9 ms·

Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future

179 points by zafka 16y ago

barmstrong 16y ago
Good discussion of this sort of research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_experiment
Fargren 16y ago
Older discusssion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1878160 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1878160
zdw 16y ago
Krulwich's NPR Science pieces has some of the best verbal delivery, storytelling form, and production values - it's worth listening to the audio version of them. Highly recommended if you're thinking about making a podcast.
- yan 16y ago
  Krulwich also co-hosts Radiolab (.org), which is incredible.
- cs_loser 16y ago
  Krulwich is also the clown who had his ass handed to him by none other than Neil Armstrong last month: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2010/12/08/131910930/neil-armstrong-talks-about-the-first-moon-walk http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2010/12/08/131910930/neil-...
garyrob 16y ago
See http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Wagenmakers-Why-Psychologists-Must-Change-the-Way-They-Analyze-Their-Data.pdf http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Wag... ("Why Psychologists Must Change the Way They Analyze Their Data: The Case of Psi".) It demolishes the study referred to in the npr article.
- zafka 16y ago
  So far the best line in this paper is: "Returning to Laplace’s Principle, we should obviously assign our prior belief in precognition a number very close to zero, perhaps slightly larger than the probability of, say, goldfish being able to talk"
  - srean 16y ago
    You touch upon a very important point. For some reason we are very bad at Bayesian reasoning. Sometime it leads to unsubtantiable opinions http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1909576 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1909576 but could be very damaging if faulty reasoning is used by a jury or a judge...."the person can be guilty or not guilty so the probabilities are 50:50". I would be a lot more relieved if people with the power over other peoples lives grokked Baye's rule and priors.
    - sesqu 16y ago
      Please explain the proper way to form priors, then. 50:50 is widely used, as is "0 for obviously wrong stuff". The author here suggested "something sufficiently close to 0", which to me is indistinguishable from the second one. Should an accused's guilt prior be based on the jury's own guilt, the number of crimes they've heard about recently, or the judge's conviction rate? Or maybe the accused's socio-economic class? Bayes's rule doesn't help with the point that suggestive evidence is not convincing evidence. It just points out that prior beliefs are part of the equation, but will hopefully pale in comparison to actual data. In fact, I was taught to set practically useless hyperparameters to ensure that they do. No one does that outside of an experiment. Let's say I believe (I don't) the height of pygmies is normally distributed, where the mean is also normally distributed with mean 130cm and standard deviation 10cm, and the standard deviation is inverse gamma distributed with shape 7cm and scale 1cm. Assuming the height is actually normally distributed with mean 160cm and sd 15cm (it isn't), how many pygmies must I measure to admit that P(height>160cm)>20%? I'm not sure I can even do the math. Here P=50% for the unknowable accurate model and P=0.13% for the prior model. How does the situation change when my prior is "sufficiently close to 0"?
bluekeybox 16y ago
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The classic 5% (or even 0.1%) statistical threshold is sometimes not enough. See here for an easy-to-understand example of why that is the case: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_... In other news, capital punishment has been installed for science journalists publishing articles that contain a question in the title that can be succinctly answered with "No."
- gfodor 16y ago
  Can someone please, please explain this to me? I've never understood why the oft stated line "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is anything other than a clever saying. Why should it be that things that follow your intuition require any less rigor to prove than those that do not, and vice versa? Presumably there should be no subjectivity to cold hard science; evidence is evidence, and a certain quantity of evidence should reflect fact equally well regardless of how unusual that fact is. edit: just to note, nowhere in constructing a statistical test is it required that the creator decide how "extraordinary" the null hypothesis is.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    Why you ask? Because it won't be believed otherwise. Causal proofs of a statistical nature aren't math proofs. They aren't, generally at least, proving fundamental relations that resist all dispute. Rather they are simply persuasive. To be persuaded of something you already strongly believe is far easier than something you don't believe. And really the key word is persuade. It's not that people can prove the sun will come up tomorrow, but they can persuade you that it will. .
  - ewjordan 16y ago
    It's simply the way Bayesian statistics work: if the prior probability of something happening is very low, then for me to flip from thinking "didn't happen" to "did" it will take some new information that is very powerful. If you think that's illogical, I'd ask you to consider why a teacher is more likely to accept the excuse "my dog ate my homework" than "aliens kidnapped me and stole it". You seem to be arguing that given that the evidences are equal (a mere statement from a kid), the teacher should properly consider both occurrences to be equally likely.
