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12th October 2010, 09:04 AM | #1 |
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Bem's latest experiments / Researcher says we can see the future
I thought folks might be interested in Daryl Bem's recent experiments, to be published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf ~~ Paul |
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12th October 2010, 08:58 PM | #2 |
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"The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. The term is purely descriptive; it neither implies that such phenomena are paranormal nor connotes anything about their underlying mechanisms."
I've predicted the future, nothing extraordinary about that! No need to discuss the hated word paranormal. It's not magic, it's a perfectly ordinary occurrence!!! This guy has been taking obfuscation lessons from Rramjet. Apparently he was valedictorian in Rramjet's Obfuscation for Dummies Workshop. Edit: Ahahaha, he takes an oblique potshot at ECREE on the bottom of page 2. |
13th October 2010, 04:05 PM | #3 |
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"The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. The term is purely descriptive; it neither implies that such phenomena are paranormal nor connotes anything about their underlying mechanisms."
This is actually a fairly good definition of psi that doesn't beg the question. The interesting thing about Bem's paper is that all the experiments are based on the same hypothesis: time-reversed information flow. ~~ Paul |
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13th October 2010, 05:39 PM | #4 |
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14th October 2010, 12:45 AM | #5 |
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Bem's work is impressive, and this looks to be a more solid demonstration of psi than the ganzfeld. But I do wonder about the lack of a control group. I know this is an old criticism but in a couple of these experiments, the subject is asked which of two mirror images they prefer (this choice is then "influenced" retro-actively by them subliminally seeing the computer's random choice).
But if the image is of, say, a person then the choice isn't random. Am I right in thinking that there was a study done that showed that people preferred pictures of people facing to the right? So the initial choice of the subject isn't random. So those occasions where the computer chooses the rightward option, you can't say “Ah, this is retro-causation making people choose this option” because that's what they've more likely to have chosen anyway. And while you'd expect that to even out to 50% of the time, I'd like to be sure that the experimenters knew about this effect and accounted for it. After all, we're looking at a difference of a couple of percentage points on that particular experiment. It'd be interesting to see how the figures were for those targets which otherwise would have been chosen less frequently. This is link to an article that nicely summarises Bem's experiments http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...chic-phenomena |
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14th October 2010, 02:23 AM | #6 |
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If it were true that people could indeed foresee future events, could this be explained within a materialistic worldview? What do you think?
(I know that this is probably a dumb question, but I'm very curious about this study. It looks rather solid in my opinion.) |
14th October 2010, 02:30 AM | #7 |
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My hunch is that time is the joker in the pack. Both these and the pre-sentiment experiments deal with predictions of events in the very near future (less than a second), so perhaps "now" isn't as strictly defined as we think.
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14th October 2010, 05:50 AM | #8 |
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It will be interesting to see how this is received among psychologists more generally. I agree that parapsychology research would benefit from a broader input from other fields, although I hope that they do not take him up on the proposal to repeat uncontrolled experiments, but rather consider improving the design.
However, even if non-artefactual, these experiments don't seem to have anything to do with what we think of as 'psi'. I realize that psi has now been defined in such a way as to incorporate these results, but it borders on bizarre to claim that the potentially tiny effect of a fuzziness in our perceptions on the order of milliseconds can be presumed to relate to claims of presentiment. It would make more sense to relate these experiments to those of Libet, I think. Much about the presentation of this selection of experiments is the same as other experiments, so I admit to some tedium on reading through it. But there were several things I found interesting, so far. Bem (finally) raises the issue of the actual placement of targets instead of a theoretical randomness when it comes to analysis (as Ersby referred to above). He didn't go so far as to make this a preference in terms of analysis, apply this analysis to all the experiments, or to design experiments which would obviate this effect, but at least he recognized the issue. And one of his analyses even provided a reasonable accommodation for this effect. It did modify the effect by a small amount. The other part I found interesting was the discussion section titled "The File Drawer". It is interesting to get a glimpse of the much larger collection of data from which this selection was culled, although it does give some hints as to the extent to which statistical assumptions are violated. However, for much of the experiments, Bem demonstrates that taking many measures and then dividing people into many different groups on the basis of those measures allows you to sometimes find 'statistically significant' differences in between group measures. He 'tests' some alternate explanations for those differences with varying success and leaves it at that. Residual 'unexplained' differences are meant to serve as confirmation of 'anomalous cognition', rather than simply a measure of the limits of his cleverness or of any interest by critics (i.e. the extent to which switching the burden of type I and type II errors helps us arrive at true results). As Ersby mentions, one wonders at the lack of control groups. Linda |
14th October 2010, 08:05 AM | #9 |
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I've not read the entire paper, but as for the first experiment color me unimpressed.
