[extropy-chat] Re: Damien grants psi evidence

[Damien Broderick]

At 08:41 AM 12/17/2004 +1100, Brett Paatsch wrote:

>>>As for psi phenomena, there is plenty of experimental evidence.
>>Granting this (as I do, to the horror of many extropes), ....
>
>That's interesting.  I'd normally rate your baloney filters pretty
>highly, so I wonder what experimental evidence of what psi
>phenomena you'd grant?

The margins of this email are too narrow to give the full evidence. Look, 
e.g., at the material I've url'd in previous posts, from Professor Jessica 
Utts (and her skeptical foe Professor Ray Hyman) at

http://anson.ucdavis.edu/~utts/

perhaps starting with her stuff linked from:

<In the Fall of 1995 Professor Ray Hyman (University of Oregon) and I 
prepared a report assessing the statistical evidence for psychic 
functioning in U.S. government sponsored research. The report was part of a 
review done by the American Institutes of Research (AIR) at the request of 
Congress and the CIA. >

That assessed material is acknowledged not to be the strongest operational 
data derived from the Stargate program, which remains classified, so 
disagreements persist. Still, Utts makes a fair case for psi.

A more adventurous glimpse (with lots of laffs) is Jim Schnabel's REMOTE 
VIEWERS.

Research continues. I think I provided an url recently to an interesting 
protocol by Prof Suitbert Ertel, who claims to be getting robust, 
repeatable psi effects, using a haptic protocol, by screening his subjects 
in advance and concentrating thereafter on those who aced the screen; some 
will have done so by chance fluctuation, and hence will fall to chance 
subsequently; the `psi stars', it is supposed, will persist. (And obviously 
those screening data are not added back in as part of Ertel's evidential 
data, as skeptics will routinely surmise on the assumption that all lab 
parapsychologists are fools or rogues.) (And of course most professional 
astrologers, tea-readers and `psychics' *are* fools or rogues.)

Damien Broderick