simon_ 16y ago
Perhaps NPR celebrates inverse April Fool's Day (1/4)?
- Semiapies 16y ago
  That'd be funnier than the simple reduction of "The answer to science article titles phrased as questions is 'No'."
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
mcritz 16y ago
I knew this comment would be up-voted before I wrote it.
nostromo 16y ago
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" -- and I wouldn't count these small studies as extraordinary. Unfortunatley, publishing these kind of claims prematurely help the more gullible among us to fall for ridiculous claims from psychics and others who would take advantage of them. (The authors of "The Secret", I'm looking at you.) Commenters on NPR's website (not exactly the dumbest audience online) have already shown this problem; "All of you criticizing this need to open up your minds" and "The future, as well as the past, influence our dreams."
- pygorex1 16y ago
  > All of you criticizing this need to open up your minds This type of attitude is infuriating - if a claim can survive the crucible of peer review then it we can be much, much more certain that it is true and correct. If humans were to posses a limited form of precognition that would be awesome - but before we can claim to posses a thing we must be sure that it is real.
  - Xurinos 16y ago
    As a fellow skeptic, I would advise we avoid outright rejection. After all, part of the mantra is to question our own world view, right? Disease existed long before we figured out causes and targeted treatments; people possessed it, and people applied treatments with varying degrees of success and failure, including death. One of the more interesting inaccuracies of medical history is that of humors (random site - http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/herbs/WomenMed.html http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/herbs/WomenMed.html). How we treated disease changed over time and is still changing as we learn new things. My point? It is important to continue to apply rigid scientific study to all manners of phenomena, not only to validate its existence but also to figure out how to repeat or avoid said phenomena, depending on the need, the positives and the negatives of said phenomena. However, we should not turn a blind eye towards what people think they experience just because we have not yet come up with the right tool for measuring or the right study for identifying. There is always some reason behind the claim (even if the reason is "snake oil salesman"). Whatever is behind precognition (to take your example), people claim to experience it and always have made those claims. There is a certain burden of proof required, sure. How do you convince someone born deaf that there is a thing like sound that is experienced the way the hearing experience it? In the case of precognition, it tends to be self-validating (sometimes self-fulfilling), and yet it is still useful for precogs or those who believe in them, whether it is illusion or real, whether we have proven it concretely or not. That bears a quick repeat... The information is somehow useful. These people who are shouting "open your mind" find their precognitive information useful; in their minds, challenges to this useful information are silly. In the name of understanding, the real focus should be on figuring out how that information is obtained. Is it psychic phenomena, a ghost whispering in the ear, great subconscious brain processing, or something else? So if the response to an outright simple rejection is "open your minds", I think it is warranted. If the response is to indicate disagreement, however, I always thought that to be a useless response, as useless as the simple rejection.
Qz 16y ago
Wow, the word retyping test seems like a total scam. Of course you're better able to recall words after a test in which you were already better able to recall those words. It's called memory. Correlation, not causation, as the maxim goes.
- forensic 16y ago
  I think you missed the point. 1. People recalled as many as possible. 2. People were divided into two groups, control and experimental. 3. Experimental group was asked to retype the words. 4. Control group was asked to go home. 5. Experimental group found to score better on initial test.
  - Andrew_Quentin 16y ago
    I have not red the original article so maybe I am mistaken, but the post submitted here seems to suggest that there was one group only not two groups. There was one group and they retyped only half or so of the words and not the other half and were found to remember the retyped words better. I do not know if that makes a difference, but I think it might and could. The retyped words might have whatever quality or for whatever reason might have been easier to rememmber than the non retyped words. Unless in the original article it suggests that the experiement was carried out in the way you suggest, I do not think there was much control of variables.
forensic 16y ago
Has anyone investigated Dean Radin's work? It demonstrates similar statistical effects in a huge number of experiments. He has put forth quantum entanglement as the explanation.
- nervechannel 16y ago
  And how many unpublished studies with null results I wonder? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnel_plot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnel_plot PS non-physicists invoking "quantum stuff" are bullshit merchants, p < 0.001 :-)
joeld42 16y ago
My bet is a crappy pseudo-random number generator, or other software bug.
- marcusbooster 16y ago
