5 ms·

In 1923. That was entirely reasonable at the time for a country like USSR to fund two persons to find out if that "telepathic revelation" on which many mediums

by Iv 7y ago

In 1923. That was entirely reasonable at the time for a country like USSR to fund two persons to find out if that "telepathic revelation" on which many mediums seemed to agree had any grounds. 1923. Realize how much fewer we knew about the Earth, the mind, space, at the time. Plate tectonics was a new theory, still hotly debated. The origin of human people were not clear and several people were buying into this Aryan theory that caucasians came from an advanced lost civilization. Hell, CIA sponsored research into medium activities until the 70s! If there was an advanced civilization hiding underground, it was not crazy to think they had tech to send telepathic message, and it would have been irresponsible to not inquire a bit about the people who claimed knowledge about it.

ryanmercer 7y ago
>Plate tectonics was a new theory, still hotly debated This always gets me. Well into the 1950's it was still contested, DNA wasn't discovered until the 1950's, gravitational waves weren't detected until 2015! Even just looking at my family's first personal computer in 1995 and comparing it to the Pixel 3 I carry as a phone and the Moto x4 (which was free!!!) that I mostly just use for listening to YouTube videos at work and just how much more capability/processing power/storage they have compared to that Compaq Presario. It's truly amazing how much we've done and discovered in the past 100~ years.
- TACIXAT 7y ago
  As powerful as our phones are, I feel they are incredibly under-utilized. There is this super computer in my pocket and I use it to check 3 websites and play some games.
  - phkahler 7y ago
    Technology isn't really relevant unless we figure out a use for it.
  - ryanmercer 7y ago
    >and I use it to check 3 websites That is a powerful use. You're connecting to a source of data that is likely weeks of travel by foot away, if not on another continent. If even one of them is a social site, like HN/Reddit/Facebook, it grants you access to the collective thoughts and works of thousands to millions of people. "I wonder what other movies so and so was in" used to be something you'd have to ask multiple individuals. "I wonder how a nuclear reactor works" was something that would have required a trip to a library and might have left you unsatisfied, now you can go on YouTube and actually see a tour of a reactor at a university and find many articles (some from nuclear/energy organizations on the first page of Google) that contain descriptions that even someone plucked form a random grade school could understand. "How do I change my oil/hang a door/learn to program/knit a scarf/sew something/plan for my retirement/order illicit goods on the darknet/repair my item" now brings you more articles and videos than you could possibly want for countless topics. While you might do these things on a daily basis, or a monthly basis, many people do use that nifty pocket computer that is their smartphone to find such things. I learn more from listening to YouTube videos and podcasts at work in a month of work days about history than I did in all of my k-12 education. For that matter I probably learn more just during my commute in a month than I did in all of my k-12 education. I can also whip that phone out and learn all sorts of things via Khan Academy, I can fire up Duolingo and TALL Drill and practice foreign language skills. I can chat with friends all over the world in real time via text, via image and video video thanks to Marco Polo/Skype/ FB Messenger/FaceTime etc. That phone is my planner, my own personal weather forecaster, my full-time navigator, a camera and a video capture device, grants me access to all manner of data I've stored in Drive/Evernote/Sheets/Docs, can give me basic translation of foreign languages in real time with the camera, allows me to manage my investments/credit cards/bank accounts and get instant notification of transactions, grants me access to insane amounts of music, let's me get a very good estimate of my dietary deficiencies via cronometer. I'd call that quite a technological accomplishment. That little black rectangle gives me the same abilities and conveniences that someone might have required an entire staff to have even 30 years ago.
    - rescbr 7y ago
      Still, most are things that old Presario could do with a dial-up connection. Sure, some might require a Pentium 4 and ADSL, but the smartphone isn't a revolution. The Personal Computer and the Internet were.
  - Can_Not 7y ago
