Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Thunndarr]

[Merlyn]

[Rteacher]

I don't think you ("Thunndarr") make it clear whether you're referring to past experimental protocals or current practices (which "hermes..." apparently was referring to...) In any case, researchers are prone to criticise the work of others in their field. Here's from the preface of Remote Viewing: The Science and Theory of Nonphysical Perception by Courtney Brown.


...When Carl Sagan coined the phrase, �extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,� it is doubtful that many realized how much damage was done to the scientific enterprise. This elevated-threshold demand had never before been a requirement of scientific inquiry. But unfortunately, this demand has been used in recent years to deter a willingness to examine scientific evidence with care and consideration.

The reality is that extraordinary claims really require only calm consideration of evident facts, and the call for "extraordinary evidence" is typically used only to refuse to consider these evident facts. For example, Galileo's claim that the Earth revolves around the sun was extraordinary in his day. But he only requested that people calmly examine his observations to see that he was correct. Those who refused to look at his data instead demanded what amounted to "divine proof" of his claims, which was simply an intellectual filibuster intended to avoid change.

For a long while, research into psi (psychic) phenomena has been in a similar situation as compared with the problems encountered by Galileo in his day. Until recently, academia has been highly resistant to open inquiries with respect to psi phenomena. But things are changing. For example, many members of the "Society for Scientific Exploration" (to mention just one academic group) have a strong interest in psi phenomena. The Society currently publishes the Journal of Scientific Exploration which often features papers on the subject of psi phenomena generally, and remote viewing more specifically. Their 2004 membership listing contains approximately 800 members from virtually every state in the United States and most developed countries. Many of these members are academics. The institutions represented include Harvard, Yale, Stanford,most Ivy League universities, the most prestigious private and public universities, and so on.

Clearly there exists a body of intelligent people today who want to openly discuss the subject of psi phenomena.This book is about the subject of remote viewing, a specific phenomenon that falls within the more general category of psi phenomena. Remote viewers typically employ a set of clearly defined procedures to describe things that are not accessible to their normal senses of hearing, touch, sight, taste, or smell.

The remote viewers always work �blind,� in the sense that they are never given any information regarding what they are asked to perceive until after all of their psychic perceptions are recorded. (Indeed, remote viewing normally does not work at all if the remote viewers are given any advance information about a target.) Scientific controls require this (plus much more, as is explained elsewhere in this volume).

Yet regardless of how rigorously the scientific controls have been followed in the collection and analysis of the data presented in this volume, nowhere in this book is there a demand that readers must accept the reality of remote viewing. This is simply a book of data and theory. All that is asked of the reader is that the material in the book be given calm consideration.

The time seems truly ripe both inside and outside of academia for the subject of remote viewing to be examined with full seriousness. It is not difficult for any serious researcher to conduct sensible experiments with this phenomenon without soon realizing that the phenomenon itself is real, and that its reality has profound implications for all of humanity, and for science. This is the moment to engage in a serious dialogue about remote viewing and its related issues.

To clear up a common misconception right at the outset, let me state unambiguously that all remote-viewing data are always speculative until they are verified using normal physical means of obtaining information. One can never say that something is real because someone has �remote viewed it.� Data collected using remote viewing always needs to be compared in detail with information obtained using physical methods before one can evaluate the accuracy of the remote-viewing data. Thus, while it may be possible for remote-viewing data to sometimes be 100% accurate, one never knows this until the data are compared with the known and verified physical characteristics of whatever the remote viewer was supposed to be perceiving.

In laboratory situations, this verification process can take anywhere from a few minutes to a number of days or weeks. But in situations in which the remote viewer perceives something that cannot be verified easily, the verification process can take much longer, even many years. Until this verification process is completed (however long it takes), the remote-viewing data will remain speculative. If the data cannot be verified at all, then the data can never leave the realm of speculation, no matter how good the track record of a remote viewer�s accuracy.

In this volume, many remote-viewing results are presented. The results were obtained across a variety of distinctly different projects. Each project was initiated in an attempt to learn something new about the phenomenon of remote viewing. This required laboratory conditions for the experiments, and thus exact verification of the remote-viewing results was essential. Thus, readers will learn a great deal that is very concrete about remote viewing by reading this volume.The remote-viewing data presented here have been fully verified and are not speculative any longer, even though the interpretation of these results may continue to provoke healthy debate.

