Robertson and Roy-Preliminary Description

Is there anything yet as to how the subjects were drawn from the population?
 
Rhine tested thousands of people with Zener cards. At first, the low quality of the printing caused cues to bleed through to the back of the card (sensory leakage). Then, people who scored high initially (approximately 5 % showed significance at the .05 level), showed lower scores later (the decline effect). Anyone who knows anyhing about experimental design is familiar with statistical regression to the mean. Then, the file drawer.
Not to mention experimenter bias, confirmation bias and blatant public mopery.
 
Jeff Corey said:
Rhine tested thousands of people with Zener cards. At first, the low quality of the printing caused cues to bleed through to the back of the card (sensory leakage). Then, people who scored high initially (approximately 5 % showed significance at the .05 level), showed lower scores later (the decline effect). Anyone who knows anyhing about experimental design is familiar with statistical regression to the mean. Then, the file drawer.
Not to mention experimenter bias, confirmation bias and blatant public mopery.
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Yeah. To be brutally honest, I have little trust for people who do research in this area, they seem to have an ax to grind. Couple this with the fraud and poor research that we have seen already, and I really don't trust much that these guys do, on the face of it. Hence my question regarding subject selection. I am very interested in knowing how they were selected and what inventory of background questions were utilized. A simple random probability sample will not cut it without such information being collected.
 
Jeff Corey said:
At first, the low quality of the printing caused cues to bleed through to the back of the card (sensory leakage).
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Perhaps I am being a wee bit cynical but to me "sensory leakage" is a polite term for fraud. It is nice and neutral with no implications. Do you know how this leakage was discovered?
 
I first read about it in Skinner (1949) "Card guessng Experiments" American Scientist, reprinted in his Cumulative Record.
 
ED:
Yeah. To be brutally honest, I have little trust for people who do research in this area, they seem to have an ax to grind. Couple this with the fraud and poor research that we have seen already, and I really don't trust much that these guys do, on the face of it. Hence my question regarding subject selection. I am very interested in knowing how they were selected and what inventory of background questions were utilized. A simple random probability sample will not cut it without such information being collected.



Response: The protocol employed should brutally fall or stand on its own regardless of the name of the pill or, in this case, the medium employed to test it. The fact is Ed seems to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that there are bad pills and good pills, lousy mediums and good mediums. No, he knows it. Regardless of how Robertson & Roy selected the mediums, if they provide the goods under tightly controlled conditions (no possibility of cold, hot or warm reading) then the validity being sought is obtained. I am sure those closed minded and biased persons (such as evidenced in the above statement) would love nothing more than to to have parapsychologists spinning their wheels testing people with no abilities whatsoever. This is like going to Phase 3 testing with substances which never made it past phase I.

Ed, why would you be concerned about how the medium(s) was/were selected? What difference could this have on the results? Please explain.
 
SteveGrenard said:
ED:
Yeah. To be brutally honest, I have little trust for people who do research in this area, they seem to have an ax to grind. Couple this with the fraud and poor research that we have seen already, and I really don't trust much that these guys do, on the face of it. Hence my question regarding subject selection. I am very interested in knowing how they were selected and what inventory of background questions were utilized. A simple random probability sample will not cut it without such information being collected.



Response: The protocol employed should brutally fall or stand on its own regardless of the name of the pill or, in this case, the medium employed to test it. The fact is Ed seems to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that there are bad pills and good pills, lousy mediums and good mediums. No, he knows it. Regardless of how Robertson & Roy selected the mediums, if they provide the goods under tightly controlled conditions (no possibility of cold, hot or warm reading) then the validity being sought is obtained. I am sure those closed minded and biased persons (such as evidenced in the above statement) would love nothing more than to to have parapsychologists spinning their wheels testing people with no abilities whatsoever. This is like going to Phase 3 testing with substances which never made it past phase I.

Ed, why would you be concerned about how the medium(s) was/were selected? What difference could this have on the results? Please explain.
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Nonononononononnonononononnonononono

The people who are responding, not the media.

There is a distinct difference between being closed minded and careful. I feel that the caution that you would expect of researchers in real science cannot be taken for granted here.

They get good results, I will provisionally accept them. Then again, I would have provisionally accepted the Targ experiment when in fact it was one step from a fabrication.
 
