Peterson, Priestcraft, Profits and the Paranormal

[Gadianton]

Some very fair points here, Physics Guy. And just to make sure you are aware: Dr. Peterson has "thrown down the gauntlet" and challenged you to start up an email exchange with Dr. Paul Smith:

I invite Dr. Paul Smith to register on this forum and start a thread. No reason he wouldn't enjoy it here. If he finds certain of us obnoxious, he can put us on ignore and just discuss with those of his choosing. If he were to register here, I for one would issue a general call of civility toward him. I'm sure others would join me.

I'm sure you already know how this set-up works--i.e., if you decline to start up the email correspondence, Peterson will repeatedly dismiss you as a "dogmatically closed-minded atheist" who refuses to look at the evidence,

Since Physic's Guy is an outspoken theist, that would certainly be a mischaracterization. It's easy to get trounced in email where nobody can see. If Dr. Smith does not register here to discuss his evidence for remote viewing, then I will take that as chickening out and lack of seriousness about his beliefs. If DCP doesn't encourage him to register here to discuss, I will take that as proof that his "challenge" was for showmanship only. "My guy will take on anybody! (as long as nobody sees it if he loses)"

[drumdude]

The CIA report here:

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CI ... 0005-5.pdf




Some interesting parallels to the Second Watson Letter

Great minds trick alike!

[I Have Questions]

The CIA report here:

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CI ... 0005-5.pdf




Some interesting parallels to the Second Watson Letter

Great minds trick alike!

Great find.

[Doctor Scratch]

No, I’m not going to discuss remote viewing with a proponent. If this guy has anything which could be worth my time, he has no business wasting his time discussing with me. He should be writing up his paper for Nature and planning what to do with his Nobel prize money. Whatever he’s got, that he thinks might impress me, it is my duty to science to urge him to submit it for publication as quickly as possible.

For that matter: this guy has apparently been doing remote viewing for quite a while now. Why is he offering to discuss with me instead of just getting Peterson to post links to all the papers that he has already published?

Who needs to bother with a journal like Nature when the Journal of Parapsychology will suffice? I mean, if it appeared in something like the Journal of Parapsychology, then it must be settled science! Only something like passing the rigorous peer review at Interpreter would lend more creedence to the claims of this article!

There’s a Nobel Laureate in the UK who strongly believes this is real and has tried to do research on it and has run into all kinds of problems with his reputation being attacked and he’s a Nobel Laureate.

Which Nobel Laureate, I wonder?

[drumdude]

There’s a lot of real doctors and PhDs who also push the anti-vaccine fear mongering. I don’t know why DCP finds one conspiracy theory compelling and rejects the other outright.

Oh right, because the brethren declared vaccines safe.

[Tom]

No, I’m not going to discuss remote viewing with a proponent. If this guy has anything which could be worth my time, he has no business wasting his time discussing with me. He should be writing up his paper for Nature and planning what to do with his Nobel prize money. Whatever he’s got, that he thinks might impress me, it is my duty to science to urge him to submit it for publication as quickly as possible.

For that matter: this guy has apparently been doing remote viewing for quite a while now. Why is he offering to discuss with me instead of just getting Peterson to post links to all the papers that he has already published?

Who needs to bother with a journal like Nature when the Journal of Parapsychology will suffice? I mean, if it appeared in something like the Journal of Parapsychology, then it must be settled science! Only something like passing the rigorous peer review at Interpreter would lend more creedence to the claims of this article!

There’s a Nobel Laureate in the UK who strongly believes this is real and has tried to do research on it and has run into all kinds of problems with his reputation being attacked and he’s a Nobel Laureate.

Which Nobel Laureate, I wonder?

It may be Brian Josephson, who, unfortunately, is afflicted with Nobelitis.

[Physics Guy]

Brian Josephson has been off the deep end for many years. He has had an unusually fortunate career—or perhaps an unfortunate one. At a young age he proposed a naïve and simplistic theory of how the subtly paired electrons which carry the electric current in superconductors might make their ways across a gap between two superconductors.

The naïve theory turned out to be right; it had significant theoretical implications; and it continues to have important practical applications. It did deserve a Nobel prize. Nobel prizes are for important discoveries. They’re not for being brilliant.

