Dean Radin's Take on Things

[Rodney]

See http://www.realitysandwich.com/what_gorilla

[Civilized Worm]

I saw the gorilla, does that mean I'm qualified to dismiss psychic phenomena?

[Gr8wight]

Yes, but what if we are told there will be a gorilla, and that the first person to spot the gorilla will win a prize, so the whole crowd at the basketball game is actively looking for the gorilla, but no one sees it? But let's say the people who put on the game insist there was a gorilla, but nobody could see it. What if we bring in people who have no actual interest whatsoever in the basketball game, and other people who are experts in the appearance of gorillas, and we have them look at the video record of the game, from a dozen camera angles, in extreme slow motion, and no one ever sees a gorilla? Except for one guy, who claims he saw a gorilla, but when asked to point it out on the videotape, cannot? How long should we go on believing there really was a gorilla? In those circumstances?

See, Rodney, in the video described by Mr. Radin, the gorilla was really there. Although most people did not see it the first time, after being told to look for it, almost everyone could see it on a second viewing. Not so your alleged paranormal which no one seems to be able to see, even when looking for it intensely. Mr. Radin needs a few lessons in constructing an analogy.

[leon_heller]

Radin's pronouncements on the results obtained by the PEAR people are comprehensively debunked here:

http://www.skepdic.com/pear.html

For someone who claims to have qualifications in psychology, he seems to be extremely gullible about the paranormal. It's usually physicists who take such stuff on board uncritically.

Leon

[Rodney]

Radin's pronouncements on the results obtained by the PEAR people are comprehensively debunked here:

http://www.skepdic.com/pear.html
You mean that they're debunked because Robert Todd Carroll states: "These data should remind us that statistical significance does not imply importance"?

[leon_heller]

You mean that they're debunked because Robert Todd Carroll states: "These data should remind us that statistical significance does not imply importance"?

That's one of the reasons. Without a theory of how the results come about the findings are quite useless, even if they are significant.

Leon

[Rodney]

That's one of the reasons. Without a theory of how the results come about the findings are quite useless, even if they are significant.
Leon
So if a new treatment for cancer produces results that are significantly above chance, it should be disregarded until there is a theory of how the treatment could work?

[plumjam]

That's one of the reasons. Without a theory of how the results come about the findings are quite useless, even if they are significant.

Leon

How silly.
We might as well stop investigating any and every anomalous aspect of reality then.

[leon_heller]

How silly.
We might as well stop investigating any and every anomalous aspect of reality then.

Of course we should! It's a total waste of time.

In over 100 years of investigations no-one has produced any scientific evidence for paranormal phenomena, let alone a convincing explanation of how they are supposed to arise.

Leon

[plumjam]

Of course we should! It's a total waste of time.

In over 100 years of investigations no-one has produced any scientific evidence for paranormal phenomena, let alone a convincing explanation of how they are supposed to arise.

Leon

One of the great engines behind progress in knowledge is the investigation of anomalies. We learn by looking at what doesn't fit into our current mode of understanding.
The notion of electromagnetic waves was not so long ago ridiculed by the scientific establishment; now it forms the basis of quite a proportion of our society.
Sorry, but your attitude seems to be one of putting your head in the sand when faced with anomalous data. That's just retrogressive, and a bit clingy.

You don't have to have a theory about how something arises in order to know, and honestly acknowledge, that it does arise.

[leon_heller]

So if a new treatment for cancer produces results that are significantly above chance, it should be disregarded until there is a theory of how the treatment could work?

I was referring to paranormal phenomena, as was Radin.

Leon

[plumjam]

I was referring to paranormal phenomena, as was Radin.

Leon

So your view is merely prejudice then.

[leon_heller]

One of the great engines behind progress in knowledge is the investigation of anomalies. We learn by looking at what doesn't fit into our current mode of understanding.
The notion of electromagnetic waves was not so long ago ridiculed by the scientific establishment; now it forms the basis of quite a proportion of our society.
Sorry, but your attitude seems to be one of putting your head in the sand when faced with anomalous data. That's just retrogressive, and a bit clingy.

You don't have to have a theory about how something arises in order to know, and honestly acknowledge, that it does arise.

Herz showed that there was an actual effect which coule be replicated. No paranormal studies have ever been successfully replicated by any reputable investigators.

Leon

[leon_heller]

So your view is merely prejudice then.

No. Can you show me one paranormal study that has been accepted by the scientific establishment.

