[extropy-chat] Re: Damien grants psi evidence

[John K Clark]

"Damien Broderick" <thespike at satx.rr.com>

> Utts is saying that further research needs to explore *process*,
> rather than the simple reality of the phenomenon.

Yes, I realize that is what she is saying, and that is why I say she is a
crackpot.  She used something called "meta-analysis", the idea is to
statistically lump lots of different experiments done by different people at
different times (42 as near as I can tell) and hope to get statistically
relevant results even if none of the individual experiments can do so. This
is a pretty dodgy technique even in the best of times but particularly bad
in this case because no area of human behavior is more full of fraud, self
deception, and stupidity than the investigation of the supernatural. With a
reputation like that to live down and wish to be taken seriously in this
field you must be more careful and honest than Caesar's wife. She wasn't.

Nor is that the only problem, Ray Hyman Of the University of Oregon
examined the series of experiments that gave the strongest ESP signal in
Utts analysis, I quote:

"My analysis demonstrated that certain flaws, especially quality of
randomization, did correlate with outcome. Successful outcomes correlated
with inadequate methodology."

Hyman thinks that carefully randomizing targets is always important but
concedes a reasonable person might have a different opinion, provided of
course that the target is used just once...

"but this was blatantly not the case" [.] "All of the significant hitting 
was
done on the second or later appearance of a target. If we examined the
guesses against just the first occurrences of targets, the result is
consistent with chance."

"The experimenter, who was not so well shielded from the sender as the
subject, interacted with the subject during the judging process. Indeed,
during half of the trials the experimenter deliberately prompted the subject
during the judging procedure. This means that the judgments from trial to
trial were not strictly independent."

And on the basis of this Mickey Mouse study Utts says ESP is as well
established as the law of conservation of momentum so further proof is
unnecessary. Crackpot!

>  Faraday didn't waste his life on ever-more careful demonstrations
> meant to show nothing more than that electricity exists.

Faraday had some good experiments and interesting ideas but it would be
decades after that before Maxwell put electromagnetic waves into
mathematical form, and decades after that before Hertz actually proved that
they exist by detecting them experimentally. To maintain Faraday would say
the sort of thing Utts did, that his experiments were so good there is no
need to even look for electromagnetic waves anymore, is an insult to his
memory.

  John K Clark    jonkc at att.net