    You do as little as you want with your phone, I have more useful and reliable information enter my head in a month than would enter my grandfather's in a year. Back in the day you'd have to memorize more, search longer, and in other cases, hope your cousin wasn't just making stuff up.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I had the same reaction to plate tectonics when reading a Time-Life book as a kid. But for every thing that is amazing because it's so recent, there's another that is amazing because it's so much older than you would think. Like quantum mechanics and special relativity are both older than the airplane. Edit: Ok, almost exactly the same age would be more accurate.
hinkley 7y ago
> In 1923. What really gets me is that penicillin will not have been discovered for five more years. No antibiotics until after WWI is long over.
segfaultbuserr 7y ago
People trend to underestimate the historical influence of some subjects in nowadays' fringe science. Many ideas in Sci-Fi and fantasy stories didn't come from nowhere, but based on actual history. Parapsychology, as you said, is an interesting example. In the scientific progress and Cold War paranoid of the 1950s, the idea of "mind power", "mind control" were popular. It convinced many people, even those with a scientific background, and only universally rejected by the mainstream in the 1970s. Even the CIA had a program, "Stargate Project", to study the applications of ESP to gather military intelligence, but it seems the CIA never had reliable results (as modern readers expected), and some participants eventually suffered a mental breakdown. (And around the 1960s, the same history repeats. People started to think that psychedelic drugs have great effects on the human mind, the counter-cultural youths did experiments first, and later the CIA also established a program, MKULTRA, and conducted a lot of unethical human experiments.) To illustrate how influential ESP was, just read the paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950) by Alan Turing. In the beginning of the paper, it summarized nine arguments against artificial intelligence and the feasibility of Turing Test, the 9th argument was parapsychology. Alan Turing said, > I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. [...] How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately, the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. And he pointed out, that some readers may suggest that telepathy can be used to distinguish human intelligence and artificial intelligence, and "this argument is to my mind quite a strong one", and he continued to describe one experiment setup... > A more specific argument based on E.S.P might run as follows: "Let us play the imitation game, using as witnesses a man who is good as a telepathic receiver, and a digital computer. The interrogator can ask such questions as "What suit does the card in my right hand belong to?" The man by telepathy or chairvoyance gives the right answer 130 times out of 400 cards. The machine can only guess at random, and perhaps get 104 right. But he also gave an interesting and creative response to this objection, > Suppose the digital computer contains a random number generator. Then it will be natural to use this to decide what answer to give. But then the random number generator will be subject to the psycho-kinetic powers of the interrogator. Perhaps this psycho-kinesis might cause the machine to guess right more often than would be expected on a probability calculation. It's pretty much a science fantasy novel. "How did the enemy compromise our unbreakable, formal-verified encryption system?!" "Oh, one attacker used the ESP power to make /dev/random keep outputting 0xAAAAAAAAAAAA..." Edit: This is not a joke, it's actually one of the most common form of psycho-kinesis experiments by proponents (and critics) of parapsychology. I didn't realize until I checked Wikipedia... But I doubt the electronic version of this experiment has been performed before Turing (only widely used after the 80s!), so it can be said that Alan Turing can be credited for this idea... See Psychokinesis on random number generators, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology#Psychokinesis_on_random_number_generators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology#Psychokinesis_o... Finally, Turing finished his counter-argument with a simple conclusion: in the worst case scenario, we can simply lock all participants in ESP-proof rooms and eliminate this problem. > If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up. [...] To put the competitors into a "telepathy-proof room" would satisfy all requirements.
coldtea 7y ago
>In 1923. That was entirely reasonable at the time for a country like USSR to fund two persons to find out if that "telepathic revelation" on which many mediums seemed to agree had any grounds. That, plus Nazi Germany funded similar missions much later, and the US also had teams investigating paranormal activities for potential intelligence use decades later...