  A valid point. As scientists rely more on the tools created by others, how can they be certain they're measuring the subjects and not the tools themselves. The article repeatedly refers to "a computer" in these experiments as if it's some divine arbiter, I think most programmers here know differently.
- Fargren 16y ago
  Anotehr article about the same study: http://hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/precognition-real-cornell-university-lab-releases-powerful-new-evidence-human-mind-can- http://hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/precognition-real-corn... From the article : "The sequencing of the pictures on these trials was randomly determined by a randomizing algorithm … and their left/right target positions were determined by an Araneus Alea I hardware-based random number generator." At the very least they were using Araneus Alea wich is a hardware random number generator, so the numbers were not predictable. It's possible that the "randomizing algorithm" did something dumb and made the sequence not random, but I doubt it. I think that it's more likely thet the sudy was done so many times that it eventually gave significant results than it is that the sequence was not random. Or maybe prescience is real to some degree, or the study is a statistical glitch. However the replication package they provide has the compiled program without the source code, and that is a red flag to me.
- julian37 16y ago
  The paper says they used an Araneus Alea I (hardware) RNG. See http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf page 12.
maeon3 16y ago
Figuring out what time is may be what causes civilizations to go extinct. Once you figure out how to probe the earlier states of the universe you find everything vanishes, along with the evidence that the civilization ever existed. This may be why our visible universe is not teeming with chit-chat.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
bmr 16y ago
I'm going to memorize the winning numbers from tonight's Mega Millions draw after they are announced.
maxklein 16y ago
This is trivial software to write. Why does someone not quickly whip up a web app that does the picture thing as described in the experiment, then we can personally test if we have ESP senses or not? Specs: Two buttons - ESP mode or non-ESP mode. In non-ESP mode, 60 random pictures are shown and we are to guess. Then it gives the correct one. In ESP mode, add some porn. If the results are different, then we have ESP. Use Javascript for the randomisation algorithm so that we can be sure there is no server trickery being done.
- Fargren 16y ago
  Javascript random is only pseudoalleatory. I think you need a true random number generator to truly test this.
  - cmos 16y ago
    can't it just get one from the server?
  - lwat 16y ago
    Random.org can help
  - endtime 16y ago
    Why would psuedorandomness be insufficient? Don't try to hack the JS and the effect should be the same.
    - Fargren 16y ago
      If it's pseudorandom, that means there's some form of pattern in the numbers it generates. It's impossible (or at least unreasonably hard) to know whether the person doing the test may subconciously guess or estimate the pattern. That invalidates the whole test.
      - endtime 16y ago
        I suppose that's true, though if someone can intuit a crypto-strong PRNG then that's an interesting and significant result in itself.
comice 16y ago
This was discussed by people on the James Randi forum back in October: http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=188366 http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=188366
qiqing 16y ago
Hypothesis #1: 53% in an experiment that has 36 trials? Really? 50% is 18/36, but 19/36 is 52.7%, and 19/35 is 54.3%. Depending on experimental design, if it just so happens that near the end of the 20 minutes, the subject has a tendency stop on one of the last erotic pictures they're like to guess and let the time run out. Hypothesis #2: Depending on how the computer's random number generator was seeded (and they might have a relatively short repeating sequence), subjects may have, however unconsciously, "learned" to predict the randomness, something they would have insufficient motivation to do in the other set of pictures. [We can test for this by seeing if they were getting better at it over the course of a session.]
Eliezer 16y ago
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ib/parapsychology_the_control_group_for_science/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ib/parapsychology_the_control_group...
mbrubeck 16y ago
Here is some very good discussion of (failed) attempts to replicate the study, and at least one possible methodological flaw that could invalidate some of the results: http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2010/11/brief-note-daryl-bem-and-precognition.html http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2010/11/brief-note-dar... "The real lesson? This is the level of methodological scrutiny every paper should receive, and not just the ones you think are crazy: the ones you like and rely on for your own work should get a good working over like this too (especially these ones; and I'm as guilty on this as everyone else)."
- lallysingh 16y ago
  I'm wondering if the real point of the paper is to point out how insufficient the experimental design & statistics used in its contemporaries.
ibejoeb 16y ago
So it looks like I'll be studying my Mega Millions picks tonight. My methodology: 1. Buy ticket 2. Go AWOL until after the drawing. 3. Study numbers 4. Look up results 5. Profit
- russianbandit 16y ago
  Let us know if that works.
- khafra 16y ago