... The research presented in this volume was conducted by myself and others associated with The Farsight Institute, a nonprofit research an educational organization. I am the Director of the Institute. I have never received any financial compensation for my work as Director of The Farsight Institute. Indeed, the reverse is true; I have contributed thousands of dollars to the Institute to help support research into the remote-viewing phenomenon...

... I originally intended to publish this book in an academic press that involved a peer-review process. An editor-in-chief of a major university press was interested in the manuscript for this book, and he undertook to have the manuscript peer reviewed. Since the topic of remote viewing was (and still is) quite controversial for an academic press, the editor decided to err on the side of safety, and the peer-review process took four years and included reviews from a seemingly countless list of famous academics. This long peer-review process turned out to be a great blessing as I explain below, and the editor deserves great credit for helping to shepherd this project through so many phases.

The manuscript went through numerous major revisions in which I did nearly everything that any reviewer asked me to do. The final major revision alone had six reviewers (two are normal for most manuscripts, with or without revisions).The overall peer-review process included academics who minimally spanned the disciplines of physics, psychology, sociology, statistics, and engineering. Four of the final six reviewers emphatically argued in favor of publishing the manuscript. Each of these four reviewers gave evidence of having closely read the manuscript, since their reviews engaged the manuscript at various points throughout the work. But the other two reviewers just as emphatically dismissed remote viewing as a real phenomenon and argued against publication for that reason.

At first I felt that the negative reviews could be overcome since they appeared to me to have significant weaknesses. One of the negative reviewers posited that remote viewing was analogous to a �pagan religion.� Other comments left me wondering how closely this reviewer read the manuscript, or even if it was read at all. The other negative reviewer gave some mention of the initial parts of the manuscript, but argued that even the claim that the remote-viewing phenomenon exists is excessive.

Given the difficulty faced by any scholar who wants to publish a book on this topic with a university press, I was quite happy with the outcome of the peer-review process on a substantive level. But for the press to publish the work, it would have required that the project be supported by the press�s editorial committee, which is largely composed of faculty members, one or more of whom were quite conservative in their views with respect to controversial topics of this sort. This is a typical situation for most academic presses.

Thus, despite considerable support from some of the reviewers, the management of the press ultimately felt the reviews collectively fell short of providing sufficient support to move forward toward publication. In retrospect, I now think that it is currently impossible to publish any book that supportively engages the subject of remote viewing in most (and perhaps all) academic presses, although I hope this changes one day. I know there are many academics who would like to read about this subject.

Serious controversy with regard to many topics will naturally result in split reviews that are passionately argued, and academic presses will have to live with such arguments among the reviewers if the peer-review process is not to degrade into a �black-ball� situation where controversial topics are concerned. Nonetheless, the peer-review process greatly helped me in writing this volume. Indeed, for four years some of the smartest minds on the planet gave me some of the greatest advice anyone could ask for, and I am deeply grateful to all of the reviewers, even (and often especially) the negative ones.

Although this book was not ultimately published by the university press which sent it through such a long, thorough, and generally positive peer-review process, it can nonetheless be stated without ambiguity that the book gained all the benefits that are normally associated with peer-review. The primary characteristic of any working peer-review process is that the author is assisted by the reviewers in the production of a superior book, and to this end, the peer-review process worked well...


http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:1gDxyhBIuJ8J:www.farsight.org/FarsightPress/
RemoteViewingTOC_Preface_Chapter1_Index_Courtney
Brown.pdf+pear+remote+viewing+experiments+current
+protocols+revised&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2

I'm sorry for the length of this quote, but I couldn't figure out how to get this link to work without messing up the page formatting. (And I was too sleepy to edit properly today...)

[laogaiguk]

[quote="Rteacher"]

Rteacher, you can do this

[url=put your link here]Put anything you want the link to say here[/url]

[Rteacher]

I'll delete most of it tonight - it's ridiculously long...

[hermes.trismegistus]

[hermes.trismegistus]

[Thunndarr]

[Merlyn]

[Grotto]

Herpes wrote:

[pocketfluff]

[hermes.trismegistus]

Instead of addressing each point individually, it may be more time-effective if I were to provide broad attention to the topic in general. Unfortunately I'm working 12 hour days, so I don't have the time to devote as much attention to the topic as I'd like, but this should serve as a decent primer.