by Iv 7y ago

ryanmercer 7y ago

>Plate tectonics was a new theory, still hotly debated This always gets me. Well into the 1950's it was still contested, DNA wasn't discovered until the 1950's, gravitational waves weren't detected until 2015! Even just looking at my family's first personal computer in 1995 and comparing it to the Pixel 3 I carry as a phone and the Moto x4 (which was free!!!) that I mostly just use for listening to YouTube videos at work and just how much more capability/processing power/storage they have compared to that Compaq Presario. It's truly amazing how much we've done and discovered in the past 100~ years.

TACIXAT 7y ago
As powerful as our phones are, I feel they are incredibly under-utilized. There is this super computer in my pocket and I use it to check 3 websites and play some games.
- phkahler 7y ago
  Technology isn't really relevant unless we figure out a use for it.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  >and I use it to check 3 websites That is a powerful use. You're connecting to a source of data that is likely weeks of travel by foot away, if not on another continent. If even one of them is a social site, like HN/Reddit/Facebook, it grants you access to the collective thoughts and works of thousands to millions of people. "I wonder what other movies so and so was in" used to be something you'd have to ask multiple individuals. "I wonder how a nuclear reactor works" was something that would have required a trip to a library and might have left you unsatisfied, now you can go on YouTube and actually see a tour of a reactor at a university and find many articles (some from nuclear/energy organizations on the first page of Google) that contain descriptions that even someone plucked form a random grade school could understand. "How do I change my oil/hang a door/learn to program/knit a scarf/sew something/plan for my retirement/order illicit goods on the darknet/repair my item" now brings you more articles and videos than you could possibly want for countless topics. While you might do these things on a daily basis, or a monthly basis, many people do use that nifty pocket computer that is their smartphone to find such things. I learn more from listening to YouTube videos and podcasts at work in a month of work days about history than I did in all of my k-12 education. For that matter I probably learn more just during my commute in a month than I did in all of my k-12 education. I can also whip that phone out and learn all sorts of things via Khan Academy, I can fire up Duolingo and TALL Drill and practice foreign language skills. I can chat with friends all over the world in real time via text, via image and video video thanks to Marco Polo/Skype/ FB Messenger/FaceTime etc. That phone is my planner, my own personal weather forecaster, my full-time navigator, a camera and a video capture device, grants me access to all manner of data I've stored in Drive/Evernote/Sheets/Docs, can give me basic translation of foreign languages in real time with the camera, allows me to manage my investments/credit cards/bank accounts and get instant notification of transactions, grants me access to insane amounts of music, let's me get a very good estimate of my dietary deficiencies via cronometer. I'd call that quite a technological accomplishment. That little black rectangle gives me the same abilities and conveniences that someone might have required an entire staff to have even 30 years ago.
  - rescbr 7y ago
    Still, most are things that old Presario could do with a dial-up connection. Sure, some might require a Pentium 4 and ADSL, but the smartphone isn't a revolution. The Personal Computer and the Internet were.
- Can_Not 7y ago
  You do as little as you want with your phone, I have more useful and reliable information enter my head in a month than would enter my grandfather's in a year. Back in the day you'd have to memorize more, search longer, and in other cases, hope your cousin wasn't just making stuff up.
perl4ever 7y ago
I had the same reaction to plate tectonics when reading a Time-Life book as a kid. But for every thing that is amazing because it's so recent, there's another that is amazing because it's so much older than you would think. Like quantum mechanics and special relativity are both older than the airplane. Edit: Ok, almost exactly the same age would be more accurate.

hinkley 7y ago

> In 1923. What really gets me is that penicillin will not have been discovered for five more years. No antibiotics until after WWI is long over.

segfaultbuserr 7y ago

People trend to underestimate the historical influence of some subjects in nowadays' fringe science. Many ideas in Sci-Fi and fantasy stories didn't come from nowhere, but based on actual history. Parapsychology, as you said, is an interesting example. In the scientific progress and Cold War paranoid of the 1950s, the idea of "mind power", "mind control" were popular. It convinced many people, even those with a scientific background, and only universally rejected by the mainstream in the 1970s. Even the CIA had a program, "Stargate Project", to study the applications of ESP to gather military intelligence, but it seems the CIA never had reliable results (as modern readers expected), and some participants eventually suffered a mental breakdown. (And around the 1960s, the same history repeats. People started to think that psychedelic drugs have great effects on the human mind, the counter-cultural youths did experiments first, and later the CIA also established a program, MKULTRA, and conducted a lot of unethical human experiments.) To illustrate how influential ESP was, just read the paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950) by Alan Turing. In the beginning of the paper, it summarized nine arguments against artificial intelligence and the feasibility of Turing Test, the 9th argument was parapsychology. Alan Turing said, > I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. [...] How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately, the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. And he pointed out, that some readers may suggest that telepathy can be used to distinguish human intelligence and artificial intelligence, and "this argument is to my mind quite a strong one", and he continued to describe one experiment setup... > A more specific argument based on E.S.P might run as follows: "Let us play the imitation game, using as witnesses a man who is good as a telepathic receiver, and a digital computer. The interrogator can ask such questions as "What suit does the card in my right hand belong to?" The man by telepathy or chairvoyance gives the right answer 130 times out of 400 cards. The machine can only guess at random, and perhaps get 104 right. But he also gave an interesting and creative response to this objection, > Suppose the digital computer contains a random number generator. Then it will be natural to use this to decide what answer to give. But then the random number generator will be subject to the psycho-kinetic powers of the interrogator. Perhaps this psycho-kinesis might cause the machine to guess right more often than would be expected on a probability calculation. It's pretty much a science fantasy novel. "How did the enemy compromise our unbreakable, formal-verified encryption system?!" "Oh, one attacker used the ESP power to make /dev/random keep outputting 0xAAAAAAAAAAAA..." Edit: This is not a joke, it's actually one of the most common form of psycho-kinesis experiments by proponents (and critics) of parapsychology. I didn't realize until I checked Wikipedia... But I doubt the electronic version of this experiment has been performed before Turing (only widely used after the 80s!), so it can be said that Alan Turing can be credited for this idea... See Psychokinesis on random number generators, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology#Psychokinesis_on_random_number_generators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology#Psychokinesis_o... Finally, Turing finished his counter-argument with a simple conclusion: in the worst case scenario, we can simply lock all participants in ESP-proof rooms and eliminate this problem. > If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up. [...] To put the competitors into a "telepathy-proof room" would satisfy all requirements.

coldtea 7y ago

>In 1923. That was entirely reasonable at the time for a country like USSR to fund two persons to find out if that "telepathic revelation" on which many mediums seemed to agree had any grounds. That, plus Nazi Germany funded similar missions much later, and the US also had teams investigating paranormal activities for potential intelligence use decades later...