Josephson didn’t figure out why the simple theory actually worked, or anticipate where it would go. He was a smart guy by normal standards, all right, but he was no Einstein. He was lucky, except that he then had this big early hit and no way to keep up the performance. Taking weird but simple speculations seriously had worked well for him once, to the point of a Nobel prize in physics, and so he just kept doing that, but he was only lucky that once.

In general, finding one or two people who have some impressive scientific credential and support a given wild theory is not significant evidence supporting the wild theory. The number of people in the world with scientific credentials is large. Even among foolish statements there are few so foolish that not a single supporter can be found in a pool so wide.

After decades of research, remote viewing is likely to have one or two prominent proponents even though it is nonsense. If it were anything more than nonsense, on the other hand, it would by now have won far more proponents than that. By now it would be an industry.

[I Have Questions]

I think Peterson needs to give full disclosure on this one. He is promoting to his small but clearly easily influenced audience something that costs thousands of dollars. He’s endorsing it. So has he spent his own money on some remote viewing courses with Paul H. Smith, yes or no? Or is he just pushing an affinity fraud scam at no financial risk to himself? Is Paul H. Smith paying for his endorsement?

So Peterson, have you put your money where your mouth is on this one?

[drumdude]

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, you got me reading the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. I was curious to see what the latest research in the area was, and there was actually a number of publications about precognition and tests of it through post-activity priming. That is, you expose someone to something that would normally prime them for a given response if done beforehand after the fact and look for a difference in effect. These were all from the same research group, testing variations on the same study. The researchers, testing a binary choice, found that approximately 53% of participants chose correctly... And declared that this was a significant result. When they repeated this test and found only 49%, they then narrowed the result solely to those who rated highly on extroversion, raising the result to 56%, declaring the outcome significant. This was rather blatant p-hacking, not helped by their acknowledgment that other labs have repeatedly failed to replicate the effect they're testing for.

I credit them with doing the experiments and reporting the results honestly, but anyone looking at the first result and then the second should've drawn the conclusion of failure to replicate.

Per the article linked today talking about SAIC and SRI experiments, I don't find myself terribly impressed either. The strongest of the SAIC experiments, Entropy II, has what should be a shockingly high p-value compared to the rest. But the big difference between these studies was the scoring system used. Most of these studies used a binary system to check things. "Is the subject primarily indoors or outdoors?", "Are they alone?", and so on. These questions could then be scored directly. The Entropy study used a subjective rating scale. To quote from the Society for Psychical Research's own paper on it...

<blockquote>For example, consider a USE element of shielding, then declarative statements such as "there is shielding at the target" would receive a membership value of 1.0 because it is clear, by definition, that there is no ambiguity about the shielding element being present in the response. However, "something massive at the site" might only be assigned a membership value 0.40, to capture the ambiguous nature of that response element, because there may be many things that are massive but not at all related to shielding.</blockquote>

In other words, vague, ambiguous statements can still register reasonably significant scores. It would be difficult to not attain some kind of score in the range of significance through this system, especially with someone who is capable - knowingly or not - of delivering a Barnum statement. This goes double for the fact that, in the Entropy study, participants were not totally blind: They knew some important details of their target, like that they'd be in the San Francisco Bay area and near a technical facility.

It's hard to find any of this terribly convincing as a result. Beyond the obvious p-hacking, the experimental design simply isn't very good.

[Everybody Wang Chung]

Today or tomorrow, probably, I'll offer just a bit of "intellectual autobiography" in a blog entry to indicate some of the influences that have led me to become more open, in the relatively recent past, to the possibility of the paranormal than I ever was before.

I'm really looking forward to this "intellectual autobiography" of the paranormal. The idea of such an "intellectual autobiography" from the Afore is certainly entertaining in its absurdity, but perhaps it's best for the Afore to leave the intellectual heavy lifting to science (observation and verifiable data).

Let's be honest, the Afore's encounters with dowsing and things that defy logic/the scientific method (and even gravity) are a bit like attempting to perform brain surgery with a rubber chicken. The Afore can continue to try all he wants, but the results are always the same.