The Ganzfeld Experiments

[CFLarsen]

People fake data all the time to get their stuff published. The charge of fraud is serious and can not just be mantrated away by the sacred Order of the Ostrich.

That is a classic quote, if I ever saw one!

 

[Dancing David]

Such as?

[/b]
The lack of randomization of targets, assuming that all targets are equally likely to match a random reciever list and the preference effect.
Kave you read this thread or do you just ask questions that have been discussed for five pages or more.


First, do you deny there is error?

I asked you for the specific sources of error in the Milliken study of the force of the repeling effect of a single electron, what are they Tai, you made this bold and sweeping assertion that error can not be eliminated.

So i am asking, what is the source of error in the Millikin experiment?

 

[Ed]

Originally posted by Interesting Ian
[Ed, is it really necessary to place your responses in quotes??

no. Just never really thought about it. Does make for a pain in responding. Never again!!!
Ed
No. The interposition of raters is a serious flaw in control, particularly when more than one is used. Why even go down that road? A pool of x stimuli, one transmitted, pick from the pool. The notion that a rater can pick more accurately what a receiver "sees" than the receiver is ludicrious. Simple, clear, unambigious.
[/quote]

Didn't I discuss this earlier in the thread? If the receiver selects what she thinks is the actual target, she may misinterpret a psychological gravitation towards a certain target for a parapsychological one so to speak. But if we have judges, hopefully they will make their choice based entirely on the transcript.

Maybe. This sort of thing happens all of the time in real research and the solution is in the instructions and the basic paradigm. Adding a third party is clumsy.



I have the feeling that psi might more easily be elicited with pictures which engage the emotions more. These will typically be complex scenes.

You can elicit emotions in a variety of ways, complexity is a potentially cheap way of doing it. Some very emotional and simple work can be seen from Picasso, Chagall, Death Camp survivors and others. There are also lists of emotionally charged words. I somehow wonder why the practitioners could not come up with something better. Consider: All told, I have probably thought about this topic for maybe 30 hours total. In that time I have come up with some pretty telling critisms and solutions. Now, I would certainly hope that a practitioner has devoted more thought to the problems. Why are we even having this discussion? Why did they not anticipate and do better?

Is what you are saying here not at odds with what you say above? If pictures elicit as a target, certainly they will elicit as a choice. Perhaps it is non-verbal so words are merely a distraction. The question is why cross modalities? Anyhoo the transmitter could have notes or verbatims in hand when making the selection.


Ian, recall this:

Also this method would be less susceptible to accusations of cheating and of artifacts skewing the results.

Ian, don't you find it a tad suspicious that virtually all of this research really sucks? I mean really. Look at the poster "experiments". The groundbreaking Targ work on AIDs patients, Schwartz, Scole, This crap. Seriously, all personal animosity aside, don't you find it odd?

I am really curious about your opinion on what I said. I am personally getting less interested in the research in this area per se. and more in the nature of failure amoungst researchers. We have people with sterling Vitas making basic mistakes, repeatedly. My take is that the errors fall into a number of areas:

- Lack of clarity -- What actually was done, what were the assumptions, why were the statistics used used? KEY: Could I replicate this experiment exactly from the description given? If no, it is unclear.

- One sidedness -- The unfortunate fact is that meta analysis is like a new toy. What are the specific limitations of this approach in the case at hand? What other interpretations for findings might be relevant? Discuss in detail.

- Piss poor design with an almost pathological lack of concern like La Belle Indifference, but not about one's body.

Literally, "beautiful indifference." Seen in certain patients with conversion disorders who show an inappropriate lack of concern about their disabilities.

The term refers to an indifference where there damn well should be concern.

These are the main characteristics and they all appear, to a greater or lesser extent, in paranormal research.

I can't help thinking that these otherwise staid and stable scientists are going on the intellectual equivilent of a sex holiday in Thailand for Japanese businessmen.

I don't get it. You do appreciate this point, don't you? Believe me, if we picked some area inhabited by real scientists and discussed some relevant papers, none of the crap that comes up here would ever, ever arise.

Edit to add: Think of it this way. Suppose we engaged in a discussion on some philosophical issue. Suppose everything I posted was more or less unreliable. Quotes out of context, lot's of personal communications, misquotes, use of unobtainable references. Suppose the ONLY way you could know what was going on was to track down the source for EVERYTHING that I said. On the surface, would you think my position sound? That is the nature of evaluating paranormal reseach.

 

[Ed]

I asked you for the specific sources of error in the Milliken study of the force of the repeling effect of a single electron, what are they Tai, you made this bold and sweeping assertion that error can not be eliminated.

So i am asking, what is the source of error in the Millikin experiment?

David,

T'ai appears played out in this discussion and is reduced to sniping. I wouldn't bother.

 

[CFLarsen]

David,

T'ai appears played out in this discussion and is reduced to sniping. I wouldn't bother.

I agree. He does not seem to want to engage in real debate.

I wonder why he is here at all. I do not wonder that we will get an honest answer from him.

 

[Ed]

I agree. He does not seem to want to engage in real debate.

