A Potential Cat Among The Pigeons

1. 73

   Inspirepubposted 15 years ago

   For fundamentalist scientific rationalists who think that paranormal phenomena are hogwash, and for fundamentalist religious types who think that only God can change the world by conscious will, check out the scientific literature from Princeton University's many years of scientific investigation.
   
   http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publications.html
   
   I anticipate rabid polemics from both sides, while the agnostics can sit back and gloatingly say "I told you so ..."
   
   Jenny

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2. 60

   Thom Carnesposted 15 years ago

   Well, here's one riposte to be going on with:
   
   http://www.csicop.org/si/2006-03/pear.html

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3. 73

   Inspirepubposted 15 years ago

   I think he contradicts himslelf.
   
   At one point, when talking about "baseline bind", he comments that baseline data should be expected to occasionally stray outside the p=0.5 band, and that many researchers err by having their baseline data being "too good", because they exclude these strays.
   
   Then he criticises the PEAR study for having one of these strays in their baseline data, and cites the stray as "evidence of non-random behaviour".
   
   Did he not read his own "baseline bind or baseline bias" section?
   
   The occasional false positive is managed by replication, and with increasing sample size a false positive result becomes increasingly unlikely anyway.
   
   Jenny
   
   P.S. The PEAR studies have involved a range of different apparatus - the random number generator is only one. Another is the classic two-slit light box experiment, which I have done myself several times - at least I have done the "it's a wave until you look and the ooh! now it's a particle" version. I haven't tried the "let's see if we can make it slightly less evenly a wave by thinking about it before we look at it" version, which is what PEAR used. I was sufficiently freaked out by having interference patterns come and go based on whether or not we had a detector turned on. It is seriously cool out there at the edges of reality ...

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4. 71

   Peter M. Lopezposted 15 years ago

   Jenny, are you referencing this link (the PEAR Proposition paper):
   
   http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/jse … sition.pdf
   
   or the book, Margins of Reality.  I've read Thom's link, but I'm not sure to what specifically it and you, Jenny, are referring.

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