The Ganzfeld Experiments

[Interesting Ian]

How the hell can we possibly know, Ian, without calculating the probabilities of such "hits" due to chance? You're relying on your gut instinct, again, and then calling people stupid who don't agree with your gut.

Okay, folks, how can we calculate the probabilities of these hits due to chance? Or run baseline experiments to determine the probabilities empirically? Come on, now, don't hold back.

~~ Paul

What do you mean how could you possibly know??? Clearly you didn't click on the link and read the receivers impressions together with looking at the targets. Such accurate descriptions couldn't just be by chance.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Ian said:
What do you mean how could you possibly know??? Clearly you didn't click on the link and read the receivers impressions together with looking at the targets. Such accurate descriptions couldn't just be by chance.

Yes, I did read the quotes. You have no idea whatsoever whether those could be chance. You don't even know how many trials those quotes were selected from. I don't trust your gut.

And if they aren't chance, they aren't necessarily psi either.

~~ Paul

 

[Interesting Ian]

Yes, I did read the quotes. You have no idea whatsoever whether those could be chance. You don't even know how many trials those quotes were selected from. I don't trust your gut.

And if they aren't chance, they aren't necessarily psi either.

~~ Paul

Well there would have to be the best of thousands for the chance hypothesis to stand any . . . er . . . chance.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Ian said:
Well there would have to be the best of thousands for the chance hypothesis to stand any . . . er . . . chance.

You have no idea what the chances are that a photo containing a president will be described as containing a president, or that a photo containing fire will be described as containing fire, or that a photo of Christ will be described as containing Christ.

You just don't know, Ian.

~~ Paul

 

[Interesting Ian]

You have no idea what the chances are that a photo containing a president will be described as containing a president, or that a photo containing fire will be described as containing fire, or that a photo of Christ will be described as containing Christ.

You just don't know, Ian.

~~ Paul

More detail than that. But anyway.

What chance do you think it is then? a half? A third? Surely not as low as a tenth??

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Ian said:
What chance do you think it is then? a half? A third? Surely not as low as a tenth??

I don't have a clue. What percentage of the targets had fire? What are the chances that someone will mention fire when placed in a quiet room with ping pong balls and white noise and asked to describe images in his head? During what is obviously a psi experiment? In the United States? On Tuesday?

~~ Paul

 

[AOK Tiger]

Ian,

These are examples of the hits.. where are the examples of all the misses ?

Didn’t they do 1,000’s of tests ?

Why such COMPLEX pictures anyway ??? Are circles and squares etc unable to be transmitted by PSI ???

 

[AOK Tiger]

Ian another point…

If I had someone send the Eagle picture and the receiver described it …

I would think WOW…

Then I would have the same 2 do it again..

I assume if psi existed they could repeat it at will ??

YOU KNOW THEY CAN’T so logic says the hit was a lucky guess

 

[thaiboxerken]

When a picture of George Washington was the target the receiver said:

"Lincoln Memorial... And Abraham Lincoln sitting there... ...the 4th of July... All kinds of fireworks... Valley Forge... bombs bursting in the air... Francis Scott Key... Charleston..."

But of course a President and Independence Day "aren't even close to what the actual picture is"!

You're correct. You are simply dismissing all of the misses contained in the description and opting for only the one or two percieved "hits".


When a clip of a man spitting fire was the target the receiver said:

"I find flames again...The lips I see are bright red, reminding me of the flame imagery earlier..."

But of course flames "aren't even close to what the actual picture is"!

Exactly, and again you are leaving out all of the misses and opting to only pay attention to the hits. The same can be said of all of the other "examples" of success they are trying to convey.

Take the GW photo, for example. The description given can fit any number of identities and photos. Any president's picture could be seen as a hit using such methods. Any bomb pictures, any fireworks pictures, any holiday pictures and even pictures of Washington D.C. could be construed as a hit. Heck, a forge could be seen as a hit. These people are fishing for hits, it's dishonest "science" and it's junk.

 

[AOK Tiger]

Ian I have to take you up on this (in your sig)

Typical Skeptic: To believe in X is irrational

Interesting Ian: Oh! How so?

Skeptic: It is not upon me to show this. You must show that it's not irrational.

Interesting Ian:

The Sceptic would respond : You must show me that it’s Rational… not that its “not irrational”.. that would be stupid phraseology !