SteveGrenard said:
If researchers were testing new products that looked promising for cancer or lipid control or AIDS you can be sure they would bury the poor performers until they got one (or more) that clicked for them. You seem to know a lot about science so you should know that unsuccessful results are rarely published. What's the point? We're all looking for a positive result. Robertson and Roy have claimed they have found it in the mediums they ended up testing. I am sure they discarded many just like big pharm discards new MANY drug candidates.
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Steve, it's high time you read Richard Feynman's excellent seminar on "Cargo Cult Science", available here, because that's exactly what you and your cronies are practicing. Specifically:

"But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves--of having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results."

Now, I think it was Feynman -- perhaps I'm misremembering -- who told the story of when he sat in on a psychology class during a lecture on ESP. He got all the students in the room to stand up and mentally think "heads" or "tails", then he flipped a coin and whatever side came up he got those students to remain standing while the others sat down. After doing this five times he only had a couple of students left standing who he used for the actual ESP experiment he was demonstrating, because those two students were the "most tuned in" to ESP. Now, anyone who's passed a high school statistics course can tell you what's wrong with that procedure, but the experiments you've linked to are guilty of essentially the same simple error.

When Feynman said "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool", I'm pretty sure he was talking about you specifically.


[edited to change "cornies" to "cronies", and it's probably STILL an incorrect spelling]
 
Posted by Ed

quote: "Our results incorporate all of the mediums who were used"

If they wanted an "all-star" team, that is very cool; provided they designed the study that way to begin with. If they muck with data or subjects, except for good reasons, the whole thing looks fishy.
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Yes, well, that's an interesting point when dealing with mediumship testing. From what I can tell, it looks like they tried to select mediums they felt had ability from the beginning--not have various "psychics" participate and then throw out the results of those that were "bad".

However, Ed, just hypothetically....when it comes to mediumship research would you really feel it was so bad if, say, researchers studied five mediums....found three who got nothing and two who were "amazing"...and kept the results separate for all five, concluding there "is something to it" only based on the two mediums whose results they had isolated?

Not averaging the results for everyone (a la Schwartz) wouldn't be "fishy" at all as long as it was clarified, right?

If someone tested ten mediums...and only one was "amazing"...that would still make the case for mediumship stronger, not weaker.....
 
Steve said:"We're all looking for a positive result."

And therein lies the essential, core, basic problem. YOU are looking for positive results, the "researchers" are looking for positive results. I am simply looking for honesty.

Looking for positve results is what seems to be going on in paranormal research. Do you think, for one split second that, after all of the data torture, the guys at Princeton were looking for truth or anything remotely resembling it? No, they were looking for positive results. You just summed up the problems with this field of human endevor in a nutshell, and tipped your hand in the process.
 
Clancie said:

However, Ed, just hypothetically....when it comes to mediumship research would you really feel it was so bad if, say, researchers studied five mediums....found three who got nothing and two who were "amazing"...and kept the results separate for all five, concluding there "is something to it" only based on the two mediums whose results they had isolated?

Not averaging the results for everyone (a la Schwartz) wouldn't be "fishy" at all as long as it was clarified, right?

If someone tested ten mediums...and only one was "amazing"...that would still make the case for mediumship stronger, not weaker.....
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A single subject design is pretty powerful, if done properly. And yes, if that subject were the real deal it would be astounding. The danger here is that, unlike psychophysics for example, you are not dealing with well understood verities like dark adaptation. Such results would require the testing and re-testing of the same subject, and by different laboratories.

I cannot stress enough how bad research in this area (Schwartz for a good example) has sullied the work of everyone. Steve told us why, "we are all looking for positive results". I would love positive results, really, really. That makes me suspect from the gitgo. Therefore it is all in well designed and replicated experiments. The parapsychological community has not earned the trust of anyone. That is not a hallmark of science.
 
Ed,

I think we're in basic agreement, based on your post above.

However, I do think your SG quote is a bit unfair to Steve's original intent. He -didn't- say, "We are all looking for positive results" as if to say that is the goal of parapsychologists--to confirm mediumship as being real.

Actually his quote was this:
Posted by Steve Grenard

You seem to know a lot about science so you should know that unsuccessful results are rarely published. What's the point? We're all looking for a positive result.
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Of course, you can also learn something from experiments where the results do -not- support the hypothesis (which I think, btw, is why we never heard the results from Schwartz about his cold reading experiments). But I don't think Steve's saying what you're implying he is.

