Telephone telepathy 'proved'

[Pontiuth Pilate]

To those that argue about the method: there were 4 potential callers. guessing the correct one had a 25% probability. His results were that 42% of the guesses were correct. What's wrong with that? Repeating the experiment with only two possibilities wouldn't be any better in my view.

\

OK, here's my list.

1. My dad, who works at a computer company.
2. A friend who goes to college.
3. My grandmother, who is retired and lives at home.
4. My boss at work.

I get a call at 10:30 in the morning. Unless I'm a total idiot, what am I gonna guess?

If you are measuring telepathy then there is no reason to select people that the volunteer knows at all. The only point of doing so, clearly, was to give the volunteer a not-so-hidden advantage in that he was already familiar with the behavior patterns of the potential callers.

I'm very interested in claims of telepathy and (more importantly) distance empathy, but bunk science is bunk science.

If the caller doesn't know the person to whom they are calling maybe it won't work.

In that case you are testing empathy not telepathy, get your terms right.

 

[Xenocrates]

I don't hold scientists in higher regard than other folks. Those BS-ing politicians and lawyers? They could have been scientists with different advice and opportunity and vice versa. To expect more from scientists is not reasonable. Every idea on it's merit I say!

There was one ecperiment where we had to measure the radioactivity of a sample for some reason. When I put it into the gieger counter, the reading decreased. Everyone who had done that experiment before me didn't say a single word. They must have plucked their results out o' their trousers; hundreds of people. The explanation is that the gieger counter was so old and irradiated that the sample absorbed more radiation than it emitted. Because no one could think of that, they all pretended that it didn't happen.

That's normal practice.

 

[Xenocrates]

\

OK, here's my list.

1. My dad, who works at a computer company.
2. A friend who goes to college.
3. My grandmother, who is retired and lives at home.
4. My boss at work.

I get a call at 10:30 in the morning. Unless I'm a total idiot, what am I gonna guess?

If you are measuring telepathy then there is no reason to select people that the volunteer knows at all. The only point of doing so, clearly, was to give the volunteer a not-so-hidden advantage in that he was already familiar with the behavior patterns of the potential callers.

I'm very interested in claims of telepathy and (more importantly) distance empathy, but bunk science is bunk science.

The 4 callers were all in a room and under supervision, they did not decide when to call. Sheldrake makes this clear. It's a short paper (only about 1 page), you can read it easily! There is no way any preknowledge of behaviour patterns could have affected the results. He even discusses that possibility.

In that case you are testing empathy not telepathy, get your terms right.

Fair point; he has noticed that people who know each other sometimes score better on these tests. It is empathy in a way, but that's just a species of telepathy. You pedantic hair splitter

I'm really tempted to email Sheldrake and get him to defend his own work instead of me!

 

[Samson]

Actually, contrary to common sense, parapsychology stuff gets a LOT more peer review than anything else. Everyone's out to debunk these guys and, to date, no one's managed to debunk Sheldrake and he's been around for a long time now.

In mainstream science, researchers try to ape the results of their illustrious forebears (it's true, I've been there), but in this field everyone's out to debunk you.

Sheldrake uses the biggest samples that he can and he appears to me to use scientifically accurate methods. In the online staring experiment, he used 6860 trials, giving a positive result 60.6% of the time (miles over the expected 50%). This can't be dismissed lightly! He was drawn to internet based experimentation because he could get a high sample size and do cheap experiments. He gives his methods and invites you to reproduce his work; 'low sample size' is an invalid criticism now. It's more a question of whether you dismiss something that has experimental evidence for it for unscientific reasons and whether you can find an alternative explanation for the phenomena.

But where is this published? As I pointed out the trail he refers to in the paper in the OP that has 850 trials and p= 1x10-26 was not published in a peer reviewed jornal but a book writen by Sheldrake. Where are you getting your numbers from?

My point about the quality of the publication was based on the fact that it had only 12 trials, each a binary result. I cannot imagine a paper in genetics being published with that sort of level of statistical significance.

Lastly The CIA spent at least $20,000,000 on 'remote viewing' programmes over two decades or more. Wouldn't they have shut down the operation early if it was drawing a blank?



From http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/air1995.pdf

The Indians have recently started their own remote viewing and have reported successes against Pakistani intelligence by using it. The article here is very interesting, but there are potential flaws and it could be a smokescreen (who knows?) http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/12-13-04.asp

Interesting stuff!

Note that this paper at www.fas.org is not a peer reviewed paper.

 

[JerichoHill]

The sample size in terms of the number of possible people is too small. I cannot believe the validity of this paper.