I wonder why he is here at all. I do not wonder that we will get an honest answer from him.

I don't really want to debate this stuff either. I would really like to discuss the "why" of the nature of the research.

I mean, all the biggies are really dead ducks. The Scole thing is trash because of the lack of control. PEAR, aside from the logical and methodological flaws was admitted by the investigators to not show anything. This latest is just fraught with problems that should have been anticipated by the researchers. All we are left with is a vacuous discussion of irrelevancies. There is nothing much to discuss about a flawed experiment except, maybe, hopefully, how to avoid the problems in the future. I trust we can agree that nothing really can be salvaged from dreck, right?

So, why? Why does it happen? If I were a believer I would, quite frankly, be pretty pissed off at the clowns doing this stuff. I'd want to know what the hell they were playing at. I would be getting pretty tired making excuses for them.

 

[CFLarsen]

I don't really want to debate this stuff either. I would really like to discuss the "why" of the nature of the research.

Fully agree. Let's discuss the research. Let's see if T'ai Chi is ready, too.

 

[Anders W. Bonde]

Originally posted by Ian:
Quite possible it ain't never going to happen. I think we should be wary, albeit not totally dismissive, of those who claim they can produce marked "in yer face" anomalous cognition/perturbation on demand. Such "in yer face" stuff tends to be inherently unpredictable so far as I am able to understand.

When the observers (i.e. audience) are gullible and controls lax, the hits are really "in yer face", regardless of who the claimant is (though conjurers and experienced cold, warm and hot readers tend to do rather better than average) and regardless of sample sizes. When the observers are carefully avoiding trickery and don't stand to make a profit from psi, the results evaporate. Doesn't that make you wonder?

But what about not concentrating on the authenticity question in a direct way, but attempting to discern certain characteristic patterns in these meta-analyses, and then seeing if they can be reproduced?? If they can that would be interesting would it not??.

Perhaps - but so is searching bible code and Nostradamus' quatrains for useful data. Given large enough sets of data, you can always find something that fits your wishes, especially if "hit" definition is ambiguous and subjective. I also think that trawling through the data of MAs may just reveal experimental protocol and statistics artifacts that don't actually relate to the effect (assuming some underlying law of nature) that is being searched for.

Then perhaps we could devise some hypothesis about how these effects operate. If further experimentation were then commensurate with the hypothesis in question this would not only settle the authenticity question, but will also furnish us with a theory about how psi operates.

Yes, but psi-ists aren't even close yet, they can't even begin to describe an effect! IMHO, psi-ist have put the cart before the horse, and until they reverse that they're never going to progress. Ooops - I don't even think they'll progress regardless of where they put the cart relative to the horse. If we claim apparent psi effects are contingent upon characteristics of protocol and statistics, the psi-ists will just counter-claim: "Exactly! That's what's so fascinating about the psi phenomenon - the subjects are so sensitive that even the state of mind of the researchers and future peers influences the results! Now ain't that something, huh?".

IMHO, psi-research has been so muddled by naïve researchers with frail egos suffering from cognitive dissonance, and is so far totally removed from practical reality that it's an effing waste of time and money (I should probably stop posting on this issue, sit back another 40 years or so and jump if the psi-ists actually demonstrate an effect by then. Without being a psychic, my prediction is that they never will. I could be wrong, of course, but I doubt it). Also without being a psychic, I predict that I'll probably post anyway in the interim...

 

[Dancing David]

One, even physicists, can only hope to control for all known sources. Being perfect, as you stated is required, is absurd.

I agree that you can't eliminate imaginary error, but the ganzfeld studies are rife with poor procedure that include all sorts of possible rrors.

Discussed repeatedly on this thread.

 

[Interesting Ian]

II
But what about not concentrating on the authenticity question in a direct way, but attempting to discern certain characteristic patterns in these meta-analyses, and then seeing if they can be reproduced?? If they can that would be interesting would it not??.

Ed
Because first you need an effect. Reversing the process is fishing.

No this is not fishing. If we look at the results in some meta-analysis we might note that believers get higher than average results to a statistically significant effect, and skeptics get lower than average results to a statistically significant effect. If we left it at that and declared significant results, then that would be fishing. But if no such declaration was made, and instead further experiments are carried out which specifically looks for this effect, and the results support such an effect, then this is not fishing. You see??

II
Also this method would be less susceptible to accusations of cheating and of artifacts skewing the results.

Ed

Ian, don't you find it a tad suspicious that virtually all of this research really sucks? I mean really. Look at the poster "experiments". The groundbreaking Targ work on AIDs patients, Schwartz, Scole, This crap. Seriously, all personal animosity aside, don't you find it odd?

I find that skeptics tend to say the research sucks whether it does or not. Basically, with the examples you mention, I do not know if it "sucks" or not. I think they should take extraordinary measures to make sure it doesn't "suck" though. The existence of the alleged phenomena strikes at the very heart of our fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality (well ok, not mine! LOL). It's going to be incredibly difficult to persuade educated people, immersed in the western cultural zeitgeist, that this phenomena might be for real. I suspect that with many skeptics it will be impossible to persuade them of the reality of this alleged phenomena. Their minds are already made up prior to any experimentation. But there are other people to persuade who are not quite so fanatical. Parapsychologists are just shooting themselves in the foot by carrying out sloppy research. Not that I'm agreeing they have. I simply do not know (and are these researchers you mention parapsychologists anyway?)

