But even our perception of probability could be flawed. If I conduct a coin-flipping experiment there is a chance that I will get a heads up 100 times in a row.

True. There's also a chance that gravity will stop working.

The point is, there reaches a point where what you see is so consistent that it becomes silly to start thinking of it as coincidence or random chance, especially when the data shows numbers above what random chance would allow :shrug:

But it's also silly to label it as psychic powers.
It might be silly to think that my coinflipping experiment is just random and coincidental, but it still might be.

I guess your imagination is greater than mine I just like to look a little closer to earth, to what I understand so far, when presented with that "something".
Instead of thinking in terms of something as far out as magical powers.

They aren't:



(from an earlier post)

I merely labeled this thread "psychic phenomena as science" to get people in the door

The point is, it's transitioning from "magic" to "science". There is data to support odd occurrences. What is causing them? How do they work? Still more or less unknown. But to say that "nothing is happening except statistical and procedural errors" is incorrect given the evidence. Even skeptics admit that "something" is going on. They just call it "something", parapsychologists label that "something" as "psi."

I'm not interested in arguing about whether my beliefs are valid or not, regardless of the motivation. I'm just stating an opinion: I trust a guy that worked for the CIA before I trust a stage-performer that didn't.

Nice one



Every knowledge I have so far about the human psyche tells me that a phenomenon such as remote viewing is simply not possible. Such will fall into the realm of magic, and humans cannot do magic.
So to me, unless people discover real magic, it isn't possible within the limits of the human psyche.

I hope you come to some sort of conclusion soon, this is too obsessive for your own good health

I'm just gonna leave it here. I have to go to school tomorrow, and it's late now.

Hope you got something out of what I said.

Cheers,
Tubi

And that's the kicker we discover new things every day. One day it's impossible. The next it's common sense.



You don't know the half of it

Thanks for contributing!

I can make up stuff too, it's not worth anything if it can't be validated, though.



Did you actually read that page yourself?

They link to four so called "Research Institutes", all of which aren't believable at all, the first one even styling itself as the basis for the Star Gate-project, which the american government itself dropped because there was nothing in it.

Every single source linked to on that site is of the kind that clearly regards paranormal phenomena as a reality to be proven, rather than as a possibility to be validated, not to mention the fact a four year old with a "HTML For Dummies" could make more believable website programming.



Oh really?

Then why are you beating around the bush and not linking directly to some of these credible studies?



Well then, it should be easy for you to present it yourself. Where are these articles, you have yet to present a single one.



I seem to recall you made the exact same argument the last time your thread on hokus pokus was shot down, and it wasn't more reasonable then than it is now.

There are over 20 major awards for proof of anything paranormal. To date not a single one has been given, why is that?



You're just repeating what you read in that one single article you read. Where is the real proof?



You mean the guy who said we should consider statistical anomalies to be significant, not be skeptical by default and use inverted burden of evidence?

He's an idiot.

Wait a minute, the CIA themselves concluded that there was nothing in it. Do you or do you not believe the people at CIA who actually conducted the study?

I know fairly little about complex science, and even less about "psi", but from what I have read I'm not particularly convinced. Part of the reason for this conviction is, alas, my faith in the collective reasoning abilities of the international scientific community - which is much more refined than my own. They're the experts and I'm not, so for now I'll trust them. Much as psi researchers like to paint themselves with the aura of radical underdogs, the fact is that aside from a few outspoken and dedicated critics, most scientists are actually perfectly open to research into "the paranormal" but have yet to see anything actually conclusive.

In any case, until I become an expert on this sort of thing myself, I'm going to trust the majority of people who are experts rather than the few dissidents. It may turn out that the dissidents are right, but frankly - and this is another reason I feel no need to be convinced by their arguments - I don't care and I don't think it really affects me at the moment. I'm not in a position to do anything about it so I'll let other people worry...

So what you're saying is you haven't even tried.

The sources are there so you can check them. They are cited in the standard way so you can find them. If you don't attempt to find them, then you are showing an unwillingness to partake in standard scientific procedure. You just claim people "make stuff up", and don't even go out of your way to follow up on the sources. I hate to break it to you Lcars, but that's not very scientific, or professional, or rational.



Obviously nothing I say to you or directly link for you is worth anything, because "I can make up stuff too." Have a nice life.

I rest my case, m'lord.

Done with the pissing contest?

In short, there's nothing to see here. The guys who wrote the original article clearly believe in inverted burden of evidence, and that's not cool with me.

They also clearly think skepticism is something bad, and that's not okay either. Skepticism is ALWAYS a good thing, and one should ALWAYS be skeptical of EVERYTHING one reads, especially on the internet.

Just because someone piled up a bunch of articles and drew some conclusions about how people aren't treating the parapsychological whackjobs right doesn't mean what he says is true.

Proof or it didn't happen!

Why are the skeptics always the loudest and most obnoxious people in a conversation?

RATIONAL skepticism is good. Look at the data. Recreate the experiments. See if the data is replicated.

It was. It's all there. Lots of studies. Lots of stats.

A critic looked at it. Admitted the procedure checked out. Admitted the stats were there. Criticized a couple of the conclusions, and claimed that "more data was necessary."

The rebuttal was that there's nothing wrong with skepticism. But good data has been generated time and time again. Each time a critic puts forward a suggestion for how to improve, it is implemented. It's all above board. As the third section says, nothing to hide.

EVERYTHING was done according to science. The burden of proof was on them to show evidence. And they did. Submitted it to review. It was reviewed. The only thing the critic didn't agree on was what conclusion one could draw, and accused them of using tricks, which they rebutted.

There is no procedural error. No error in whose burden it is. It's all done by the book.