Why do you consider that a frustrating position…

If you believe in something weird, out of the ordinary, paranormal, supernatural .. the burden of proof falls on YOU .. not the person declaring it to be true..

How can the debunker.. someone who thinks the claim is crap, prove it ???

How can I prove that something that doesn’t exist doesn’t exist ???

 

[thaiboxerken]

Why such COMPLEX pictures anyway ??? Are circles and squares etc unable to be transmitted by PSI ???

It is rather interesting the some believers of psi think that only rudimentary information can be sent with psi, and others think that the images have to be complex. To understand these the "psi" phenomena is nigh-impossible, since it is a dynamic fiction.

 

[Ersby]

It’s funny that amherst posted a link regarding cognitive dissonance while at the same time misunderstanding my point about response bias and then trying to change the subject by introducing an incomplete and biased dataset. Nice work.

I’ll try one last time.

If you are going to run a ganzfeld experiment and you have, like the PRL, put your target pool into sets or 4 designed to be thematically diverse then you could say that each theme has a 25% chance of being chosen. I agree with that. But if you run the experiment and find, AFTER THE EVENT, that certain themes that coincide with the already known tendencies of people to describe certain subjects, psi or no psi, then you’d have to adjust for this bias. This is what happened in Study 302. The fact that there were plans for the experiment to continue until each target had been used 15 times makes no difference. The data they used displayed response bias. It didn’t cancel out the results, true, but I’m not saying it did. It’s just an example of what response bias can do.

The propensity for people to chose the first target when judging an experiment of this nature should also be taken into account (before you quote another chunk of the PRL paper, yes, I do know that judging bias actually depressed the expected hit rate by chance).

Beirman did some analysis on the entire set (“Notes on random target selection: the PRL autoganzfeld target and target ser distributions revisited”) and noted that, although the overall effect remained robust, the chance hit rate for the entire study (excluding Study 302) was 25.98% (include Study 302, and the chance hit rate is 26.5%, which is quite an effect for a series that lasted 354 trials).

Interestingly, the post hoc expected hit rate by chance for static targets was 24.4% while for dynamic targets it was 27.7% which means the 10% gap between the scores of static and dynamic targets should actually by a 6.8% gap, which renders the effect non-significant.

So, sure, theoretically, there’s a 25% chance of such and such a theme being a target as opposed to being a decoy. But once the experiment is run, there is the opportunity to go back to see if that actually occurred. It may be that a poor score could be explained by a run of unlikely targets (of course, this’d presuppose that psi didn’t exist or wasn’t working, since psi should be able to tap into these targets, unlikely or not).

But I’ll stop here. The “detailed discussion” that Amherst wanted has been lost in his desire to talk about Psiexplorer’s greatest hits. Ho hum.

 

[amherst]

It’s funny that amherst posted a link regarding cognitive dissonance while at the same time misunderstanding my point about response bias and then trying to change the subject by introducing an incomplete and biased dataset. Nice work.

Incomplete and biased dataset? Are you referring to the examples of ganzfeld hits I linked to? That's not a data-set but simply a few examples of hits culled from the experiments we are discussing.

I’ll try one last time.

If you are going to run a ganzfeld experiment and you have, like the PRL, put your target pool into sets or 4 designed to be thematically diverse then you could say that each theme has a 25% chance of being chosen. I agree with that. But if you run the experiment and find, AFTER THE EVENT, that certain themes that coincide with the already known tendencies of people to describe certain subjects, psi or no psi, then you’d have to adjust for this bias. This is what happened in Study 302. The fact that there were plans for the experiment to continue until each target had been used 15 times makes no difference. The data they used displayed response bias. It didn’t cancel out the results, true, but I’m not saying it did. It’s just an example of what response bias can do.

The propensity for people to chose the first target when judging an experiment of this nature should also be taken into account (before you quote another chunk of the PRL paper, yes, I do know that judging bias actually depressed the expected hit rate by chance).

Beirman did some analysis on the entire set (“Notes on random target selection: the PRL autoganzfeld target and target ser distributions revisited”) and noted that, although the overall effect remained robust, the chance hit rate for the entire study (excluding Study 302) was 25.98% (include Study 302, and the chance hit rate is 26.5%, which is quite an effect for a series that lasted 354 trials).

Interestingly, the post hoc expected hit rate by chance for static targets was 24.4% while for dynamic targets it was 27.7% which means the 10% gap between the scores of static and dynamic targets should actually by a 6.8% gap, which renders the effect non-significant.

