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PEAR and it's evaluation

Ed

Philosopher
E
Joined
Aug 4, 2001
Messages
8,658
There have been a couple of posts here that quoted the principle investigator to the effect that nothing was really found.

Does this ring a bell? Does anyone know whare that quote resides?

Tnx
 
The full article, which also makes the most alarmingly UNscientific excuses for the "no result" situation! A heavy work, but do plough on...
 
Zep said:
The full article, which also makes the most alarmingly UNscientific excuses for the "no result" situation! A heavy work, but do plough on...
Click to expand...

Zep, if you actually had the patience to read and understand all that you are a better man than I.
I'm going to pass and take your word for it.
 
Oh, I DID read it...and nearly blew a foofle-valve doing it, I admit.

For example, here's a quote that tries to draw the Chinese necromancy of I Ching objectively into the discussion, based on anecdotal evidence alone:
Another ancient oracle, still widely used, is the Chinese ‘‘Book of Changes,’’ or I Ching, a divination process that involves generation of a sequence of random binary events, the results of which are represented as two ‘‘trigrams.’’ These are referred to a table, or matrix, that identifies each of the 64 possible combinations, or ‘‘hexagrams,’’ with a specific text that is then consulted to obtain a response to the original query. Notwithstanding the subjective nature of the interpretation of the texts, a vast body of evidence accumulated over many millennia testifies to the efficacy of the I Ching in producing accurate and consequential results. Despite the claim of many rationalists that such oracles are nothing more than bizarre combinations of wishful thinking and ‘‘mere chance,’’ this is the same ‘‘irrational’’ formula that seems to underlie the remote perception phenomena that have now been demonstrated, by rigorous analytical quantification, to convey more meaningful information than can be attributed to ‘‘mere chance.’’ Hence the principles invoked by the ancient sages in developing the I Ching may shed some light on these more contemporary anomalies.
Click to expand...
They also shortly bring in Jung's theory of synchronicity, and the obligatory vague "quantum mechanics" reference:
Just as the concept of complementarity in quantum mechanics brings with it a certain degree of uncertainty that makes it impossible to achieve absolute precision in two frames of reference simultaneously, the complementarity of an ‘‘objective’’ causal picture of reality and a ‘‘subjective’’ synchronistic one also may necessitate tolerance of a degree of uncertainty in both dimensions.
Click to expand...
Of course, they will look for ANY excuse. Here's one that says that the best results come from least controlled tests:
In other words, the strongest ‘‘signals’’ appear to have been generated under the ‘‘noisiest’’ conditions, i.e., in the absence or minimization of any orderly or rational form of structural information.
Click to expand...
And so it goes...! :D :D
 
Is there an English translation of that article?
Terms are left undefined.
The excuse for the nonsignificant results seemed to be, "If we just analysed the outriders, the results would be way significant!"
But what do I know? I haven't spent years studying parasitology.
Or parapsychology.
 
Jeff Corey said:
Is there an English translation of that article?
Terms are left undefined.
The excuse for the nonsignificant results seemed to be, "If we just analysed the outriders, the results would be way significant!"
But what do I know? I haven't spent years studying parasitology.
Or parapsychology.
Click to expand...
Yes, there is a short version. Ahem...

THE MORE WE LOOKED, THE MORE IT WASN'T THERE. LET'S SAY "QUANTAM MECHANICS" AND TRY TO KEEP OUR SPONSORS HAPPY."

Actually, they did a fair job on the numerical analysis, but I'm sure they must have had a real crisis when their new, whizzo software, in which they placed so much faith, failed dismally to show what they thought they saw before! In fact, it confirmed the skeptics all along. And the ducking-and-weaving has been hidden in a great cloud of buzzwords and jargon, as usual.
 
I'd be more interested in skeptics trying to explain away the small p-values, rather than nit-pick about comparisions made in the conclusion. :)
 
T'ai Chi said:
I'd be more interested in skeptics trying to explain away the small p-values, rather than nit-pick about comparisions made in the conclusion. :)
Click to expand...
The thing is that PEAR themselves discovered that there's no actual "effect" to be explained anyway. So they tried to cover this up with waffle. Skeptics had little or nothing to do with it. You can read this yourself by going to PEAR's own paper that I linked - I need not explain anything to you at all!

PEAR's own preparation of their methodology and numerical analysis was argued to be statistically sound beforehand (my own reading is that this was so, but I'm no math expert!), but when applied to the data it revealed no results beyond chance. So PEAR "refined" the process to try and exclude even more of what they thought were extraneous interference...and turned up even less promising results.

Their main concern was that previous, "rougher" analysis seemed to have some promise, with some slight positive results. However the closer they analysed the same data, the less these previous results appeared, to the point that the closest analysis revealed nothing at all.

I described their previous analysis efforts as seeing shapes in the clouds. From far away, they looked like bunnies or elephants, but the closer they got to examining these clouds, the more they looked just like what they obviously were - clouds. (I wrote an interesting analogy about this too, wherein I postulated that PEAR could prove statistically they could make clouds disappear!)

Skeptics had nothing to do with this report - it was PEAR's own work. Of course, previous PEAR and other publications from which the data were drawn WERE analysed by skeptics and pronounced to be vague at best, unscientific wishful thinking at worst.

Feel free to let us know your views!
 
I haven't read that paper in awhile, so I printed it out for some light bedtime reading this evening.

There doesn't seem to be a succinct summary at the end. I wonder why?

~~ Paul
 
Come on folks, let's do some speculating here. Why do you think the early trials showed results and what sort of information pathways were they plugging as they changed the protocols over time? Or was the early statistical analysis flawed?

~~ Paul
 
Someone wrote:

"What do you think those tiny p-values mean?"

Clearly I asked first. :)
 
I have no idea what they mean, T'ai. That's the farking problem. Since the hypotheses in these experiments are about the statistical results rather than about any theory of psi, it is impossible to know what significant results mean.

~~ Paul
 
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