Dr. Ray Hyman, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, has an extensive record as a skeptic of psi phenomena. He chaired the National Research Council's review committee on parapsychology. He stated in a 1988 interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education that "Parapsychologists should be rejoicing. This was the first government committee that said their work should be taken seriously." (Chronicle of Higher Education, September 14, 1988, p. A5).

In early 1989 the Office of Technology Assessment issued a report of a workshop on the status of parapsychology. The end of the report stated that "It is clear that parapsychology continues to face strong resistance from the scientific establishment. The question is - how can the field improve its chances of obtaining a fair hearing across a broader spectrum of the scientific community, so that emotionality does not impede objective assessment of the experimental results? Whether the final result of such an assessment is positive, negative, or something in between, the field appears to merit such consideration." (Office of Technology Assessment 1989).

In 1995 the American Institutes for Research reviewed formerly classified government-sponsored psi research for the CIA at the request of the US Congress. Statistician Jessica Utts of the University of California Davis, one of the two principle reviewers, concluded that, "The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research ... have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud. ... It is recommended that future experiments focus on understanding how this phenomenon works, and on how to make it as useful as possible. There is little benefit to continuing experiments designed to offer proof." (1996 An assessment of the evidence for psychic functioning. Journal of Statistics Education 10:3).

The other principal reviewer, skeptic Ray Hyman, agreed: "The statistical departues from chance appear to be too large and constitent to attribute to statistical flukes of any sort. ... I tend to agree with Professor Utts that real effects are occurring in these experiments. Something other than chance departures from the null hypothesis has occurred in these experiments." (1996 Evaluation of a program on anomalous mental phenomena. Journal of Statistics Education 10:57).

These opinions have even been reflected in college textbooks. One of the most popular books in the history of college publishing is Introduction to Psychology, by Richard L. Atkinson and three coauthors. A portion of the preface in the 1990 edition of this textbook reads: "Readers should take note of a new section in Chapter 6 entitled 'Psi Phenomena.' We have discussed parapsychology in previous editions but have been very critical of the research and skeptical of the claims made in the field. And although we still have strong reservations about most of the research in parapsychology, we find the recent work on telepathy worthy of careful consideration."


Randomization:
In psi experiments, the way a target is selected is important because if the participants can consciously or unconsciously guess what the targets are, and they are repeatedly guessing many targets in a row, as in an ESP card test, then their responses could look like psi when they are really educated guesses.

Say that an ordinary deck of playing cards was accidentally unbalanced to contain fewer clubs than there were supposed to be. With repeated guessing, and with feedback about the results of each trial, participants might be able to notice that clubs did not show up as often as expected. If they decided to slightly undercall the number of clubs in subsequent guesses, this could slightly inflate the number of successful hits they got on the remaining cards. Successful results in such a test would not indicate psi, but rather a clever (or unconscious) application of statistics.

In a ganzfeld study, however, the process of randomizing the targets is much less important because only one target is used per session, and most participants serve in only one session. So there is no possibility of learning any guessing strategies based on inadequate randomization. However, a critic could argue (and did) that if all the target pictures within each target pool were not selected uniformly over the course of the study, this could still produce inflated hit rates.

The reasoning goes like this: A person who has participated in the study tells a friend about her ganzfeld experience where the target was, say, a Santa Claus picture. Later, if the friend participated in the study, and he got the same target pool, and during the judging period he also selected the Santa Claus because of what his friend said, and the randomization procedure was poor, and Santa Claus was selected as the target again, then what looked like psi wasn't really psi after all, but a consequence of poor randomization.

A similar concern arises for the method of randomizing the sequence in which the experimenter presents the target and the three decoys to the receiver during the judging process. If, for example, the target is always presented second in the sequence of four, then again, a subject may tell a friend, and the friend, armed with knowledge about which of the four targets is the real one, could successfully select the real target without the use of psi.

Although these scenarios are implausible, skeptics have always insisted on nailing down even the most unlikely hypothetical flaws. Hyman and Dr. Charles Honorton disagreed regarding the importance of these randomization flaws. Hyman claimed that he saw a significant relationship between randomization flaws and study outcomes, and Honorton did not. The sources of this disagreement can be traced to Honorton's and Hyman's differing definitions of "randomization flaws," to how the two analysts rated these flaws in the individual studies, and to how they statistically treated the quality ratings.