  Judging from the porn study, you'll get better results if you write a script to screen-scrape the winning numbers after they're posted online, then display them to you alongside some hot pron amidst several sets of randomly chosen lottery numbers alongside SFW pictures.
raphar 16y ago
"There was nothing surprising about the results of the psychological experiments conducted by Dr Bem. The porn used was OURS" A (future) message from <your favorite porn provider name here>
nwatson 16y ago
I e-mailed a link to a related article from a few months ago (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19712-evidence-that-we-can-see-the-future-to-be-published.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19712-evidence-that-we...) -- I sent it to some co-workers and also copied my wife. My wife (a psychologist and a Christian) defended the (mostly psychologically oriented) experiments as posed in the paper and the method behind them, whereas several atheist/strictly-causality-believing coworkers and also a conservative Christian with a strong anti-psychology bias dismissed the idea of spooky action from the future outright. The stormy e-mail exchange raged on (and I did not contribute to the discussion). The conservative guy accused me of abandoning my wife in the argument. I believe she's well capable of handling herself. In any case I wrote this (bad) poem in response: My act is mostly mute and unseen, I wear no costume, I don’t vent my spleen. Spending most time behind the stage, Conceiving a plot I prepare the cage. I have few resources, can’t sponsor M-M-A, Must find some other way to while away the day. I step out briefly to address the crowd, I hope today they’ll surely be wowed. My mind’s been active, reading Hacker News, What’s this I see? Some interesting views, on whether the future can affect our present, I’m sure this will stoke plenty of dissent. I have my materials for a good time today, Setting the stage is just an e-mail away. My fingers fly fast, the idea’s not hokey, My actors will soon be addressing the spooky. I press ‘Send’ and my time on stage is done, I’ve set the parameters, now it’s time for fun. The actors appear to have done my bidding, I just hope it doesn’t end in too much bleeding. Sure, I’ll show up from time to time, The audience gets tired of hearing everyone whine. They need to see larger schemes at play, The actor’s philosophies won’t save the day. Arguments, screeds, reasoning galore, It’s exciting for a time, not yet a bore. I’ll step back just about now, It’s time for some more. This audience of one will now sit back, Got a few more bugzillas to whack. I won’t make it to peer-reviewed journals, But empirically it’s great to see what sprouts from a kernel.
hc 16y ago
and how many studies did he throw away, when they didnt get the statistical significance he was looking for? now lets average all of them together
tokenadult 16y ago
It's time to post a link to Peter Norvig's article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html here on HN again. How well does Bem's set of experiments hold up?
tlrobinson 16y ago
The test didn't include the obvious control group: have the subjects pick a door but don't show them whether or not they picked the right one.
Rickasaurus 16y ago
I'm very disappointed in HN for voting up this unscientific garbage.
yters 16y ago
People have been getting results like this for a very long time. The Soviets took these phenomena very seriously and were trying to establish physical mechanisms. Here's one IEEE paper: "a perceptual channel for information transfer over kilometer distances - historical perspective and recent research" http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1454382 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1454... Can't find the online version anymore, so here's the version I found (9.5MB pdf): http://www.box.net/shared/inxg0nld9r http://www.box.net/shared/inxg0nld9r
blago 16y ago
Pretty sure this experiment will meet "cosmic habituation"(http://nyr.kr/fkzAaQ http://nyr.kr/fkzAaQ) very soon. Pretty sure Bem knows it. His time would be better spent studying why does the truth "wear off" (as The New Yorker put it). What happend to science!
Sauce1971 16y ago
The question is. Do they see the future or make the future. Somedays I'm convinced computers react to my moods.
- unoti 16y ago
  If you're convinced computer react to your moods, you should consider reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There's an entire chapter dedicated to the concept. It's philosophy, not science, but interesting and possibly wise nonetheless.
david927 16y ago
This violates our common sense, but it doesn't necessarily violate physics. We've known for a long time from quantum mechanics that time may not fit with our preconceived notions of what we want to think it is. Entropy only means that time moves forward. The rest, such as that we can't know the future, we've just assumed.
jamesbressi 16y ago
I am embarrassed to ask, but can someone explain the word flashing test a different way? For some reason something is not clicking for me the way it is written on NPR.
phillijw 16y ago
Did anyone record how many times the picture showed up in each side of the curtain? Was that 50/50 or not? That would be the first thing I would check. On a similar note, how many times did a person choose the left or right curtain? Was that 50/50? I can imagine the subject choosing the left or right more often based on the environment. For instance, the subject is sitting in an asymmetric position usually (mouse on right side). Was this considered when taking the test? Was the subject left or right handed? You can look at numbers all you want but there are always biases to take into account and figuring out why we have those biases might be more important than this study.

