[extropy-chat] Scientific standards of evidence

[Damien Broderick]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Spike" <spike66 at comcast.net>
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2003 10:37 AM

> Remarkable!  Only a few months ago, I was out riding
> a motorcycle, and when I got home I learned my wife
> had gotten a pain in her ribs.  It happened right
> while I was out on the bike!  In the many worlds
> interpretation of quantum mechanics, some subset of
> my probability distribution wavefunction gets
> squashed every time I go out riding, so in some
> alternate universe, she got the rib pain
> *right at the same time I was nailed.*

This drollery and more like it serves to show effectively why unanticipated
one-off anecdotal cases of apparently weird coincidence count for very
little.

Oddly enough, this was one strong motive for the parapsychologist in the
1930s, and later, to create artificial (although starkly inhospitable and
perhaps counterproductive) environments where they sought to solicit eerie
deviations from chance on a repeatable basis. The discipline using this
insight is known as parapsychology. < pause for outburst of guffaws,
especially from those who have read very little of the lab-based literature
>

Yes, there are always some universes in the MWI where a `psychic
coincidence' is emulated one time by chance, but far fewer where this
happens to the same people with frequency such that the null hypothesis is
most sensibly abandoned.

The usual example I roll out at this point is the vast data base compiled at
Princeton University (at the PEAR lab); interestingly, a couple of large
attempted replications of those experiments have recently failed to attain
significance. So the battle-tested evidence for psi is apparently shrinking.

On the other hand, a fine-grained analysis of anomalous results in long
sequences of random events, conducted by my friend Fotini Pallikari (a
colleague of Physics Nobelist Brian Josephson), suggests that there *is*
something intriguing going on under the surface of apparently stochastic
sequences, at least when physically unmediated human intention supervenes.
Her paper is in the PSI WARS issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies,
abstracts and a critical paper in full at

http://www.imprint.co.uk/jcs_10_6-7.html

Damien Broderick