Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Merlyn]

Another good article written in 2004 criticising this type of research. The best part may be this at the end.

[Rteacher]

"Taking a stand" relates more to politics than science, in my opinion...

[hermes.trismegistus]

[Thunndarr]

[Rteacher]

Having additional judges doesn't necessarily ensure more reliability. One highly qualified judge would be preferable to having several less qualified ones... Having multiple judges could serve to compound mistakes or to reach a point of gridlock. (Of course, I'm only speaking generally - and I'm half-asleep again as I post...)

[Grotto]

sigh rteacher

Any judge should be qualified to judge whatever it is they are judging! Having more than one judge helps prevent bias, gives perspective and is overall much more accurate and fair than one individual regardless how qualified they are!

[Rteacher]

Ideally in theory, perhaps (I'm still half-asleep, but probably still sharp enough to defeat you... ) but I would think that as a practical matter it would be hard to find really unbiased or independent people to act as judges in any field where there's a lot of money and/or politics and/or lobbying involved. If two-or-more are biased in a certain way then the results may be prejudiced...

(Of course, if the one judge is not really good it would be easier to corrupt just one person...)

[hermes.trismegistus]

Skeptics often contend that psi experiments are inadequately designed. They claim that the experimenters were sloppy about data collecting and recording, or that they failed to control against subject or experimenter fraud, or any number of other potential problems. These flaws, so the claim goes, produce false-positive results, and the more flawed the study, the more positive the results - leading to the assertion that if perfectly designed experiments were conducted, they would show only null results.

Meta-analysis provides a straightforward way of testing whether design flaws are systematically related to the results reported in a series of studies. To perform this test, judges assign a rating to each study indicating the degree to which certain design criteria are present or absent. If a criterion is absent in a study, the study is assigned a zero score for that criterion. If a criterion is present, the study gets a score of one for that criterion. After the presence or absence of each criterion has been determined by detailed study of the experimental report, the final quality rating is calculated by simply adding up the ones. The quality ratings for each experiment are then compared to the effects observed in the experiments.

Finding a large negative relationship between study quality and experimental results would support the critics' assertions. If this same analysis showed no systematic relationship between study quality and outcomes, it would suggest that despite the possible presence of flaws in some studies (and no experiment is perfect), those flaws did not account in any systematic way for the results of the studies. And thus design flaws would not be responsible for the observed outcomes.

In any form of psi research, a "fatal flaw" is a design feature or overlooked aspect of the experiment that allowed for explicit or inadvertent sensory cueing. This includes the absence of controls that may have allowed the telepathic receiver to deliberately or accidentally obtain information about the target picture through normal sensory means. Another potentially fatal flaw is inadequate randomization of the targets, because if the identity of the target can be inferred in any way, this can give the receiver a clue to its identity.

Hyman agreed that the results could not be attributed to chance or systematic reporting practices, and there was no systematic relationship between the security methods used to guard against sensory leakage and the study outcomes. (Hyman, R., and C. Honorton. 1986. A joint communiqu�: The psi ganzfeld controversy. Journal of Parapsychology 50:351-364)


PEAR Method of Evaluation:
For a PEAR RV trial (PRP), the percipient was asked to write a short description of the geographic site where an agent is, was, or would be at the prescribed time. The percipient then filled out a thirty-question "descriptor" form. These descriptors asked whether the perceptive impression was mainly dark or light, mainly indoors or outdoors, whether there were animals in the scene or not, significant sounds or not, and so on.

Meanwhile, the agent typically spent from five to fifteen minutes at the target site, beginning at the prescribed time. He or she wrote down any impressions and filled out the same thirty-item descriptor form. In most cases, the agent also took photographs of the scene to provide a better record of the experience and for future reference.

The target sites were determined in two ways: instructed and volitional. In the instructed mode, a person not otherwise involved in the experiment randomly selected a site from a large pool of previously selected locations. An electronic random-event generator (RNG) was typically used to make this selection. This information would be given to the agent in a sealed envelope with instructions to open the envelope only after leaving the laboratory. With the volitional method, the target site was selected spontaneously by the agent, who was traveling at some distant location unknown to the percipient, and where no preestablished target pool existed.

With both methods, most of the remote perceptions were performed precognitively, before the agent arrived at the site, and even before a site was selected. NO communication was permitted between the percipient and the agent until both had completed their tasks.