Also of note, this was from the Psychological Bulletin. While found on the internet, not just anywhere on the internet.


But hey, since I, you, or anyone can "make stuff up too", then obviously NOTHING is worth anything, right?

Come back when you are able to turn your skepticism onto your own arguments!

This is a discussion forum owned by a video game company, not the comment and debate pages in the New Scientist. Not everyone has the time to read and amass the totality of scientific research in this area, and it's not really fair to expect people to do so before they reply. If you want to discuss this with scientists in a scientific way then go find some scientists to talk to, but if you expect to be able to do that here you're wasting your time...

Skepticism involves suggesting that a theory might be wrong without necessarily offering up any idea of what is "right". Destruction without creation. Is it any wonder that that can sometimes be perceived as (or actually decend into) being unconstructive or even rude?

Doesn't change the fact that, as Lcars said, skepticism is an important part of scientific and philosophical discourse.

So you're saying it's okay for people to talk about something when they haven't read up on it?

You realize that it's impossible to have an intelligent, educated, and rational discussion under those circumstances, right?

That breeds ignorance, and allows it to fester and multiply. I thought we were beyond that. Guess not.



Yeah, sometimes you sound like a jerk when playing the role of the skeptic (trust me, I've gone onto psi forums and said the same thing Lcars has said, I felt like a jerk). Because, basically, you gotta tell people you don't believe them, and you gotta hold people to their word each and every step of the way, and you gotta demand proof for each and every step, each and every single time. And yeah, it sounds like you don't trust them, it sounds like you are on the boarder of accusing them of being just a liar. It svcks to be in that position, but you gotta do it (even, no, ESPECIALLY if they are your own opinions!)

That DOESN'T mean you can just not read what people submit to you, and it doesn't mean you can accuse them of "making stuff up." That is not how to have an intelligent, informed, rational conversation.

After reading every post in this thread, and without reading anything on psi, I agree with Lcars and MP. B) I guess I'm an offspring of ignorance, tee hee.

tl;dr, but I can already tell that you obviously know what you're talking about, so I'm going to believe what you say because I like your name

I'm going to go eat dinner, be back to discuss later!

Agreed, it's the only good thing that ever came out of Pseudo science (other then the insane amount of money intelligent people made by selling pseudo scientific "super" cures to superstitious fools. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionized_bracelet

In a way I admire them, and if that if some idiots fell for that kind of stuff, they deserve to lose their money. But in the other.... such scams should be illegal.

Conveniently enough, that information is incredibly difficult to get at. Can you get me access to the necessary primary information to make such an assessment?



Again, the primary information is extremely difficult for any regular Joe to get a hold of, if not completely impossible. Does that mean I should blindly accept what the article says? Not a chance.



I'm still waiting for that primary information. Without it, the rest is just empty words.



At least that's what THEY claim. Why do you believe them?



Or so they say. Have you checked the individual studies to confirm this?



So wait, you believe something just because someone on the internet wrote it?

No, I'm saying there's different degrees of having "read up" on things and expecting people to go through reference lists with a fine-toothed comb is ridiculous in this context. We can only go on what experience has offered us so far, and in my experience, believers in psi are already convinced of their results before they conduct their experiments. Is that the case here? Maybe, I don't know, I haven't read the article you linked to and I don't intend to because I don't want to spend my time doing that. Which means I can't offer any perspective on this particular piece of research and I'm not going to pretend I can, all I can do is comment on psi research as a whole. Which is what I've done.

Which brings me back to: if you want people to read a single article in depth and offer comments and criticism, you're in the wrong place. Or at the very least you labelled this thread wrong.

I actually found something quite interesting in that article, which I would like to share.

Page 493

"We acknowledge that “no positive theory” yet
exists to explain psi, but our article was neither a theoretical
exercise nor a comparison of psi theories (for which there are
many; see Stokes, 1987). We took a purely empirical approach by
presenting an update. We believe that we confirmed that psi effects
can be found in a larger data set where any given single study on
its own may be inconclusive. Our action is no less inappropriate
than Galileo’s demonstration of gravitational effects in pre-
Newtonian times without it being necessary for Galileo to have a
“positive theory” that describes why such effects should exist"

Very fascinating, how they can both admit that there is no unified theory regarding the concept that they believe they have established does indeed exist, AND claim that it is indeed one single concept. If there is no unified theory regarding what these anomalies (as they themselves put it) are, then how can they be so certain that the anomalies from the various studies are all manifestations of the same thing?

A more fitting anology would be if Galileo had said that the force that draws an object towards the earth and the force that draws two magnetic objects toward eachother were the same thing, and he called it "Magic". We all know those things are two different concepts, and any thesis that is based on the notion that there is only one single reason why one object would be drawn to another object is completely wrong.

They are cited in the article. Look them up.



Cited in the article (two full pages of sources for articles and experiments, including the ones that were included in the anolysis, as well as at least another half page of continued source citations, and then a couple tables of statistics). It's all there for you to look up.



No one's asking you to. If you have suspicions that some experiment had a procedural error, or got its data in a non-sound way, look up the corresponding experiment. That's why they're cited. So skeptics, be they amateur or professional, can look them up and review the evidence.



It's clear by now that you have not consulted the reference section at the end of the first section of the link in the OP.



If I believed them, I wouldn't have posted it here. But MP has made it obvious that I should instead go to a science forum, since people apparently can't be bothered to read on a gaming forum, nor can they be bothered to look up referenced articles.



I've consulted with people in the scientific field, and read experimental design. Given what I know (not a professional scientist), given the reasoning behind the experiment, and given the procedure and stuff, it looked pretty solid. But that's why I'm consulting with people who aren't so quick to believe. But since no one here can be bothered to read, I guess I'll have to find another scientist!



No.