So they start with some images. Men test no better than chance. So, those numbers get thrown out. They change images. Men test better than chance. They keep those numbers. Other subgroups test worse than chance. Those numbers get tossed out. It is trivial, given a large set of results with different possible sub-groupings, to find 'statistically relevant' results. Especially when you ignore non-relevant results and start the test over. Now, of course that objection can be overcome if with this specific design researchers are able to duplicate the results over and over again. But, color me nonplussed. Things never move forward in PSI research, you always have some new experimental design, with a bunch of subgroups, playing around with the experimental design until you get 'statistically significant' results, at which point you stop, publish, and never revisit that experiment again. This very paper is an example of that. Instead of all the hand-wringing analysis on how more trials would be good, but they have limited time and budget, on nine separate experiments, how about 9 runs of a single experiment? And how about that discussion? More splitting into subgroups: proponent vs skeptic; extravert vs intravert. Hand waving away studies that don't replicate the results. Hand waving away the "pilot" studies which showed no effect. Claiming that too long sessions cause the effect to go away out of fatique or boredom (talk about assuming your conclusion). Bringing in quantum mechanics. edit: sorry Linda, you raised the same points, didn't you? |
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14th October 2010, 08:32 AM | #10 |
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So let's say it's some sort of retrocausality. Do I need to see and react to the selected target? Or is it sufficient simply to select the target after I make my choice? Let's run one of the experiments without showing the subjects the selected target.
I'm not sure there can be an objection based on the target being displayed quickly after the subject makes her choice. In the first experiment, for example, the subject is staring at two blank curtains and then chooses one of them. Only after that is the target selected and displayed. Presumably there is no way the subject can see the target before making her choice. ~~ Paul |
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14th October 2010, 08:35 AM | #11 |
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Originally Posted by roger
I agree with you that it's rather odd that all the supposedly time-consuming work was spread over many different kinds of experiments. ~~ Paul |
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14th October 2010, 08:40 AM | #12 |
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The section you mention talks about the placement of left or right targets (unless there's another bit of the paper I missed), but not of the content of the target itself. There's an article on Google Books which describes what I was talking about...
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=l...palmer&f=false |
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14th October 2010, 08:44 AM | #13 |
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Why did they use one-tailed tests? Wouldn't it be just as interesting if the subjects guessed significantly under the expected number?
It's also interesting to note that nonerotic but negative images did not produce any results. I guess the subjects realized that it was the erotic images that were important. ~~ Paul |
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14th October 2010, 08:46 AM | #14 |
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Say, this would be perfect for an online experiment where you could recruit thousands of people. A little Java applet would do the trick.
~~ Paul |
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14th October 2010, 08:47 AM | #15 |
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14th October 2010, 08:49 AM | #16 |
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I have a couple of earlier papers by Bem actually that looked highly impressive - I will withold comment till I have read this one, but as always I'm happy to look up references for people
cj x |
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14th October 2010, 09:20 AM | #17 |
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Originally Posted by roger
So retrocausality requires that the future event be extremely emotional in order to affect the past event. I love the way he says "Because this appeared to have arisen from men's lower arousal ...". How the heck does he know that? ~~ Paul |
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14th October 2010, 09:21 AM | #18 |
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14th October 2010, 11:25 AM | #19 |
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14th October 2010, 11:42 AM | #20 |
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Paul says...
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BTW, how's Skeptiko holding up without me? |
14th October 2010, 01:11 PM | #21 |
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Fast Eddie! Welcome to the JREF forum. It's the usual stuff over there, except that I've noticed a distinct hush has fallen in the Haven. Perhaps they are bored with their New York Review of Each Other's Books.