 

[T'ai Chi]

How is your apologia for quackery related in any fashion to PCA's comments?

He said it would have to be "perfect". I can only go by what he said, jj, and what he said was holding 'psi' research to an impossibly high stanard.

 

[T'ai Chi]

Tai, that makes you appear really foolish, the burden is always on the researcher to make replication and prove that they didn't fake the data.

Right, which they do by being scientific and responding to inquiry. But when people ejaculate "fraud!", without solid evidence, and act like it is a done deal, the burden is on them, my friend, to produce incontrovertible evidence for their claims.

You obviously know close to zero about social sciences and research.

Feel free to list references where I can see what work social science and research you have done.

We'll compare.

 

[T'ai Chi]

So i am asking, what is the source of error in the Millikin experiment?

I'm not going to go into depth with this discussion and waste time if you disbelieve error exists in the first place.

So... are you denying any error exists in the experiment? YES or NO?

If YES, you're wrong and this discussion is stopped.

If NO, I'll talk about some of the various types of error. There are a lot.

 

[CFLarsen]

I'm not going to go into depth with this discussion and waste time if you disbelieve error exists in the first place.

In other words, you will not share your information, unless we agree with you in advance, before we have even seen your material. Oh, yeah, we also have to debate entirely on your terms, too.

Why not simply shame Dancing David, T'ai, by showing him where the source of error in the Millikin experiment is? Why continue to refuse to show it, when it is so much easier to show it?

 

[Ed]

All of this is irrelevant and misdirection. The real issue is why this effort is so seriously flawed.

Any thoughts?

 

[dharlow]

Yes, of course, I understand that. I'm just asking for the guy to be able to do something reliably, so we can test him a few times and all agree that he's the genuine article. Ain't never gonna happen.

It has happened. I don't know who you mean by "we" exactly (Randi?...CSICOP, which has a formal policy against conducting research?). A good many subjects claiming psychic abilties have been tested by independent researchers and have achieved significant results. The question, of course, becomes determining: 1.) how these results could be achieved through a non-paranormal process (which is not hard to do) and then 2.) whether the conditions in the experiment permitted this process to occur (where the debate often becomes a bit tricky). Whether these experiments convincingly rule out cheating ultimately becomes a subjective decision based on how much weight one assigns to competing hypotheses. However, the point is that some people, who claim certain abilities, have achieved success in independent experiments involving different experimenters, and this has been the case throughout the history of organized psychical research in the 1880s.

Adrian Parker's article lists some comparatively recent studies of individual subjects who achieved significant scoring in independent tests:

http://www.psy.gu.se/EJP/EJP ULT AP GB.pdf

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Never mind, Dharlow, you don't seem to understand what I'm asking for. I want someone to come forward with psychic abilities so obvious, so clear, so undisputable, that everyone just agrees that he's psychic. There is no need for me to ask for further muddy, arguable experiments, because those will happen anyway.

Sorry, just silly wishful thinking on my part.

~~ Paul

 

[dharlow]

Never mind, Dharlow, you don't seem to understand what I'm asking for. I want someone to come forward with psychic abilities so obvious, so clear, so undisputable, that everyone just agrees that he's psychic. There is no need for me to ask for further muddy, arguable experiments, because those will happen anyway.

Sorry, just silly wishful thinking on my part.

~~ Paul

I think I understand you, but "psychic abilities" needs to be qualified a bit. Someone who can fly around in the air or shoot fireballs out of their eyes would probably be pretty convincing if witnessed in the presence of people of considered integrity. These are physical effects that have certain strict limitations to which they can be replicated by conjuring. Even here, though, one would need at least some controls to be implemented...a psychic cannot have complete control of the siutation and provide anything resembling convincing evidence.

Controls become even more crucial for mental phemonena. There a multitudes of ways in which someone can simulate information transfer. As such, I can't think of any way in which a hypothetical psychic who claimed to do this could considered convincing without the need for strict, replicated tests amongst a variety of people.

So if you are referring to the former type of psychic, I agree, and in fact I find the physical phenomena of some psychics (mediums actually) to be the strongest case parapsychology has for evidence for psi. As far as the latter, mental type of psychic, anything they do could be replicated by a creative and skilled magician unless they are properly controlled in an extremely strict manner.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Somehow I think that if a true psychic came along, it would be obvious that he wasn't using magic. Maybe not.

~~ Paul

 

[T'ai Chi]

In other words, you will not share your information, unless we agree with you in advance, before we have even seen your material. Oh, yeah, we also have to debate entirely on your terms, too.

See Hoyt, Bill, in the DAT thread.

I'm asking DD if he believes error to exist in the first place. If he doesn't, there is no point in me spending time describing it.

Why not just wait and see how DD answers?