 

[Sidhe]

People who do stirling work in the field of parapsychology use scientific method, that is double blind trials and then repeat them, usually doing it with large control groups to discount the possibility of experimental errors and statisitcal anomolies; there's no reason why we shouldn't hold parasychological studies up to the same rigour we do scientific studies, in fact there's even more reason to be especially careful, because of the skeptical elements outside the field.

I find the experiment very interesting and worthy of further research but like most people with an interest in parapsychology I'm not going to throw my cap in the air because of one experiment and neither will most respectable people working in this field. It's interesting it could be viable, but that's all you can say so far. The sample is large enough to warrant further investigation, but too small to make any firm judgements.

 

[JerichoHill]

Okay, I read the whole paper.

If I did this kind of work at my job, I would be fired. Its abhorrent.

Here are the problems
1) Sample Size: We have 12 observations, 4 variables. Degrees of freedom are 12-4-1 = 7. We need at least df=30 for a valid experiment, and for a sociology experiment like this, it would need to be at least 100 in my opinion. This pretty much invalidates the experiment

2) There were no repeated samples. This is an isolated observation. In order to be valid, this same test should have been redone tens or hundreds of times. It was not. Since it is an isolated case, an observation above the expected value could easily occur.

3) There were 12 observations within the 1st observed test. You can flip a quarter 12 times and get heads each time, but additional sampling would smooth out the probabilities. They didn't do this.

4) They improperly use the p stat above. p,t,and f stats show statistical significance. Statistical significance does not equate to true significance. See: McCloskey

Xeno, if you still want to argue that this is valid science, I will gladly rip this sucker to shreds

 

[Perfection]

That's where you learn the trade and the bad habits start.

You don't learn the trade as an undergrad. You learn it as a postgrad.

Can you elaborate? It looks like the abstract is fair to me.

Meh, I misread it. Instead of it being wrong it just has statistically insignificant results. p=.05 happens in one in 20 experiments.

The whole of relativity was lifted and Einstein provided zero references at the end of his paper. Well an undergraduate couldn't get away with that. Plagiarism of the highest degree.

Well it wasn't lifted, yes Einstein lacked references, and yes he didn't give credit where it was deserved but he added quite a bit to it making it a novel and useful theory.

Poor followed the solar eclipse of 1919 and demonstrated that Einstein was right about the scale constant. How did he do it? Simple, he discarded the results that he didn't like! This is standard practice. Sheldrake doesn't gloss over stuff like this, he admits possible sources of error and discusses them.

No, it's not standard practice. You're listing isolated incidents from 100 years ago and assuming it's commonplace today. That's a stupid way to support your statements. Also shelrake glosses over the fact that it's quite possible that this was just chance. Being 1/20 is not enough to convince me.

Nope, the results would have deviated both sides of the 'real' figure. They didn't, they slowly crept up as if the scientists were ashamed to declare results too deviant from those of Milikan. This is the only sensible explanation.

Well, let's reign this in, what does it have to do with telephone telepathy?

The paper is here http://sheldrake.org/papers/Telepathy/Nolan.html. I trust it's to your liking!

No, that's the paper on her thing for 20-20 where's the paper for the 42% thingy?

 

[Brighteye]

The idea of morphic fields is more of the 'communal mind' variety and not connected with the 'evil eye' or anything Platonic. He says that everything in the Universe 'knows' where it is in relation to everything else. This explains one of the biggest mysteries of biology: cell determination. How else do foetal cells 'know' what to turn into? An important characteristic of proteins is the shape into which they are folded. Why do all (most) proteins with the same formula fold into the same shape? Apparently it's not the configuration of least energy. His is a general theory, that he has chosen to study through parapsychology; it's not a parapsychology theory.

Personally I think he's on to something.......

Foetal cells are guided by molecular signals. Proteins are helped to fold by chaperone proteins. One in particular has been in the (scientific) news recently because it's thought to be involved in Parkinson's.

 

[Brighteye]

The whole of relativity was lifted and Einstein provided zero references at the end of his paper. Well an undergraduate couldn't get away with that. Plagiarism of the highest degree. Poor followed the solar eclipse of 1919 and demonstrated that Einstein was right about the scale constant. How did he do it? Simple, he discarded the results that he didn't like! This is standard practice. Sheldrake doesn't gloss over stuff like this, he admits possible sources of error and discusses them.

Talk about glossing over results! Sheldrake gets a measly p=0.05 and conveniently forgets to mention all the studies people have done that show no support for telepathy. That's ignoring inconvenient data.