~~ Paul |
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15th October 2010, 08:24 PM | #22 |
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Yes, it will. My prediction is that they will take little notice of it. Not of lot of comments one way or the other.
Quote:
When I was older and learned more about science, I came to understand why they conducted those experiments that way. It wasn't stupid, it was actually quite well considered. The way we measure and test things in the laboratory is quite different from what people might experience in the "real world". There are reasons for that. What we can reasonable measure is one of the constraints that experimenters must deal with.
Quote:
Actually, there are control groups with the last two experiments. Results are at about the same level of significance. The other experiments had control trials along with the experimental trials, so there was control data for each test subject. This was built into the test statistic.
Quote:
Actually, I would guess that these experiments were done sequentially. They all have a similar set up. The changes seem almost like tweaking to try to more precisely hone in on whatever it is that is showing up as significant in their experiments. Actually, they are explicit about which direction they expect the target hits to move in and why. There are some test situations where they are looking for a negative move rather than a positive one. The one-tailed test is appropriate.
Quote:
Yes, that's quite true. It would be interesting to see what the results would be over such a large sample. Do you think it likely he will do so? |
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16th October 2010, 01:48 AM | #23 |
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My issue with a control group only really applies to the retroactive habituation experiments. These experiments ask the subject to chose which of two mirror images they prefer, but there isn't a 50:50 chance that they'll chose either one because certain compositions are generally considered more "pleasing" (see the link in my last post). So my issue isn't with the randomisation process either, but with a concern that the RNG chose those targets which would've been picked whether retroactive habituation was occuring or not. To be sure, a control group could've been run.
I've attached a picture to illustrate my point. It's simplistic, but I hope it gets my point across. If the randomly chosen left/right option (the red line) happened to coincide with a certain characteristic of the target (for example, facing right), then a baseline 50:50 chance can't be assumed. I hope that's clear, anyway. |
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16th October 2010, 05:28 AM | #24 |
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Has Bem somehow controlled for micro-PK on the random number generators?
~~ Paul |
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16th October 2010, 05:46 AM | #25 |
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Does anyone want to hazard a guess as to what's happening? Has psi research finally steered itself toward something with a physical basis: retrocausality? Could that explain the Ganzfeld, too?
~~ Paul |
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16th October 2010, 06:13 AM | #26 |
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Originally Posted by Beth
~~ Paul |
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16th October 2010, 06:13 AM | #27 |
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He starts discussing this at about page 12. Basically, he rules it out by pointing out that the results are similar using a pseudo-RNG or a RNG. And realistically, since the PEAR data showed that if an effect was present, it meant that one number was influenced for every 10,000 that were not, it can hardly be expected that this could make a difference in a run of 36.
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16th October 2010, 06:19 AM | #28 |
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These experiments don't seem to distinguish themselves from the way that 'positive' results have been obtained for decades of parapsychology research. At best, he may have steered himself out of psi and into some of the interesting discoveries of non-parapsychological researchers before him.
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16th October 2010, 07:13 AM | #29 |
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I started reading the paper carefully. I think it's quite interesting that in the first two experiments, all the effect is obtained from the subjects high in "stimulus seeking" and none of the effect from the others.
In experiment 1, I still don't understand why the erotic pictures should produce the effect but the nonerotic negative pictures should not. How did the subjects "know" which ones they should react to? Did the instructions clue them in? Are young college students not disturbed by negative pictures? What if Bem had decided that the negative pictures weren't negative enough and made them worse? (He changed the erotic images for men because he decided they weren't erotic enough.) ~~ Paul |
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16th October 2010, 07:28 AM | #30 |
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Quote:
Quote:
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18th October 2010, 05:07 AM | #31 |
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Consider experiment 1. The sequence of trials is:
I've asked Bem for the data. ~~ Paul |
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20th October 2010, 03:00 AM | #32 |
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Hey Guys,
Long time lurker, finally posting I am planning on reading this article this week. However, reading all the posts above, I fear this paper will (how original) use quantummechanics as some sort of "paranormal explanation". A long time ago I learned some things about quantummechanics. Particlewaves etc. Unfortionately it's been a while and I have to admit that, even though I realise that the "what the bleep" interpretation is wrong. I can not really understand why exactly it is wrong, nor what the right interpretation of quantummechanics is. Can one of you maybe help me with a link to a page that is good at explaining the observation part in quantummechanics? I did some searching myself but I only seem to run into paranormal explanations or very difficult ones. |
20th October 2010, 04:07 AM | #33 |
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That a good point. It would be interesting to present the raw data on different kinds of experiments without any accompanying description of how the data was meant to be grouped (i.e. does this data point go with the one which precedes it or follows it?) and see if the kind of psi experiment they represent could be reliably identified.