179 points by zafka 16y ago

Good discussion of this sort of research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_experiment

Fargren 16y ago

Older discusssion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1878160 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1878160

zdw 16y ago

Krulwich's NPR Science pieces has some of the best verbal delivery, storytelling form, and production values - it's worth listening to the audio version of them. Highly recommended if you're thinking about making a podcast.

yan 16y ago
Krulwich also co-hosts Radiolab (.org), which is incredible.
cs_loser 16y ago
Krulwich is also the clown who had his ass handed to him by none other than Neil Armstrong last month: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2010/12/08/131910930/neil-armstrong-talks-about-the-first-moon-walk http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2010/12/08/131910930/neil-...

garyrob 16y ago

See http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Wagenmakers-Why-Psychologists-Must-Change-the-Way-They-Analyze-Their-Data.pdf http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Wag... ("Why Psychologists Must Change the Way They Analyze Their Data: The Case of Psi".) It demolishes the study referred to in the npr article.

zafka 16y ago
So far the best line in this paper is: "Returning to Laplace’s Principle, we should obviously assign our prior belief in precognition a number very close to zero, perhaps slightly larger than the probability of, say, goldfish being able to talk"
- srean 16y ago
  You touch upon a very important point. For some reason we are very bad at Bayesian reasoning. Sometime it leads to unsubtantiable opinions http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1909576 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1909576 but could be very damaging if faulty reasoning is used by a jury or a judge...."the person can be guilty or not guilty so the probabilities are 50:50". I would be a lot more relieved if people with the power over other peoples lives grokked Baye's rule and priors.
  - sesqu 16y ago
    Please explain the proper way to form priors, then. 50:50 is widely used, as is "0 for obviously wrong stuff". The author here suggested "something sufficiently close to 0", which to me is indistinguishable from the second one. Should an accused's guilt prior be based on the jury's own guilt, the number of crimes they've heard about recently, or the judge's conviction rate? Or maybe the accused's socio-economic class? Bayes's rule doesn't help with the point that suggestive evidence is not convincing evidence. It just points out that prior beliefs are part of the equation, but will hopefully pale in comparison to actual data. In fact, I was taught to set practically useless hyperparameters to ensure that they do. No one does that outside of an experiment. Let's say I believe (I don't) the height of pygmies is normally distributed, where the mean is also normally distributed with mean 130cm and standard deviation 10cm, and the standard deviation is inverse gamma distributed with shape 7cm and scale 1cm. Assuming the height is actually normally distributed with mean 160cm and sd 15cm (it isn't), how many pygmies must I measure to admit that P(height>160cm)>20%? I'm not sure I can even do the math. Here P=50% for the unknowable accurate model and P=0.13% for the prior model. How does the situation change when my prior is "sufficiently close to 0"?

bluekeybox 16y ago

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The classic 5% (or even 0.1%) statistical threshold is sometimes not enough. See here for an easy-to-understand example of why that is the case: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_... In other news, capital punishment has been installed for science journalists publishing articles that contain a question in the title that can be succinctly answered with "No."

gfodor 16y ago
Can someone please, please explain this to me? I've never understood why the oft stated line "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is anything other than a clever saying. Why should it be that things that follow your intuition require any less rigor to prove than those that do not, and vice versa? Presumably there should be no subjectivity to cold hard science; evidence is evidence, and a certain quantity of evidence should reflect fact equally well regardless of how unusual that fact is. edit: just to note, nowhere in constructing a statistical test is it required that the creator decide how "extraordinary" the null hypothesis is.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  Why you ask? Because it won't be believed otherwise. Causal proofs of a statistical nature aren't math proofs. They aren't, generally at least, proving fundamental relations that resist all dispute. Rather they are simply persuasive. To be persuaded of something you already strongly believe is far easier than something you don't believe. And really the key word is persuade. It's not that people can prove the sun will come up tomorrow, but they can persuade you that it will. .
- ewjordan 16y ago
  It's simply the way Bayesian statistics work: if the prior probability of something happening is very low, then for me to flip from thinking "didn't happen" to "did" it will take some new information that is very powerful. If you think that's illogical, I'd ask you to consider why a teacher is more likely to accept the excuse "my dog ate my homework" than "aliens kidnapped me and stole it". You seem to be arguing that given that the evidences are equal (a mere statement from a kid), the teacher should properly consider both occurrences to be equally likely.

simon_ 16y ago

Perhaps NPR celebrates inverse April Fool's Day (1/4)?