I think he's just saying that we're more interested in experiments that show compelling results, not ones that are highly flawed failures where nothing has been learned.....
 
One more point, if I may. I may come accross as beligerant on this topic, and if so I do not apologise. I look on "scientists" who conduct knowingly flawed research as no better than than anyone else that abuses a trust. Pedophile priests come to mind.

Generally when results come from a laboratory, you read them and think "ummmmm" as you consider the results. The notion of fakery generally does not come to mind. Sure, people make mistakes. The contract is that they admit it.

A long time ago I was doing an interesting experiment on the mediation of a "fear" response. It involved getting scads of timed pregnant rats and then, when they delivered, culling the pups into test/control, male/female in each litter (every litter was a multiple of 4).The pups had to be injected w/ gold thioglucose for various arcane reasons, for 7 days at the same time every day. They had to be marked w/ food dye and that too had to be counterbalenced. Then, in lockstep they had to be run on a task.

I go thru this in some detail because of what happened next.

(I suspect Corey will get it is about a second.) The task was two-way active avoidence and I was using a strain of hooded rat (harty critters, the hooded rat). Well, certain strains cannot learn that task. Period. They escape, they do not avoid. It's actually in the literature but I missed it.

If I wanted positive results, believe me, at that point I could have had them. But even at that point it was not an option. So I redid it.

Researchers are faced with this kind of problem all of the time. In the world of woo, they seem to sucumb all too regularly. What do you think of the work of Creation "scientists"? I wouldn't bother to read the crap that they publish because the answer, for them, was in before pen went to paper. So when Steve says something like "we all want positive results" I see creation scientists saying "Jesus is lord". Same damn thing, we know the answer and now just have to show it. Lies.

This is why, in my biased view, paranormal research is tainted and the practioners deserve our opprobrium, in general. But I will treat each case as it comes.
 
Ed said:



A single subject design is pretty powerful, if done properly. And yes, if that subject were the real deal it would be astounding. The danger here is that, unlike psychophysics for example, you are not dealing with well understood verities like dark adaptation. Such results would require the testing and re-testing of the same subject, and by different laboratories.
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I concur completely.

Ed said:
I cannot stress enough how bad research in this area (Schwartz for a good example) has sullied the work of everyone. Steve told us why, "we are all looking for positive results". I would love positive results, really, really. That makes me suspect from the gitgo. Therefore it is all in well designed and replicated experiments. The parapsychological community has not earned the trust of anyone. That is not a hallmark of science.
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Also a very good point. On the phone with a parapsychologist correpsondent the other day, who I consider to be a reliable and competent man, we discussed this problem. Much of it centers around scientists who may be well-versed in one specific field who then venture into the realm of parapsychology. But this is precisely not what they are trained to do, and while their "positive results" get a lot of attention due to their status, they are not in any way competent in trickery, the history of the field, etc,etc.... This has been a common trait for the subject from its inception. Hence William Crookes tested and endorsed known tricksters Anna Eva Fay and Florence Cook and Alfred Russel Wallace marveled over showers of flowers that rained down onto the table in a totally dark room. Today we see these incarnations in the form of Brian Josephson and Gary Schwartz. All of these people believe themselves competent to investigate this subject, but have little to no understanding of the problems involved. There are, on the other hand, people who I think have done and do good work in the field (most of whom have specilized in it), but who are generally not well known outside of the parapsychology circle. These are the people whose work should be read, and who, I believe at least, are trust-worthy and only in search of truth.
 
Clancie said:
However, I do think your SG quote is a bit unfair to Steve's original intent. He -didn't- say, "We are all looking for positive results" as if to say that is the goal of parapsychologists--to confirm mediumship as being real.

Actually his quote was this:

Posted by Steve Grenard

You seem to know a lot about science so you should know that unsuccessful results are rarely published. What's the point? We're all looking for a positive result.
Click to expand...

Of course, you can also learn something from experiments where the results do -not- support the hypothesis (which I think, btw, is why we never heard the results from Schwartz about his cold reading experiments). But I don't think Steve's saying what you're implying he is.

I think he's just saying that we're more interested in experiments that show compelling results, not ones that are highly flawed failures where nothing has been learned.....
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Then he is a fool. He is also completely unaware of what goes on in science.