Leon

[plumjam]

No. Can you show me one paranormal study that has been accepted by the scientific establishment.

Leon

The scientific establishment currently works on the assumption of naturalism. It would be no surprise at all, then, if no paranormal study had ever been widely accepted within it.
Acceptance by an establishment does not equal truth.
You might as well ask "Has any study finding Mohammed not to be a prophet been accepted within the Islamic establishment?"

[leon_heller]

The scientific establishment currently works on the assumption of naturalism. It would be no surprise at all, then, if no paranormal study had ever been widely accepted within it.
Acceptance by an establishment does not equal truth.
You might as well ask "Has any study finding Mohammed not to be a prophet been accepted within the Islamic establishment?"

What is wrong with naturalism? It's done a very good job of explaining things so far. Has anyone come up with anything better?

Leon

[Civilized Worm]

I feel dirty for saying it, but plumjam has a point. As people have been pointing out to Claus in the distance healing thread, you don't need to understand the mechanism to recognise wether something is having a measurable effect or not.

[Tanstaafl]

One of the great engines behind progress in knowledge is the investigation of anomalies. We learn by looking at what doesn't fit into our current mode of understanding.
The notion of electromagnetic waves was not so long ago ridiculed by the scientific establishment; now it forms the basis of quite a proportion of our society.
Sorry, but your attitude seems to be one of putting your head in the sand when faced with anomalous data. That's just retrogressive, and a bit clingy.

You don't have to have a theory about how something arises in order to know, and honestly acknowledge, that it does arise.


Yes, noticing anomalous data is often the beginning of discovery. However, a sensible scientist will want to have either 1) a plausible linkage between the items with the correlation, or 2) a rather large, clearly significant correlation.

No scientist should want to spend scarce time and money pursuing something that turns out to be just a statistical quirk.


The scientific establishment currently works on the assumption of naturalism. It would be no surprise at all, then, if no paranormal study had ever been widely accepted within it.
Acceptance by an establishment does not equal truth.
You might as well ask "Has any study finding Mohammed not to be a prophet been accepted within the Islamic establishment?"


This doesn't make a lot of sense. Yes, there is an assumption of naturalism, but that does not require a dogmatic rejection of paranormal claims. These effects, if they exist, could merely be the result of natural laws that we are, as yet, unaware of. I can't think of anything a scientist would like more than to be the first to discover a new law of nature.

[leon_heller]

The scientific establishment currently works on the assumption of naturalism. It would be no surprise at all, then, if no paranormal study had ever been widely accepted within it.
Acceptance by an establishment does not equal truth.
You might as well ask "Has any study finding Mohammed not to be a prophet been accepted within the Islamic establishment?"

I didn't say that "Acceptance by an establishment equals truth". I was referring to non-acceptance by the scientific establishment of evidence for the paranormal.

Leon

[Apathia]

Plumjam,

You make a good point.
It's one that is repeated over and over to would be contestants in the Million Dollar Challenge. We don't care a straw about explanations or metaphysical speculatiions. We just want to see the goods. Denonstrate that you can do the specific tested for, and win the prize. Theories later.

Now the pain our psychic investigators have suffered from the inception of their research back at Duke University is that a particular run will show greater than chance results, which seems to suggest something paranormal is happening. However, subsequent runs don't pan oiut with consistancy.
There's a huge lack of repeatability.

These days anxious researchers grab up a group of experiments without regard to their reliability and make a "meta-analysis." Results are still very marginal, not enough to satisfy a scentist who is looking for the way we can expect nature to behave.

One of the things I learned in college physics lab was that if there was any place in the universe where the laws of physics are going to break down in your face, it's in Physics Lab. But you see, these norms of physical behavior aren't established by one classfull of clumsy physics students. It needs habitual repeatability.

Shinola happens. For something to be significant, it needs to be an ordinary, regular behavior. If it's not that, then it might be worthy of further investigation if we have some idea of how the ordinary was circumvened in that particular instance.

There has been shinola in respect to ESP studies but nothing with consistancy you can count on.
Babble about why the product is better than Brand X is wothless unless the product delivers.
And yes, a product that actually delivers is better than one that in theory should.

[technoextreme]

The notion of electromagnetic waves was not so long ago ridiculed by the scientific establishment; now it forms the basis of quite a proportion of our society.

