AND, it was ONE test. Now,it needs replication for credibility. I’ll ‘predict’ the failed replications get none of the headlines generated by the initial test.

To use the extreme as an example of how these people see statistics and probabilities as tools to prove their ideas:  If one tosses a coin there is a 50% probability that it will land heads.  If one of us states strongly that it will come up heads, and the other of us states just as strongly that it will come up tails, and we toss the coin we will see that came up one or the other of those choices. Well this just goes to show that one person was wrong, and the other had an amazing level of precognition. 

Occam

Article about this in the NYTimes today, front page below the fold. See HERE:

Journal’s Paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: January 5, 2011

One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.

The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn. ...

The story is decent enough, as far as it goes, but one quibble I have is with this point:

... if ESP exists, why aren’t people getting rich by reliably predicting the movement of the stock market or the outcome of football games?

The problem is that one doesn’t need ESP to reliably predict such things. (At least, it’s not clear that one does). If one is smart enough to be able to know all the variables that go into the problem, one may be able to reliably predict such things.

The better example involves lottery tickets or gaming outcomes at slots, cards, roulette, etc. If ESP of the kind Bem suggests were real, we’d expect people to win at these games of chance significantly more than would be expected by sheer chance. But AFAIK there is absolutely no evidence that they do.

That alone is a refutation of the claim that people have precognitive ESP.

dougsmith - 06 January 2011 06:47 AM

Article about this in the NYTimes today, front page below the fold. See HERE:

Journal’s Paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: January 5, 2011

One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.

The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn. ...

The story is decent enough, as far as it goes, but one quibble I have is with this point:

... if ESP exists, why aren’t people getting rich by reliably predicting the movement of the stock market or the outcome of football games?

The problem is that one doesn’t need ESP to reliably predict such things. (At least, it’s not clear that one does). If one is smart enough to be able to know all the variables that go into the problem, one may be able to reliably predict such things.

The better example involves lottery tickets or gaming outcomes at slots, cards, roulette, etc. If ESP of the kind Bem suggests were real, we’d expect people to win at these games of chance significantly more than would be expected by sheer chance. But AFAIK there is absolutely no evidence that they do.

That alone is a refutation of the claim that people have precognitive ESP.

Ah, but ESP does not work when used for gain. Why it would not is a mystery. Perhaps clarity of mind.

Excellent article in the NYTimes Science Section today on the statistical problems inherent in standard scientific practice, and how they can lead to false positives like the Cornell ESP study.

See it HERE:

You Might Already Know This ...
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: January 10, 2011

<snip>

... the episode has inflamed one of the longest-running debates in science. For decades, some statisticians have argued that the standard technique used to analyze data in much of social science and medicine overstates many study findings — often by a lot. As a result, these experts say, the literature is littered with positive findings that do not pan out: “effective” therapies that are no better than a placebo; slight biases that do not affect behavior; brain-imaging correlations that are meaningless. ...

Unfortunately, no matter how unbiased a researcher tries to be, s/he does have a desire that his/her work is not a waste of time (even though negative results can be of value, they aren’t nearly as pleasurable to the person as positive ones) so it’s likely that the statistical method which yields the most positive results from the data will unconsciously be chosen.

Occam

But what about ancient prophecies, that address events which could not possibly have been predictable because they were outside the scope of then current knowledge.

From Wiki

The Iron Snake

The Iron Snake is an ancient tribal prophecy attributed to both the Maasai and Kĩkũyũ tribes in Kenya in which a railway is described as an iron snake.
The iron snake would someday cross their land and would be a bad omen creating trouble as it went.
The religious gikuyu prophet Mugo wa Kibiru prophesied the coming of the whites many years before they arrived on the coast. In eastern Kenya the prophecy was attributed to Masaku, a Kamba sage and chief, and Mwenda Mwea a famous medicine man as well as a seer from Embu.[1] They both saw a black snake coming and all the cattle disappearing, plundered from the Africans by the ‘red people,’ as the early white colonizers would be known. In western Kenya, Kimnyole the Nandi Orkoiyot also predicted the arrival of Europeans (the white tribe) and the railways (the Iron Snake) who were to change everything for the Nandi.

It is interesting that a similar end-of-the-world myth speaking of snakes of iron appears in the Hopi tradition of the New World as the fourth sign on Hopi tablets.

check out “prophecy rock” interesting stuff.

http://www.crystalinks.com/hopi2.html
http://www.hopiland.net/index.php?pg=44

You must be joking, Write4U.

(1) An “iron snake” could mean virtually anything. I wouldn’t have thought it had anything to do with the railroad, but that’s human ingenuity for you. We can make anything a metaphor for anything. It’s exactly the same as the nonsense about Nostradamus.

(2) Where is the evidence that these “ancient tribal prophecies” were around pre-19th c.? The big one people tend to talk about is the one that the Aztecs usually told about a white god coming from the East, that then got told of Cortez. But there is apparently no evidence that this “prophecy” existed until well after the conquest.

(3) crystalinks is about the very definition of a crap site with no credibility at all. This is one problem with looking for information on the internet. Anyone can publish anything they want, with no regard for accuracy. So task #1 for anyone doing research is to begin by finding sites that are credible. That means task #1 is to disregard sites like “crystalinks”.

dougsmith - 14 January 2011 05:12 AM

You must be joking, Write4U.

(1) An “iron snake” could mean virtually anything. I wouldn’t have thought it had anything to do with the railroad, but that’s human ingenuity for you. We can make anything a metaphor for anything. It’s exactly the same as the nonsense about Nostradamus.

(2) Where is the evidence that these “ancient tribal prophecies” were around pre-19th c.? The big one people tend to talk about is the one that the Aztecs usually told about a white god coming from the East, that then got told of Cortez. But there is apparently no evidence that this “prophecy” existed until well after the conquest.

(3) crystalinks is about the very definition of a crap site with no credibility at all. This is one problem with looking for information on the internet. Anyone can publish anything they want, with no regard for accuracy. So task #1 for anyone doing research is to begin by finding sites that are credible. That means task #1 is to disregard sites like “crystalinks”.

Only presented in the spirit of debate about ESP or Pre-cognition…