And if scientists don't publish odd results immediately, that's the opposite of Sheldrake; that's looking at what seems to be the weight of evidence and letting that part of your work slide because you seem to be getting odd results.

Maybe you chat about it at next year's conference, and a couple of other labs try it. A year or two later you're at another conference and you chat again, and they agree. Together you suggest a concerted study. Another year later you have your results, and maybe a year after that you publish.

That's called reasonable caution. Sheldrake is completely ignoring the weight of evidence, and the weight of theory, and reading things into results that are insignificant when compared to all the other results that have been obtained.

 

[mdwh]

He is experimenting on telepathy. If the caller doesn't know the person to whom they are calling maybe it won't work. Who knows.

If they are telepathic, they don't need to be told to know who they are calling...

 

[phoenix_night]

How would one go about using the ability to predict phonecalls to give oneself a personal advantage?

So telepathy exists only within the domain of telecommunication?

 

[Irish Caesar]

Who needs a study to know telephone telepathy is real? Anyone who's had a phone for more than a week has experienced it.

Yeah, that's my thoughts, too.

 

[Pontiuth Pilate]

Okay, I read the whole paper.

If I did this kind of work at my job, I would be fired. Its abhorrent.

Here are the problems
1) Sample Size: We have 12 observations, 4 variables. Degrees of freedom are 12-4-1 = 7. We need at least df=30 for a valid experiment, and for a sociology experiment like this, it would need to be at least 100 in my opinion. This pretty much invalidates the experiment

2) There were no repeated samples. This is an isolated observation. In order to be valid, this same test should have been redone tens or hundreds of times. It was not. Since it is an isolated case, an observation above the expected value could easily occur.

3) There were 12 observations within the 1st observed test. You can flip a quarter 12 times and get heads each time, but additional sampling would smooth out the probabilities. They didn't do this.

4) They improperly use the p stat above. p,t,and f stats show statistical significance. Statistical significance does not equate to true significance. See: McCloskey

Xeno, if you still want to argue that this is valid science, I will gladly rip this sucker to shreds

I don't need to know statistics to know that this study is bunk. The fact that the same experiment could have been performed more simply, more elegantly, and at less cost for more precise results immediately waves the red flag. Introducing extraneous variables (picking relatives etc.) is proof of an intent to deliberately muddle the experiment to suit the biases of the researcher.

 

[Stormrage]

I`m a phone telepath, so I belive in that study

 

[Neomega]

I am a cynic....

But i've seen my grandma do it before.

She said, "oh, there's Lisa"... and not 10 seconds later the phone rang, and my cousin Lisa called to let us know her flight came in half an hour early, and she needed to be picked up.

 

[Xenocrates]

You don't learn the trade as an undergrad. You learn it as a postgrad.

You think people can depart by 180 degrees from the habits that they have got into? I've seen it with my own eyes man! At postgrad level people commonly pick data that supports their argument and ignore those that don't. We see it here every day on OT; it's normal human behaviour to do this. Scientists are humans, right?

Meh, I misread it. Instead of it being wrong it just has statistically insignificant results. p=.05 happens in one in 20 experiments.

And now we've got a good reason to look more carefully at this. If you look at all the positive results from all telepathy experiments since 1900 you get an astonishing 2% bias in favour of some form of telepathy existing. That's hundreds of thousands of results if not more. (I'll look for the paper for you, give me time). Maybe all of these studies were flawed, it wouldn't surprise me at all. All the more reason to do some better ones.

No, it's not standard practice. You're listing isolated incidents from 100 years ago and assuming it's commonplace today. That's a stupid way to support your statements. Also shelrake glosses over the fact that it's quite possible that this was just chance. Being 1/20 is not enough to convince me.

You said the his work deviated from the scientific method. I said that the scientific method is largely a fiction, because politics/business interests and other psychological effects affect scientists as they affect everyone else. Take climate change for example. At first it was ridiculed by the majority of scientists. Then they flipped over on-masse in a relatively short space of time and only a few dissidents were left on the other side. Scientists display sheep-like behaviour as much as we do.

Give the guy more money and he'll give you greater significance than 1/20 (or not as the case may be ).

Well, let's reign this in, what does it have to do with telephone telepathy?

I can't remember what we were talking about here, but it may be that I was arguing with you that you required greater rigour from experiments that you disaproved of than for experiments that you don't. Most people wouldn't make these criticisms about experiments that backed up what they already believed!

No, that's the paper on her thing for 20-20 where's the paper for the 42% thingy?