These sorts of complicated disagreements are not unexpected given the diametrically opposed convictions with which Honorton and Hyman began their analyses. When such discrepancies arise, it is useful to consider the opinions of outside reviewers who have the technical skills to assess the disagreements. In this case, ten psychologists and statisticians supplied commentaries alongside the Honorton-Hyman published debate that appeared in 1986. None of the commentators agreed with Hyman, while two statisticians and two psychologists not previously associated with this debate explicitly agreed with Honorton. (Harris, M.J., and R. Rosenthal. 1986. Interpersonal expectancy effects and human performance research, Postscript to interpersonal expectancy effects and human performance research., and Human performance research: An overview Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Saunders, D.R. 1985. On Hyman's factor analysis. Journal of Psychology 49:86-88. Utts, J.M. 1986. The ganzfeld debate: A statistician's perspective. Journal of Psychology 50:393-402).

In two separate analyses conducted later, Harvard University behavioral scientists Monica Harris and Robert Rosenthal (the latter a world-renowned expert in methodology and meta-analysis) used Hyman's own flaw ratings and failed to find any significant relationships between the supposed flaws and the study outcomes. They wrote, "Our analysis of the effects of flaws on study outcome lends no support to the hypothesis that ganzfeld research results are a significant funciton of the set of flaw variables." (Utts, J.M. 1991. Rejoinder. Statistical Science 6:396-403).

In other words, everyone agreed that the ganzfeld results were not due to chance, nor to selective reporting, nor to sensory leakage. And everyone, except one confirmed skeptic, also agreed that the results were not plausibly due to flaws in randomization procedures.


RV Procedures:
In typical RV experiments, a "viewer" is asked to sketch or to describe (or both) a "target." The target might be a remote location or individual, or a hidden photograph, object, or video clip. All possible paths for sensory leakage are blocked, typically by separating the target from the viewer by distance, sometimes thousands of miles, or by hiding the target in an opaque envelope, or by selecting a target in the future.

Sometimes the viewer is assisted by an interviewer who asks questions about the viewer's impressions. Of course, in such cases the interviewer is also blind to the target so he or she cannot accidentally provide cues. In some RV studies, a sender visits the remote site or gazes at a target object during the session; these experiments resemble classic telepathy tests. In other studies there are no senders at the remote site. In most tests, viewers eventually receive feedback about the actual target, raising the possibility that the results could be thought of as precognition rather than real-time clairvoyance.


Judging the Results:
All but the very earliest studies at SRI (Stanford Research Institute, mentioned in an earlier comment) evaluated the results using a method called "rank-order judging." This is similar to the technique employed in dream-telepathy experiments. After a viewer had remote-viewed a target (a geographic site, a hidden object, a photograph, or a video clip), a judge who was blind to the true target looked at the viewer's response (a sketch and a paragraph or two of verbal description) along with photographs or videos of five possible targets. Four of these targets were decoys and one was the real target.

The actual target is always selected at random from this pool of five possibilities to ensure that neither the viewers nor the judges could infer which was the actual target. The judge is asked to assign an rank to each of the possible targets, where a rank of 1 meant that the possible target matched the response most closely, and a rank of 5 meant that it matched the least. The final score for each remote-viewing trial is simply the ranking that the judge assigned to the actual target.

In the SAIC Experiments (Science Applications International Corporation) from 1989-1993, the CIA sponsored a review of the government sponsored RV research. The SAIC studies provided a rigorously controlled set of experiments that had been supervised by a distinguished oversight committee of experts from a variety of scientific disciplines. The committee included a Nobel laureate physicist, internationally known experts in statistics, psychology, neuroscience, astronomy, and a retired US Army major general who was also a physician.

Of ten government-sponsored experiments conducted at SAIC, six involved RV. Because the SRI studies had previously established the existence of RV to the satisfaction of most of the government sponsors, the SAIC experiments were not conducted as "proof-oriented" studies, but rather as a means of learning how psi perception worked.

Jessica Utts (mentioned earlier), ended her review as follows:

[hermes.trismegistus]

[hermes.trismegistus]

[Grotto]