Look at the past 100 years of discovery. What have we learned? That the world is not as we thought it was. We have discovered a lot of new things, but a large part is about how old superstitions have been proved wrong. It has, in the words of Daniel Boorstein, been an age of discoveries of "not"s.

Thunder is not Thor's chariot. Lightning is not his hammer. Mice do not come from dirty rags. We are not ruled by the whims of gods, but the laws of nature.

And so on.

So, it is very important to publish the "negative" results as well, and they are. At least in science. All the time, every day.

But not in parapsychology. Apparently, the dishonesty is so ingrained in the field, that one could almost speak of a "conspiracy of misplaced embarrassed silence".

Keeping mum about your failures is as dangerous as not finding out anything at all. We make no progress from either.
 
Clancie said:
Ed,

However, I do think your SG quote is a bit unfair to Steve's original intent. He -didn't- say, "We are all looking for positive results" as if to say that is the goal of parapsychologists--to confirm mediumship as being real.

That, obviously, is not how I read it, but if that was his intent I certainly apologise


Of course, you can also learn something from experiments where the results do -not- support the hypothesis (which I think, btw, is why we never heard the results from Schwartz about his cold reading experiments). But I don't think Steve's saying what you're implying he is.

I think he's just saying that we're more interested in experiments that show compelling results, not ones that are highly flawed failures where nothing has been learned.....

Allow me to be catty. If ever there was a field that could benefit from closely examining failures, it is parapsychology.

How many times have you read "well, we found that allowing the psi guy to actually touch the object that he was trying to move thru telekinesis really is a flaw that the next round of experiments will control for"? Jesus, it is not that this is a particularly new field, is it? These characters all seem to be at the same low point on the learning curve, it's like every experiment is the first one. This, unfortunately, is a characteristic of the believer ethos. It is not openminded, it is positive result oriented. What do you think would happen if the RC church found, clearly and unequivically, the body of Jesus? You think they would say "Whoopsie"? No. Why after all of this time don't we have clear, unambiguous evidence on this parapsychological stuff? Where are the definative experiments? Tell me, is it in the interests of the practitioners to do that? Tell me. Look at the major players and tell me if it is their best interest to design good experiments?

I have not really explored the issue of what believers make of this sad state. Does it not, should it not, give one pause?

Let me put it another way, suppose this area concerned financial investment. What would you make of a company that can never get it quite right when it comes to their analysis of instruments (even though they all have MBA's and worked at Goldman), that the basic premisis of an investment strategy shift under your feet and whose livlihood depends more on going thru the motions than your financial security? Would you work with them?
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This is actually turning into an interesting, introspective thread. Odd, with Claus me and Steve in the same room:D
 
I may come across as beligerant on this topic, and if so I do not apologise.
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Actually, you don't at all. (In fact, I keep wondering where the "Ed of yore" has gone, lol. Though personally I always thought your posts were okay--after I filtered enough to make them "G" rated...:) ).
I look on "scientists" who conduct knowingly flawed research as no better than than anyone else that abuses a trust.
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I agree, though I think most of it is sloppiness, not "knowingly". I'm sorry to say in Schwartz's case that the flaws have been highlighted so often that sloppiness isn't an excuse any more, though. And, re: Schwartz, I felt sadly convinced that he was -knowingly- fraudulent when I read a description of his seminar by a friendly writer (Justine Picardie's "If the Spirit Moves You...")
I will treat each case as it comes.
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Fair enough. :)
Posted by Ed

Why after all of this time don't we have clear, unambiguous evidence on this parapsychological stuff?
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I don't know, Ed. But I think "clear and unambiguous" should work both ways...and it hasn't, that I can see.
Where are the definative experiments? Tell me, is it in the interests of the practitioners to do that? Tell me. Look at the major players and tell me if it is their best interest to design good experiments?
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Actually, I think for most people that it is. I really doubt that most credible researchers into this are intentionally "stacking the deck"...or else believers would have a lot more, lot more "definitive" results to quote.

I think most professional researchers--even those who might like ADC to be true--are professional enough to go where there research takes them....not to try to "phony it up". I can't prove it, but I'd be surprised if fraud was rampant.

One possible conclusion is that there's "nothing" to investigate. Another, of course, is that it is simply extremely difficult to scientifically investigate something as out of our daily realm of experience as ADC would be, if it really exists.

I'm trying to become more familiar with research into this, past and present, as I realize I know very little about it. I'll let you know if any of the above changes in the process. :)
 
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