Re: Re: Who's Staring (At Rupert Sheldrake) ?
Dragon said:
Oh yes - Sheldrake is the "morphic resonance" guy isn't he?
A prince among woowoos.
Anyway, here's a
link to the CSICOP review - which refutes Sheldrake.
It refutes him does it? Do you believe everything CSICOP says?
Quote -"The biased nature of Sheldrake's sequences has several unfortunate implications. First, it leads to implicit or explicit pattern learning when feedback is provided. When the patterns being guessed mirror naturally occurring guessing patterns, the results could go above or below chance levels even without feedback. Thus significant results might occur purely from nonrandom guessing."
The CSICOP authors conclude- "The evidence reviewed here provides no support to the claim that people can consciously detect unseen staring."
I actually posted something about this a few weeks back. This is what I said before:
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If what they say is true, and it wasn't properly randomised, then it is impressively incompetent of Sheldrake. CSICOP are notorious though for giving misleading information, if not outright lies. I suppose I could do a search to try and establish if what they say is true {YAWNS}
[/QUOTE]
I found
this
Marks and Colwell then postulated that the subjects' success when they were given feedback was due to an implicit learning of structures hidden in my randomized sequences. They showed by means of several tests that my sequences deviated from "structureless" randomness.
So Sheldrake explicitly admits it. But then he goes on to say:
Ironically, this was because I adopted a recommendation by Wiseman and Smith (1994) to use counterbalanced sequences containing equal numbers of looking and not-looking trials. Like Marks and Colwell, Wiseman and Smith (1994) obtained an unexpectedly positive result in a staring experiment and then tried to explain it as an artifact of the randomization procedure, but in their case they attributed it to a lack of counterbalancing.
Ah! There is a problem then in that it is not possible to have both a wholly random sequence as well as a equal number of looking and not looking trials. He followed Wiseman's and Smith's recommendation, but then gets hammered for his procedure not being wholly random. On the other hand if it had have been wholly random, then there would have been a lack of counterbalancing, and the skeptics could again call into question his results for the same reasons as those given by Wiseman and Smith in their staring experiment.
So it seems Sheldrake can't win
Of course, even if it is not wholly random, this doesn't mean to say there are patterns. It's like guessing the colours of cards one at a time. You know there are 26 red cards and 26 black cards. So if the first card you guess is black and you get it correct, then there is a very slightly higher probability that the next card is red.
Would that be enough to explain Sheldrakes results? I have no idea. What I'd like to know is why it is necessary to have equal numbers of staring and not staring trials. Is it simply because Wiseman got a positive result using this procedure and therefore it
must be flawed? Or does he have independent reasons?
Anyway, now we know the bare facts of the case, I think your charge that Sheldrake was being incompetent cannot be upheld. This does not mean to say that the less than wholly random procedure is not a concern, but he was put in a situation that no matter what procedure he used, he would have been accused of incompetence.
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