is specified.
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But I don't get the impression that was the case with heavier than air flight. It was obviously being pursued. It's just that it was a difficult problem.
Linda
By establishing prior probability through building a theoretical and hypothetical base, and by performing experiments which minimize or eliminate bias. Results which depend upon flexibility in the choice of method of analysis and upon the use of one of the researchers as a test subject are recognized as likely to be unreliable and invalid.
Linda
Ivor the Engineer
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Actually, if remote viewing is not real a sufficiently large sample size could produce any significance level that is specified.
Doesn't it bother you philosophically that you're applying different standards to different claims?
I understand the point that you and Linda are making, but in the real world there are practical limits to sample size, at least in terms of what will be accepted by most scientists and almost all non-scientists. If you want to win the JREF Million Dollar Challenge, for example, it's clear that your proposed protocol cannot be extremely time-consuming.
Yet the claims of "psi" and so on are large scale "macro" events, e.g. telepathy, levitation and so on so there is no need for many replications to establish the claim.
This is why say 40 or 50 years ago investigators examined the people who claimed they could move things with the power of their mind, and found the claims to be unverifiable.
Since then the "paranormal" researchers have moved away from the claims traditionally made by the proponents of psi and ended up with such experiments as typified by the ganzfeld experiments, which is not related to what used to be and is often still claimed to be psi.
Macro scale psi has been demonstrated as much as anything can be (for example the ether) to not exist.
IXP
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No, because manipulating the bones and muscles in the back is a plausible method for relieving back pain. Putting ping-pong balls over your eyes, shining a red light on them, and listenting to white noise is NOT a plausible method of viewing distant places.
edited to add: Now, if had you asked if chiroptric treatment to cure allergies required extraordiany evidence, I would agree.
IXP
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Beth
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Well, yes, but the probability of that occurring what is specified.
No. IXP's reply covers this nicely.
Yes, it would be time consuming and expensive. Small effects that cannot be reliably produced are notoriously difficult to distinguish from random chance.
The problem I see with your logic is that what is considered plausible varies from era to era. For example, until the early 19th Century, the scientific establishment considered it highly implausible that meteorites existed. Therefore, ordinary evidence of their existence did not suffice, which was a setback for scientific knowledge.
paximperium
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Yes. Plausibility and burden of evidence is based on prior knowledge and things that has been tested repeatedly. Do you think everything should be magically forgotten?
We found meteorites. What do you have? All "remote viewing ever has is failure, bias and fraud.
So how did it come to pass that, for hundreds of years, the scientific establishment was completely wrong about meteorites?
No, but new evidence should be considered objectively, not discounted because it does not comport with the existing orthodoxy.
Not according to Richard Wiseman.
paximperium
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Let's assume(because I have no idea if you're even telling the truth) you are correct and we completely ignore that the Scientific Method a whole host of modern scientific equipment was not yet developed.
Do tell. How was this this belief overturned?
Do you have anything? Anything at all?
Who's discounting it purely from existing orthodoxy? It's being discounted because it contradicts what is known and that it has failed repeatedly.
What do you have?
So? Do you actually have anything? Anything at all?
Quite a bit, as a matter of fact:
"Isaac Newton and other savants in the 1600s were well aware of the myriad reports throughout history of stones falling from the sky, but summarily dismissed them as folk tales and so much 'vulgar superstition'. They would not gainsay 2000 years of the wisdom of their hero Aristotle who had decreed that no small bodies exist in space beyond the Earth and her Moon, and that the Earth is at the center of the solar system. The Sun, they believed, revolves around the Earth.
"Then, at the end of the 1700s, a series of remarkable infalls of meteorites began. Physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1744-1799) witnessed a bright, spindle-shaped fireball at Gottingen on November 12, 1791 at 6:30 p.m., and shared his unworldly experience with German physicist Ernst F. Chladni (1756-1827). Chladni became so enthralled with Lichtenberg’s experience, he furiously researched fireballs and falling bodies in the Gottingen library for the next three weeks. 'Chladni found that the descriptions were so astonishingly similar from place to place and century to century that, to his lawyer’s ear, the eyewitnesses were telling the truth: falling masses of iron and stone are genuine natural phenomena and not the fantasies of unlettered observers.'
"Chladni published a little book in 1794 in which he proposed that meteor-stones and iron masses enter the atmosphere from cosmic space and form fireballs as they plunge to Earth, thereby reviving the Anaxagoran idea that things falling from the sky were small bodies from space. Chladni saw no physical basis for the claim that outer space is empty and proclaimed that 'to deny their presence is as arbitrary as to assert it; unless we assume that the universe has remained completely unchanged from the beginning, we must admit that changes have taken place in planets—or in whole planetary systems. The evidence, he said, favors the latter conclusion, and observations, not unproved hypotheses, should decide the matter.' Many savants at the time rebuked him for his 'use of eyewitness reports, which they equated with folk tales, and his flouting of the rules of the Aristotelian-Newtonian view of the cosmos.' He did not withdraw his views. In the midst of the criticism, a magnificent shower of stones occurred in the city of Siena in Tuscany, Italy . . .
"On April 26, 1803, at 1:00 p.m. in a clear sky, a fireball coursed northwestward out of a single high, gray cloud near L’Aigle, Normandy, France. Between 2000 and 3000 thousand stones accompanied by loud hissing sounds fell into the fields following three loud detonations. Thunderous reverberations lasted for ten minutes. The stones showed black crusts and ranged up to 18 pounds. Many people witnessed the stone shower.
"French chemist and Minister of the Interior Jean-Antoine Chaptal (1756-1832) dispatched mineralogist Jean-Baptiste Biot, noted earlier in a passage by Velikovsky, to gather more data on the fireball’s trajectory and the extent of the fall. His assessment agreed with the Chladni hypotheses.
"Doubting savants finally agreed that stones may fall from the sky, but continued to dispute how the stones got into the sky in the first place." (footnotes omitted). See http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=452
Again, Wiseman was asked: "I noticed that you were already interviewed in the article ('Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, refuses to believe in remote viewing.') but I was wondering what was meant by 'I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven.' Is it a misquote?
"The response?
“'It is a slight misquote, because I was using the term in the more general sense of ESP – that is, I was not talking about remote viewing per se, but rather Ganzfeld, etc as well. I think that they do meet the usual standards for a normal claim, but are not convincing enough for an extraordinary claim.'” See http://podblack.com/2009/09/dr-richard-wiseman-on-remote-viewing-in-the-daily-mail-clarification/