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For those who want to consider the mundane explanation about remote viewing: remember that humans can still be surprised by the birthday paradox and other synch

• lofaszvanitt 9mo ago
  Or certain knowledge is just not available for anyone. No matter how much power and money you have. There are a lot of areas that are buried underneath technology, while it is an innate ability to certain individuals. Most people do not really understand how their gadgets work or what they are capable of beyond what is advertised....
  • LargoLasskhyfv 9mo ago
    That, and psyops to saturate the channel, because it's considered a 'born secret', falling under the 'invention secrecy act' or equivalents elsewhere for reasons. And lastly simple inability by most to perceive that, and other ESP/Psi stuff, maybe akin to so called aphantasia for people who can't visually imagine things. Edit: Also Weapons of Class Disruption. Can't have that, ever.
• pmontra 9mo ago
  Hedge funds? Yes but before than that, armies would use RV to get targets, secrets, etc. There are plenty of wars around the world and a lot of money involved.
  • gtdhvy 9mo ago
    [flagged]
• bfuller 9mo ago
  What would be the price of revealing this information advantage?
  • sxp 9mo ago
    There have been hedge funds and other investment groups that claim to use RV. (At least according to Google and pro-RV books.) They also claim to be able to beat the market. Based on those anecdotes, I think any hedge fund that thinks they can use RV will publicly brag about it to get more investors. None of these groups can replicate their results beyond the initial claims. This is strong evidence that positive results in RV are just due to selection bias, specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias. If those investment groups could actually replicate their results, they would still be major names and others would be actively trying to copy them since it should only take a couple of millions of dollars to find capable RV candidates. The non-skeptical view is that if people try to predict the stock market via RV, they will interfere with the future and their prediction ability will decrease. But when weighing this hypothesis against the hypothesis that RV is just selection bias, the latter wins due to Occam's Razor.
• kjkjadksj 9mo ago
  The issue with remote viewing as the CIA understood it was not that it didn’t work. By all means there are documents that indicated it did work. The difficulty however was that the training program was unreliable and insufficient to establish a reliable pipeline to competency like other military skills.
  • the_af 9mo ago
    The "difficulty" with remote viewing is nonsense pseudoscience and crackpottery. It absolutely does not work. Not "unreliably", but not work at all. This reminds me of that one time on HN when someone tried to convince me that ritual witchcraft (I think they called it blood magic) on servers was a real thing, necessary to make them work, and my dismissal was typical of narrow minded people.
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    • mnky9800n 9mo ago
      I would be supportive of blood magic if it made things work lol
      • buildsjets 9mo ago
        Don’t knock it till you try it: I call upon thе blood-moon goddess for I have but one request. I've laid the altar, charged the crystals, the circle, I have blessed. Then make clean && make all, BOOM compiles with no errors or warnings every time. Witchcraft.
    • lijok 9mo ago
      Dude claims “there are documents that indicated it did work”. You didn’t enquire about them, just completely dismissed it. That is indeed typical of narrow minded people.
      • the_af 9mo ago
• fumeux_fume 9mo ago
  Just go to wikipedia for the mundane explanation: data leakage to the judges of poorly designed experiments. Absolutely zero reproducibility.
  • stevenhuang 9mo ago
    You are wrong. There has been many reproductions. People don't study it because there is no known mechanism of action and so it's fringe. Jessica Utts, a well respected statistician > Despite Professor Hyman's continued protests about parapsychology lacking repeatability, I have never seen a skeptic attempt to perform an experiment with enough trials to even come close to insuring success. The parapsychologists who have recently been willing to take on this challenge have indeed found success in their experiments, as described in my original report. https://ics.uci.edu/~jutts/response.html https://ics.uci.edu/~jutts/response.html
    • krackers 9mo ago
      Before you can define statistical significance, you have to clearly define the success criteria. From what I see, remote viewing produces vague results, so some amount of human interpretation is necessarily. What counts as a "hit"? If you look at "verified" examples from the social-rv site GP mentioned, some of them match only in an abstract sense, but are still counted as a success. The more reliable thing would be to remote view a coin flip and have the person say heads or tails, but that's not how the stargate experiments were defined and I haven't been able to find any trials like this. Edit: Actually I did find at least one experiment-ish, which is more precognition rather than remote viewing to determine crypto coin price trends [1]. Seems 53 correct predictions, 50 incorrect predictions which is well within statistical chance. Also seems the social-rv GP linked will eventually have a remote-viewing for real-world events prediction-market type thing. Now that's interesting, and they cleverly avoid it devolving into a traditional prediction market by introducing indirection where two images are arbitrarily assigned to the outcome (true/false) and the person RVs the image, without knowledge of which outcome that image represents. [1] https://reddit.com/r/remoteviewing/comments/lg6sf2/precognitive_trading_groups_insights_on_direct/ https://reddit.com/r/remoteviewing/comments/lg6sf2/precognit...
• MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
  Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/808/ https://xkcd.com/808/
• jjk166 9mo ago
  > For those who want a skeptical & cynical view: if remote viewing works, it would be part of the standard strategy of every hedge fund. Please don't use the efficient capitalism argument. By that logic, if polio vaccines worked then why didn't 1940s pharma companies sell polio vaccines back when people were getting polio? Remote viewing is bunk, but not because hedge funds in their omniscience have determined it to be unprofitable.
  • squigz 9mo ago
    > Please don't use the efficient capitalism argument. By that logic, if polio vaccines worked then why didn't 1940s pharma companies sell polio vaccines back when people were getting polio? Because they didn't know about such a vaccine. We know that remote viewing "exists" I think that GP's point - that, if such things exist, they would actually be utilized - is a good one. The framing might not be great but it's also not entirely relevant. You could just as easily make a non-capitalism example - like why don't fire departments use them
    • jjk166 9mo ago
      The concept of vaccines had been known for centuries during the 1940s. No one had ever gotten a polio vaccine to work. Imagine if they had concluded since it had never been done that it therefore could not work. We are aware of remote viewing as a concept but it does not currently exist - no one has ever gotten it to work. There are very good reasons to think it can't work, but the lack of a practical implementation alone is not such a reason. The issue is not capitalism specifically, it just frequently takes that form. Firefighters not doing something is equally fallacious proof of impossibility.
• krackers 9mo ago
  That social-rv is really interesting, apparently the target is randomly assigned _after_ submission, so it's not just remote viewing but also precognition? The popular ones on the "explore sessions" are a very close match, but if you look at other predictions by those accounts, they're less sure. It's very easy to form a connection between any two images if you allow abstracted forms of similarity, and fundamentally there are very limited themes when it comes to images (natural things, man-made things. Smooth vs sharp.). A good control test might be to have LLMs produce output instead, and score that.
  • krackers 9mo ago
    Hm I did notice this bit "list of up to the last 50 targets you've done (so you don't get duplicate targets too frequently)" which seems to invalidate some of the methodology. If the target is never among the last 50 you've done that skews sample space a bit. The fact that this needs to be done also seems to imply the set of images is not that large... And this is worsened by the fact that the LLM-based auto scoring explicitly uses the last 10 as decoy targets >When you submit a session, the system collects your last 10 targets (including the current target) to create a pool of possible matches. A multimodal AI agent is presented with your complete session (including all drawings, text, and data) along with all 10 targets from the pool. The agent is instructed to analyze and rank the targets based on how well they match the session content. The protocol otherwise seems good, but the specific carveouts here would seem to bias results. The source for the judging is at https://github.com/Social-RV/comparative-judging https://github.com/Social-RV/comparative-judging which is the part which would need to be studied carefully. At first glance, it exposes raw filenames to the LLM which might bias things. The ranking logic also seems a bit sketchy, it does some tournament-style elimination thing which I haven't analyzed thoroughly but if decoys are eliminated in an earlier round it could bias things compared to just asking the LLM to order the 10 images based on similarity in a single-pass which is obviously unbiased.
    • krackers 9mo ago
      I guess another thing, is that the null hypothesis is that an incorrect image is equally likely to be matched to any of the 10 decoy targets. But this isn't the case, the LLM has its own implicit bias. For instance, if you modeled things as a "bag of words" then longer target descriptions are more likely to match with images that contain bunch of text. So some decoy targets are more likely to be hit than others. I think to counter this, you'd need to model your null hypothesis as the distribution that results when you have the LLM score a deliberately incorrect image against your target + dummies.