So, sure, theoretically, there’s a 25% chance of such and such a theme being a target as opposed to being a decoy. But once the experiment is run, there is the opportunity to go back to see if that actually occurred. It may be that a poor score could be explained by a run of unlikely targets (of course, this’d presuppose that psi didn’t exist or wasn’t working, since psi should be able to tap into these targets, unlikely or not).

So what exactly is your problem with the ganzfeld? As you well know, the analyses done initially by Bem and then furthered by Bierman et.al. http://a1162.fmg.uva.nl/~djb/publications/1998/AutoGF_set20effect.pdf show that the results can not be due to response bias. This strongly suggests that any future successful experiments will not be due to it either. What exactly is your criticism? What do you think explains the results?

But I’ll stop here. The “detailed discussion” that Amherst wanted has been lost in his desire to talk about Psiexplorer’s greatest hits. Ho hum.

You seem to be trying to imply that the examples of ganzfeld hits I linked to are (somehow?) the product of a dubious website. Those hits were products of the very experiments we are discussing, results of which were published in the very papers we are discussing. I find them to be quite relevant and I don't understand how you could not.

amherst

 

[thaiboxerken]

Amherst, people have disputed and refuted your claims and the claims presented in the ganzfield experiments many times over. It's been debunked. You just refuse to accept the fact that these experiments are highly subjective and full of bias.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Amherst said:
So what exactly is your problem with the ganzfeld? As you well know, the analyses done initially by Bem and then furthered by Bierman et.al. http://a1162.fmg.uva.nl/~djb/public...set20effect.pdf show that the results can not be due to response bias. This strongly suggests that any future successful experiments will not be due to it either. What exactly is your criticism? What do you think explains the results?

Well, now that you ask: My problem is that it's time to move along. Let's assume we have a replicable experiment (a possibly incorrect assumption). Now try to figure out exactly which protocol produces results and which ones do not. Get some guts. Run experiments that are likely to fail in an effort to figure out exactly what it is about the successful protocol that is necessary for positive results. Run the risk of finding out that the requirement is something mundane in the protocol or in the analysis.

Parapsychologists love to say that the replicable experiment has been found. Okay, then continue.

~~ Paul

 

[AOK Tiger]

Amherst,

Your refusal to respond to the query about simple tests shows us one thing clearly..

YOU KNOW simple card tests ARE the only real indisputable way to test for “psi”.

YOU also KNOW that they show “psi” doesn’t exist.

But because you want to cling to your delusions you have too latch onto dubious, complex, inconclusive tests.

Be honest to yourself Amherst.. simple card test would be MORE conducive to helping any psi effect.. denying them is ridiculous.

 

[Lucianarchy]

Most honest, informed sceptics these days accept that there is an effect.

In the face of the overallbody of evidence, it would be irrational, illogical and against occam to suggest each and every last peice of scientific evidence is a result of either self delusion, cheating or collusion of some sort. In fact it is extraordinary unlikely that that should account for every psi effect on record.

The liklihood is that the effect exists and current scientific thinking does not yet understand the mechanism of action.

 

[thaiboxerken]

Most honest, informed sceptics these days accept that there is an effect.

Yes, but not necessarily a "psi" effect. There are mundane things going on here that have been pointed out.


The liklihood is that the effect exists and current scientific thinking does not yet understand the mechanism of action.

You are wrong.

 

[Ed]

Most honest, informed sceptics these days accept that there is an effect.

In the face of the overallbody of evidence, it would be irrational, illogical and against occam to suggest each and every last peice of scientific evidence is a result of either self delusion, cheating or collusion of some sort. In fact it is extraordinary unlikely that that should account for every psi effect on record.

The liklihood is that the effect exists and current scientific thinking does not yet understand the mechanism of action.

Unfortunately most of it is not science. Appealing to the "mass of evidence" would validate every religion that ever was.

Tell me, do you believe in the power of prayer? If not, why not?

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Luci said:
to suggest each and every last peice of scientific evidence is a result of either self delusion, cheating or collusion of some sort.

But that's not what we're suggesting, is it?

Come on, you believers: At least admit that all you're doing is attaching the label psi to unexplained results. To further define psi as paranormal is a leap of faith. It could just as well be invisible flying donkeys.

~~ Paul