[extropy-chat] Re: Damien grants psi evidence

[Damien Broderick]

At 07:18 PM 12/18/2004 +1100, Brett wrote:

>Because the 'just show the RVer the options' protocol would be easier
>in practice to implement than a protocol involving judges, this suggests
>that judges protocol is being used because the 'just show the RVer the
>options' protocol has already been tried and found to be unsatisfactory
>to the researchers.
>
>There would have needed to have been a motivating reason to add
>complexity (and therefore cost) to the simplest most obvious protocol
>that could work.

As I said at some point, the margins of this email are too small. Here are 
two additional motives for using judges during the STAR GATE and research 
programs:

If you ask for a remote view of one target out of 4 or 5, and then show the 
percipient a picture or multimedia display of the chosen option, or take 
him to the place to walk through up close, you can't also display the other 
non-chosen options without risking muddying the waters.

But the key motive is probably that these protocols were developed for 
military intelligence, where the RVer was trying to gather information 
paranormally about some place or person he would never see in reality, 
possibly never get *any* feedback on. In that case, judges would probably 
be intelligence operatives who had provided the mission target or who 
perhaps possessed only some indistinct satellite pictures, etc. Does any of 
this work? Well, these programs were funded on an annual basis for more 
than a decade.

Actually I'm less interested in remote viewing and Ganzfeld protocols than 
in much simpler experiments such as Suitbert Ertel's current trials where 
Ss draw numbered balls from a bag (with replacement) after guessing the 
numbers. Using pre-screened `star' Ss, Ertel claims a robust success rate 
averaging 70% where 50% +/- is expected by chance. Simple, elegant, totally 
pointless except as evidence of psi. Strangely enough, the obvious 
fallibilities of this test have also occurred to Ertel, who has set up 
procedures to obviate them.

On a personal note: am I driven by an obsessive wish to believe, to find 
evidence for some magic in the world? Maybe, but I don't think so. I also 
think it'd be great if cold fusion were true, and it seems that some 
continuing work there is also worth noting, but I couldn't really care one 
way or the other. If marginal psi effects are real, they could indicate 
something interesting about consciousness, or whether we're in a tweakable 
simulation, or about time-reversal and entanglement in QT. In the short 
term, reliable technologies based on them would make somebody very rich; 
that was my main motivation in studying the Lotto data.

Damien Broderick