I'm starting to lose my will to live here ; it's hard work being on my own against all of you guys all the time. In my next thread I'm going to break habit and be with the majority! It's on the man's website somewhere if I didn't link it.


Just give me a damn reason (a good one please) why telepathy is impossible and I'll return the favour by picking the same kind of holes in your theory That'll learn ya!

 

[Xenocrates]

I don't need to know statistics to know that this study is bunk. The fact that the same experiment could have been performed more simply, more elegantly, and at less cost for more precise results immediately waves the red flag. Introducing extraneous variables (picking relatives etc.) is proof of an intent to deliberately muddle the experiment to suit the biases of the researcher.

Another reactionary!

Well since he postulates that people who know each other display a stronger effect this doesn't seem unreasonable. Under the conditions of the experiment, where the researcher's picked the caller and the group was under constant observation it's very hard to argue that this is could bias the experiment. Exactly how do you think that this could bias the experiment?

Your only argument is that this was a fluke 1/20 result as far as I can see. maybe so, maybe not.

 

[Pontiuth Pilate]

We see it here every day on OT; it's normal human behaviour to do this. Scientists are humans, right?

If you're suggesting that the average scientist exercises the same intellectual rigor as the average OT poster, that's pretty damned insulting.

At first it was ridiculed by the majority of scientists. Then they flipped over on-masse in a relatively short space of time and only a few dissidents were left on the other side. Scientists display sheep-like behaviour as much as we do.

Up until 1944, nearly all scientists believed that the vector of genetic inheritance was nucleic proteins. By 1953, nearly all agreed that the basis of genes lied in DNA. Why did they display this "sheep-like behavior"?

The answer is a word you may find foreign: EVIDENCE.

Well since he postulates that people who know each other display a stronger effect this doesn't seem unreasonable.

Yet again that is empathy not telepathy OR precognition. Guy can't even get his own pseudoscience right!

Exactly how do you think that this could bias the experiment?

By introducing unnecessary variables, whose interactions are difficult or impossible to pinpoint. This immediately renders the experiemnt's results suspicious.

Either the experimenter deliberately set out to bias the experiment, or he doesn't know HOW to conduct a proper single variable experiment. Let's see him get the same results with the method I described.

Like I said I am interested in his claims, but I can't in good faith accept the experiment he conducted as anything but bullcrap.

 

[Xenocrates]

If you're suggesting that the average scientist exercises the same intellectual rigor as the average OT poster, that's pretty damned insulting.

Insulting - yes, true also - yes You ever walked along a bus queue and heard the BS conversations that other people are having? It's the same in science labs. To the credit of OT we don't talk that kind of banality very often!

Up until 1944, nearly all scientists believed that the vector of genetic inheritance was nucleic proteins. By 1953, nearly all agreed that the basis of genes lied in DNA. Why did they display this "sheep-like behavior"?

There's still a case for the involvement of proteins in inheritance. http://www.molgen.mpg.de/~ag_krobitsch/11260797.pdf#search=%22protein%20genetic%20inheritance%22

You've supported my point. Proteins were the fashion, then they weren't. Now they're coming into vogue again. You find evidence only if you look for it. You look for it if you believe it may be there (and can persuade a funding body of the same). Absence of evidence is sometimes due to the absence of money to search for it! If you say their aren't fashions in science - you've got to be joking!

Yet again that is empathy not telepathy OR precognition. Guy can't even get his own pseudoscience right!

Firstly it could be precognition or it could be telepathy (demonstrated by the result). How can we tell the difference? Personally I'm not really concerned about which it is. If he can demonstrate that one or the other is happening it's a major scientific breakthrough.

By introducing unnecessary variables, whose interactions are difficult or impossible to pinpoint. This immediately renders the experiemnt's results suspicious.

I still don't get this point.

Either the experimenter deliberately set out to bias the experiment, or he doesn't know HOW to conduct a proper single variable experiment. Let's see him get the same results with the method I described.

Email him with your method and we'll see what happens! I think there aren't any advantages to your method, but we'll see if Sheldrake agrees.

Like I said I am interested in his claims, but I can't in good faith accept the experiment he conducted as anything but bullcrap.

I wish he's nail one experiment down to a greater probability. I wish he'd just stick to one area and get it done, but he shows some wunderlust and before letting the concrete set on one experiment, he moves to another. But to be fair to him, he's just trying to illuminate the way so that other researchers can follow.

There's a chance that a modest fluke was responsible for the telephone result, but if he had more trials and got the probability up to 99% I'll wager that you'd still say that the 1% fluke chance is the answer and not the 99% telepathy/precognition chance. At what probability point would you be willing to accept the result?