Semiapies 16y ago
That'd be funnier than the simple reduction of "The answer to science article titles phrased as questions is 'No'."
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

mcritz 16y ago

I knew this comment would be up-voted before I wrote it.

nostromo 16y ago

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" -- and I wouldn't count these small studies as extraordinary. Unfortunatley, publishing these kind of claims prematurely help the more gullible among us to fall for ridiculous claims from psychics and others who would take advantage of them. (The authors of "The Secret", I'm looking at you.) Commenters on NPR's website (not exactly the dumbest audience online) have already shown this problem; "All of you criticizing this need to open up your minds" and "The future, as well as the past, influence our dreams."

pygorex1 16y ago
> All of you criticizing this need to open up your minds This type of attitude is infuriating - if a claim can survive the crucible of peer review then it we can be much, much more certain that it is true and correct. If humans were to posses a limited form of precognition that would be awesome - but before we can claim to posses a thing we must be sure that it is real.
- Xurinos 16y ago
  As a fellow skeptic, I would advise we avoid outright rejection. After all, part of the mantra is to question our own world view, right? Disease existed long before we figured out causes and targeted treatments; people possessed it, and people applied treatments with varying degrees of success and failure, including death. One of the more interesting inaccuracies of medical history is that of humors (random site - http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/herbs/WomenMed.html http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/herbs/WomenMed.html). How we treated disease changed over time and is still changing as we learn new things. My point? It is important to continue to apply rigid scientific study to all manners of phenomena, not only to validate its existence but also to figure out how to repeat or avoid said phenomena, depending on the need, the positives and the negatives of said phenomena. However, we should not turn a blind eye towards what people think they experience just because we have not yet come up with the right tool for measuring or the right study for identifying. There is always some reason behind the claim (even if the reason is "snake oil salesman"). Whatever is behind precognition (to take your example), people claim to experience it and always have made those claims. There is a certain burden of proof required, sure. How do you convince someone born deaf that there is a thing like sound that is experienced the way the hearing experience it? In the case of precognition, it tends to be self-validating (sometimes self-fulfilling), and yet it is still useful for precogs or those who believe in them, whether it is illusion or real, whether we have proven it concretely or not. That bears a quick repeat... The information is somehow useful. These people who are shouting "open your mind" find their precognitive information useful; in their minds, challenges to this useful information are silly. In the name of understanding, the real focus should be on figuring out how that information is obtained. Is it psychic phenomena, a ghost whispering in the ear, great subconscious brain processing, or something else? So if the response to an outright simple rejection is "open your minds", I think it is warranted. If the response is to indicate disagreement, however, I always thought that to be a useless response, as useless as the simple rejection.

Qz 16y ago

Wow, the word retyping test seems like a total scam. Of course you're better able to recall words after a test in which you were already better able to recall those words. It's called memory. Correlation, not causation, as the maxim goes.

forensic 16y ago
I think you missed the point. 1. People recalled as many as possible. 2. People were divided into two groups, control and experimental. 3. Experimental group was asked to retype the words. 4. Control group was asked to go home. 5. Experimental group found to score better on initial test.
- Andrew_Quentin 16y ago
  I have not red the original article so maybe I am mistaken, but the post submitted here seems to suggest that there was one group only not two groups. There was one group and they retyped only half or so of the words and not the other half and were found to remember the retyped words better. I do not know if that makes a difference, but I think it might and could. The retyped words might have whatever quality or for whatever reason might have been easier to rememmber than the non retyped words. Unless in the original article it suggests that the experiement was carried out in the way you suggest, I do not think there was much control of variables.

forensic 16y ago

Has anyone investigated Dean Radin's work? It demonstrates similar statistical effects in a huge number of experiments. He has put forth quantum entanglement as the explanation.

nervechannel 16y ago
And how many unpublished studies with null results I wonder? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnel_plot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnel_plot PS non-physicists invoking "quantum stuff" are bullshit merchants, p < 0.001 :-)

joeld42 16y ago

My bet is a crappy pseudo-random number generator, or other software bug.