To analyze the results of a single trial, the researchers matched the percipient's descriptor list against the agent's descriptor list for the actual target. They then compared the descriptor lists to all other targets in the entire database. This provides an objective, mathematically rigorous way of evaluating the likelihood of each individual trial. Some criticism has been directed at the PEAR PRP methods, primarily because in most cases the percipient and the agent knew each other, and because the percipient knew approximately when and where the agent was going to visit a site. (Hansen, G.P., J. Utts, and B. Markwick. 1992. Critique of the PEAR RV experiments. Journal of Parapsychology 56 (2):97-114) This shared knowledge might have biased one or both of the participants to fill in their descriptor lists in similar ways. The results of such shared knowledge could, in principle, inflate the score obtained in each trial.

In response, the PEAR researchers reanalyzed their data to see whether shared knowledge might have biased the results, especially in the volitional trials. They argued that if this bias were responsible for some extra hits on the descriptors, then it should have resulted in better results for the volitional trials than for the instructed trials. But no statistical differences were found. (Dobyns, Y.H., et al. 1992. Response to Hansen, Utts and Markwick: Statistical and methodological problems of the PEAR RV experiments. Journal of Parapsychology 56 (2):115-146) Thus, while shared biases may have influenced the results in principle, the magnitude of any such bias was too small to be detected. Of greater improtance is the finding that the pear RV studies produced essentially the same results as those seen by many other researchers over the years.

Of the 340+ PRP trials published, 125 were in the instructed mode and 209 in the volitional mode. The final odds against chance for the PEAR researchers' overall database were 100 billion to 1. For the instructed trials alone, the outcome was a billion to 1, and for the volitional trials, 100,000 to 1. Thus, the results actually ran opposite to the shared-knowledge suggestion, with somewhat greater performance demonstrated in the instructed mode.

Many of the skeptical arguments commonly leveled at psi experiments have been motivated by nonscientific factors, such as arrogance, advocacy and ideology.

"The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance of things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice." - Arthur Schopenhauer

In 1993 the parapsychologist Charles Honorton, from the University of Edinburgh, considered what skeptics of psi experiments used to claim, and what they no longer claim. He demonstrated that virtually all the skeptical arguments used to explain away psi over the years had been resolved through new experimental designs.

Informed skeptics no longer claim that the outcomes of psi experiments are due to mere chance because we know that some parapsychological effects are, to use skeptic Ray Hyman's words, "astronomically significant." (Marks, D.F. 1986. Investigating the Paranormal. Nature 320:119-24) This is a key concession because it shifts the focus of the debate away from the mere existence of interesting effects to their proper interpretation.

This concession also puts to rest the decades-long skeptical questions over the scientific legitimacy of parapsychology. It states, quite clearly, that skeptics who continue to repeat the same old assertions that parapsychology is pseudoscience, or that there are no repeatable experiments, are uninformed not only about the state of parapsychology, but also about the current state of skepticism.

Honorton alwo pointed out that informed skeptics no longer claim that there are any meaningful relationships between design flaws and experimental outcomes. (Honorton, C. 1993. Rhetoric over substance: The impoverished state of skepticism. Journal of Parapsychology 57:191-214)

Namaste.

[Grotto]

some dumbass wrote:

[hermes.trismegistus]

Grotto, I have to ask, what formal training do you have in research methodology?

Where have you been published?

Namaste.

[Merlyn]

Obviously this is a very small field with only 2 or 3 people who are actively involved in its study. You've told us that much when you keep quoting the same people over and over again and shifting back and forth through the years to prove the same points over and over again. What needs to be done are more studies and new judges need to be appointed who are qualified to judge the results. We have those judges like Randi, but you reject them because you say they are too set in their stances, but all they really want are clear cut results with no fudging. Check out the webpage, give it a chance. You say for us to do the same to those webpages you post dedicated to remote viewing. I say for you to do the same. You'll likely learn a lot. If not, who cares. There are so many ways to end the debate and without a doubt show the veridicality that rv actually works and that goes beyond some crappy drawings of structures. That's all the critics really want, and when you can do that, or when they can do that in these institutes, get back to us, everything else is crap to be honest. If you choose to believe it, good for you. Give us addresses instead of buildings shapes for a start.

[hermes.trismegistus]

[Grotto]

[jacl]

[Tiger Beer]

Astral Projection/Astral Travel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astral_projection