Ummmm.... Since when??? Most of the physics that dictate how our computers and everything else works were figured out over one hundred years ago. Next time when you pick a field a science don't pick one that actually invokes the word telegraph in a college course on the subject because the scientific establishment sure as hell got over what every problems they were having with it really quickly. I'll chalk that up to ignorance.

[Gord_in_Toronto]

One of the great engines behind progress in knowledge is the investigation of anomalies. We learn by looking at what doesn't fit into our current mode of understanding.
The notion of electromagnetic waves was not so long ago ridiculed by the scientific establishment; now it forms the basis of quite a proportion of our society.
Sorry, but your attitude seems to be one of putting your head in the sand when faced with anomalous data. That's just retrogressive, and a bit clingy.

You don't have to have a theory about how something arises in order to know, and honestly acknowledge, that it does arise.

Cite?

[CFLarsen]

Radin's pronouncements on the results obtained by the PEAR people are comprehensively debunked here:

http://www.skepdic.com/pear.html

And here, too:

Shapes In The Clouds (http://skepticreport.com/pseudoscience/shapesintheclouds.htm)
A commentary on "Information and Uncertainty in Remote Perception Research", Dunne and Jahn, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR).

For someone who claims to have qualifications in psychology, he seems to be extremely gullible about the paranormal. It's usually physicists who take such stuff on board uncritically.

Dean is the typical "I want to believe" type of fellow.

More information here:

An Evening With Dean Radin (http://skepticreport.com/pseudoscience/radin2002.htm)
I spent one of the last evenings of September 2002 attending a lecture by Dean Radin, author of "The Conscious Universe", on the Upper East Side, Manhattan, where he told about the Global Consciousness Project.

Book Review: The Conscious Universe, Dean Radin (http://skepticreport.com/pseudoscience/radinbook.htm)
The subject of the book is psi research, that is research concerning telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition. Radin claims that these phenomena are real and in the book he presents the evidence, which he thinks proves this.

I feel dirty for saying it, but plumjam has a point. As people have been pointing out to Claus in the distance healing thread, you don't need to understand the mechanism to recognise wether something is having a measurable effect or not.

I'm aware of that, and I'm not saying otherwise.

[leon_heller]

Sorry, but your attitude seems to be one of putting your head in the sand when faced with anomalous data. That's just retrogressive, and a bit clingy.

You don't have to have a theory about how something arises in order to know, and honestly acknowledge, that it does arise.

But science advances by proposing theories that can be tested. Simply running experiments that are claimed to produce anomalous results without a theory as to how they arise is a waste of time.

Leon

[leon_heller]

Something that makes me very suspicious about the PEAR investigations of the effect of intention on random number generation that Radin discusses at length is some correspondence I had with Prof. Jahn and the founder of Psyleron, John Valentino, who make the RNGs used in the current experiments into "global consciousness". As they appear to be ascribing their results to some sort of quantum effect, I asked them why they didn't use a quantum-based RNG like the Quantis unit made by idQuantique in their experiments. They rejected the suggestion out of hand, saying that

"As a result of these findings, we have come to believe that the phenomenon we are studying is not dependent on the noise source in any way that would lead to enhanced effect or merit a more thorough study of each and every individual type of device."

It appears that they they only want to use equipment they have designed themselves.

Leon

[Ersby]

Talk about people not seeing things which are clearly there, I doubt if Radin has ever wondered if he himself has the same blind spot when it comes to evidence against the paranormal.

[Pixel42]

I feel dirty for saying it, but plumjam has a point. As people have been pointing out to Claus in the distance healing thread, you don't need to understand the mechanism to recognise wether something is having a measurable effect or not.
It always annoys me when people dismiss something because "there's no known way in which it could work". If it works, it works, and if we don't know why then we'd have to find out. If that meant throwing away everything we currently understand about science and starting again from scratch then that's what we would have to do. But we won't do that until whatever it is has been shown to still work after all the ways in which we know we can inadvertantly fool ourselves have been carefully and methodically eliminated. No supposedly paranormal phenomenon has so far survived that process.

[cgallaga]

Kind of cheeky of Radin to use the same vision test that Shermer used to demonstrate the faulty and selective perception inherent in paredolia.

[Civilized Worm]

What is wrong with naturalism? It's done a very good job of explaining things so far. Has anyone come up with anything better?

Leon


Plumjam believes that scientists are conspiring to maintain the naturalistic paradigm by suppressing evidence of psi and intelligent design.

Good luck getting him to back up his position though.