marcusbooster 16y ago
A valid point. As scientists rely more on the tools created by others, how can they be certain they're measuring the subjects and not the tools themselves. The article repeatedly refers to "a computer" in these experiments as if it's some divine arbiter, I think most programmers here know differently.
Fargren 16y ago
Anotehr article about the same study: http://hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/precognition-real-cornell-university-lab-releases-powerful-new-evidence-human-mind-can- http://hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/precognition-real-corn... From the article : "The sequencing of the pictures on these trials was randomly determined by a randomizing algorithm … and their left/right target positions were determined by an Araneus Alea I hardware-based random number generator." At the very least they were using Araneus Alea wich is a hardware random number generator, so the numbers were not predictable. It's possible that the "randomizing algorithm" did something dumb and made the sequence not random, but I doubt it. I think that it's more likely thet the sudy was done so many times that it eventually gave significant results than it is that the sequence was not random. Or maybe prescience is real to some degree, or the study is a statistical glitch. However the replication package they provide has the compiled program without the source code, and that is a red flag to me.
julian37 16y ago
The paper says they used an Araneus Alea I (hardware) RNG. See http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf page 12.

maeon3 16y ago

Figuring out what time is may be what causes civilizations to go extinct. Once you figure out how to probe the earlier states of the universe you find everything vanishes, along with the evidence that the civilization ever existed. This may be why our visible universe is not teeming with chit-chat.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

bmr 16y ago

I'm going to memorize the winning numbers from tonight's Mega Millions draw after they are announced.

maxklein 16y ago

This is trivial software to write. Why does someone not quickly whip up a web app that does the picture thing as described in the experiment, then we can personally test if we have ESP senses or not? Specs: Two buttons - ESP mode or non-ESP mode. In non-ESP mode, 60 random pictures are shown and we are to guess. Then it gives the correct one. In ESP mode, add some porn. If the results are different, then we have ESP. Use Javascript for the randomisation algorithm so that we can be sure there is no server trickery being done.

Fargren 16y ago
Javascript random is only pseudoalleatory. I think you need a true random number generator to truly test this.
- cmos 16y ago
  can't it just get one from the server?
- lwat 16y ago
  Random.org can help
- endtime 16y ago
  Why would psuedorandomness be insufficient? Don't try to hack the JS and the effect should be the same.
  - Fargren 16y ago
    If it's pseudorandom, that means there's some form of pattern in the numbers it generates. It's impossible (or at least unreasonably hard) to know whether the person doing the test may subconciously guess or estimate the pattern. That invalidates the whole test.
    - endtime 16y ago
      I suppose that's true, though if someone can intuit a crypto-strong PRNG then that's an interesting and significant result in itself.

comice 16y ago

This was discussed by people on the James Randi forum back in October: http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=188366 http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=188366

qiqing 16y ago

Hypothesis #1: 53% in an experiment that has 36 trials? Really? 50% is 18/36, but 19/36 is 52.7%, and 19/35 is 54.3%. Depending on experimental design, if it just so happens that near the end of the 20 minutes, the subject has a tendency stop on one of the last erotic pictures they're like to guess and let the time run out. Hypothesis #2: Depending on how the computer's random number generator was seeded (and they might have a relatively short repeating sequence), subjects may have, however unconsciously, "learned" to predict the randomness, something they would have insufficient motivation to do in the other set of pictures. [We can test for this by seeing if they were getting better at it over the course of a session.]

Eliezer 16y ago

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ib/parapsychology_the_control_group_for_science/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ib/parapsychology_the_control_group...

mbrubeck 16y ago

Here is some very good discussion of (failed) attempts to replicate the study, and at least one possible methodological flaw that could invalidate some of the results: http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2010/11/brief-note-daryl-bem-and-precognition.html http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2010/11/brief-note-dar... "The real lesson? This is the level of methodological scrutiny every paper should receive, and not just the ones you think are crazy: the ones you like and rely on for your own work should get a good working over like this too (especially these ones; and I'm as guilty on this as everyone else)."

lallysingh 16y ago
I'm wondering if the real point of the paper is to point out how insufficient the experimental design & statistics used in its contemporaries.

ibejoeb 16y ago

So it looks like I'll be studying my Mega Millions picks tonight. My methodology: 1. Buy ticket 2. Go AWOL until after the drawing. 3. Study numbers 4. Look up results 5. Profit

russianbandit 16y ago
Let us know if that works.
khafra 16y ago
Judging from the porn study, you'll get better results if you write a script to screen-scrape the winning numbers after they're posted online, then display them to you alongside some hot pron amidst several sets of randomly chosen lottery numbers alongside SFW pictures.

