[ExI] few bits per second

[Damien Broderick]

On 6/28/2010 1:37 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:

> wouldn't you agree that the
> PEAR record is actually quite disappointing as evidence of psi goes?

The PEAR work wasn't just interested in looking for evidence of psi for 
the sake of it, over time it was more concerned with the process (and 
hence were prepared to accept low effect size). So even low effect size 
can be harnessed to investigate aspects such as whether number of bits 
per REG output unit influenced success rate,** gender correlates, etc.

> I mean, 2 events out of 100,000 is pretty low.

Some of their results were better than that (the remote viewing efforts, 
for example--but those have been seriously criticized from within the 
parapsych community); I think their insistence on getting the mechanisms 
bulletproof against critics meant that the tasks were unbearably drab 
and repetitive. Other protocols that are more natural and engaging, such 
as Ganzfeld and Remote Viewing, have shown much higher deviations from 
chance expectation without compromising their robustness.

>I am about 99% sure I
> have not seen credible evidence of any psi phenomena. I am about 85 -
> 95% percent sure that physics as we know it does not provide a basis
> for their existence...  What
> are your percentages here?

99% convinced. If it turns out that they're all lying or making some 
frightfully subtle procedural error, I'll change my mind, of course. And 
I've seen arguments by physicists who claim that psi looks to be 
consonant with the sorts of extensions that are needed to bridge the 
current gap between GR and QT.

**see e.g. http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_12_3_ibison.pdf

Damien Broderick