Linda |
20th October 2010, 04:27 AM | #34 |
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I'm sorry, but I still don't understand why you think this is different from what Bem mentioned and what I mentioned - that the random choice, by the computer, happens to coincide with the non-random choices of the subjects, through chance or through association with a characteristic which influences choice or whatever. I also don't understand why this applies to the retroactive habituation experiment and not the other experiments, so I must be missing something. Note, I couldn't open the book chapter you linked to earlier (it told me my page limit had been exceeded or that I wasn't authorized).
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20th October 2010, 05:13 AM | #35 |
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20th October 2010, 05:41 AM | #36 |
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At this stage I couldn't hazard a guess. Unlike the presentiment experiments I cannot see an obvious artifact. Like you I would like to see the raw data.
I would also be interested in seeing the software design. Is the experiment really fully computer controlled, or does it have a facility for an experimenter to discard a trial due to an error? They mention a participant's data being removed altogether because of a high number of errors, I wonder how errors in general were treated. |
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20th October 2010, 06:12 AM | #37 |
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Also, as Roger points out, he does seem to allude to a lot of fiddling with the experimental design during the conduct of the experiment.
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20th October 2010, 07:22 AM | #38 |
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The issue I have with these two particular experiments is that there seems to be an assumption that of two mirror images, there's a 50-50 chance that someone will prefer either one. But this isn't the case, since (for example) people prefer people facing right.
A snippet from the Google Books article:
Quote:
This isn't a fatal flaw, by any means, but I would like to know that this was taken into account. |
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20th October 2010, 08:29 AM | #39 |
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Basically, QM is about elementary particle (and molecules & atoms) being modellable as a wave , and their property described through a wave function. An observation in the physical term, is an interraction with the wave which provocate a collapse and enable one to read eigen value of the particle observed, for example energy level. I am really summarizing here, but all woo pretending that the observer effect enable us to dostuff as human, are dead wrong, as QM has a specific definition of observing (interraction), and when we "observe" as human we don't interract with what we observe in any meaningful way. I recommend to look on wiki on QM to get the basics. |
20th October 2010, 08:38 AM | #40 |
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Okay. Parapsychologists generally seem to consider that they has been taken into account. When asked this question, they refer to a justification offered by Jessica Utts that it theoretically should not materially alter the results. The simple explanation is that though you may prefer to choose the right-facing target, and may do so on every trial, you should still only be right about half the time, as a random selection of targets will ensure that a right-facing target will only be selected about half the time. Yes, the variation expected from random sampling means that this 50-50 proportion is only a general tendency and that you will see usually see something a bit different from 50-50 and occasionally a lot different from 50-50. But this variation, and the probability of obtaining random targets which are a lot different from 50-50 and coincide with the choice of target by the subject, can presumably be described by the same distribution obtained by random sampling. Parapsychologists seem to consider this sufficient to mostly fail to take your concerns into account, and to occasionally attempt to see if they can discover this effect on post hoc analysis (as Bem attempts in this paper).
Now, I'm not sure that even theoretically this would work. When I've tried to play with this idea, it looks like this alters the variation so that the variance would no longer be accurately described by, for example, the binomial distribution, meaning that statements about expected probabilities based on a binomial distribution would be inaccurate. I haven't fully explored this though, so I may be wrong. And it is of little importance compared to the much bigger problem that it turns out in practice that the distribution of 'randomly selected' targets seems to be markedly different from the expected distribution. The few times we have been given the data on the distribution of targets, that distribution has been markedly different from chance. So we already suspect that statistical tests based on random sampling won't give us valid answers, regardless of whether they could in theory. Linda |
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