raphar 16y ago

"There was nothing surprising about the results of the psychological experiments conducted by Dr Bem. The porn used was OURS" A (future) message from <your favorite porn provider name here>

nwatson 16y ago

I e-mailed a link to a related article from a few months ago (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19712-evidence-that-we-can-see-the-future-to-be-published.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19712-evidence-that-we...) -- I sent it to some co-workers and also copied my wife. My wife (a psychologist and a Christian) defended the (mostly psychologically oriented) experiments as posed in the paper and the method behind them, whereas several atheist/strictly-causality-believing coworkers and also a conservative Christian with a strong anti-psychology bias dismissed the idea of spooky action from the future outright. The stormy e-mail exchange raged on (and I did not contribute to the discussion). The conservative guy accused me of abandoning my wife in the argument. I believe she's well capable of handling herself. In any case I wrote this (bad) poem in response: My act is mostly mute and unseen, I wear no costume, I don’t vent my spleen. Spending most time behind the stage, Conceiving a plot I prepare the cage. I have few resources, can’t sponsor M-M-A, Must find some other way to while away the day. I step out briefly to address the crowd, I hope today they’ll surely be wowed. My mind’s been active, reading Hacker News, What’s this I see? Some interesting views, on whether the future can affect our present, I’m sure this will stoke plenty of dissent. I have my materials for a good time today, Setting the stage is just an e-mail away. My fingers fly fast, the idea’s not hokey, My actors will soon be addressing the spooky. I press ‘Send’ and my time on stage is done, I’ve set the parameters, now it’s time for fun. The actors appear to have done my bidding, I just hope it doesn’t end in too much bleeding. Sure, I’ll show up from time to time, The audience gets tired of hearing everyone whine. They need to see larger schemes at play, The actor’s philosophies won’t save the day. Arguments, screeds, reasoning galore, It’s exciting for a time, not yet a bore. I’ll step back just about now, It’s time for some more. This audience of one will now sit back, Got a few more bugzillas to whack. I won’t make it to peer-reviewed journals, But empirically it’s great to see what sprouts from a kernel.

hc 16y ago

and how many studies did he throw away, when they didnt get the statistical significance he was looking for? now lets average all of them together

tokenadult 16y ago

It's time to post a link to Peter Norvig's article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html here on HN again. How well does Bem's set of experiments hold up?

tlrobinson 16y ago

The test didn't include the obvious control group: have the subjects pick a door but don't show them whether or not they picked the right one.

Rickasaurus 16y ago

I'm very disappointed in HN for voting up this unscientific garbage.

yters 16y ago

People have been getting results like this for a very long time. The Soviets took these phenomena very seriously and were trying to establish physical mechanisms. Here's one IEEE paper: "a perceptual channel for information transfer over kilometer distances - historical perspective and recent research" http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1454382 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1454... Can't find the online version anymore, so here's the version I found (9.5MB pdf): http://www.box.net/shared/inxg0nld9r http://www.box.net/shared/inxg0nld9r

blago 16y ago

Pretty sure this experiment will meet "cosmic habituation"(http://nyr.kr/fkzAaQ http://nyr.kr/fkzAaQ) very soon. Pretty sure Bem knows it. His time would be better spent studying why does the truth "wear off" (as The New Yorker put it). What happend to science!

Sauce1971 16y ago

The question is. Do they see the future or make the future. Somedays I'm convinced computers react to my moods.

unoti 16y ago
If you're convinced computer react to your moods, you should consider reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There's an entire chapter dedicated to the concept. It's philosophy, not science, but interesting and possibly wise nonetheless.

david927 16y ago

This violates our common sense, but it doesn't necessarily violate physics. We've known for a long time from quantum mechanics that time may not fit with our preconceived notions of what we want to think it is. Entropy only means that time moves forward. The rest, such as that we can't know the future, we've just assumed.

jamesbressi 16y ago

I am embarrassed to ask, but can someone explain the word flashing test a different way? For some reason something is not clicking for me the way it is written on NPR.

phillijw 16y ago

Did anyone record how many times the picture showed up in each side of the curtain? Was that 50/50 or not? That would be the first thing I would check. On a similar note, how many times did a person choose the left or right curtain? Was that 50/50? I can imagine the subject choosing the left or right more often based on the environment. For instance, the subject is sitting in an asymmetric position usually (mouse on right side). Was this considered when taking the test? Was the subject left or right handed? You can look at numbers all you want but there are always biases to take into account and figuring out why we have those biases might be more important than this study.