Psychic Phenomenon

Just a follow-up to this post the first of the month. From Richard Wiseman's blog:

In short, all four trials were misses.

When I analysed believers and sceptics separately, the results were the same, with no difference between the groups. So the study didn’t support the existence of remote viewing, and suggested that those who believe in the paranormal are good at finding illusory correspondences between their thoughts and a target .

* * *

Update: I have just looked at the data from those who claimed some kind of psychic ability, and had a high confidence in their choice of target. This sub-group of participants also scored zero out of four.

Surprise, surprise.

Thanks, Richard -

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to my blog.)

I'm not quite sure what to make of this:

Twitter's first scientific study needs you!

Can some people correctly identify a place using mind power alone?

Psychologist Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, wants to find out, and New Scientist readers can help.

Over the course of this week, we'll be carrying out an experiment to find out if there's any substance to claims that some people are "remote viewers" – able to psychically identify a distant location without being shown or told where it is through conventional means.

I dunno - I'd think that twits and woo make a bad combination. The sort of thing that would have you hunched over a toilet after the party, if you know what I mean. But the way that they are doing it at least seems reasonable on first glance:

So, how is the experiment going to work?

So, I was listening to NPR yesterday afternoon, and heard their 'letters' bit about the show on Monday (which I missed, due to being out shooting). They had evidently done a segment speculating what would happen were marijuana legalized, and were reading some of the letters that they got in response. Most were about what you would expect - thoughtful observations and critiques of the show. Then there was the last one:

Is your dog psychic? Does your dog jump around like an idiot right before you get home, and seem to "know", you know, telepathically, when you're coming home? Ours seem to. We have two ginormous English Mastiffs who hop around like morons whenever someone comes to the door - sometimes they start even before we realize that there is someone at the door! Amazing! They love meeting new people, and it's almost like they have a keener sense of smell and hearing than we do! But of course, it's probably because they're psychic. Yeah. That's the ticket.

If your dogs do this too, then Dr. Rupert Sheldrake wants to pay you a thousand bucks to perform totally scientifical-sounding experiments on your dog. And he would too...

...except for those darned skeptics and atheists! Those guys are always hanging around, whining about "evidence" and whatnot. *shaking fist at the dirty unbelieving atheist skeptics*

From his interview at Alex Tsakiris' breathtakingly credulous woo-factory, Skeptiko.com (That's SkeptiKo.com, NOT NOT NOT our good friend SkeptiCo.com folks!):

[link] Dr. Sheldrake: Well, I mean, I’ve had to think long and hard about this because, of course, I often have encountered some skeptics and… I think that, for many of them, it…they’ve made science, not into a method of inquiry, but into a kind of ideology. Michael Shermer likes to say, “Skepticism is a method not a position.” But, actually, for him, it is a position. And, so it is for most skeptics.

I think, what lies behind it for many of them is that they’ve…many of them are atheists, dogmatic and often militant atheists.

Alex: Right.

More below the fold...

So, you're a single parent struggling to raise a severely autistic child. Of all the difficulties you might expect to confront, I bet this one would never cross your mind:

Leduc's weird tale began on May 30, when she dropped young Victoria off for class at Terry Fox Elementary and headed in to work, only to receive a frantic phone call from the school telling her it was urgent she come back right away.

The frightened mother rushed back to the campus and was stunned by what she heard - the principal, vice-principal and her daughter's teacher were all waiting for her in the office, telling her they'd received allegations that Victoria had been the victim of sexual abuse - and that the CAS (Children's Aid Society) had been notified.

How did they come by such startling knowledge? Leduc was incredulous as they poured out their story.

"The teacher looked and me and said: 'We have to tell you something. The educational assistant who works with Victoria went to see a psychic last night, and the psychic asked the educational assistant at that particular time if she works with a little girl by the name of "V." And she said 'yes, I do.' And she said, 'well, you need to know that that child is being sexually abused by a man between the ages of 23 and 26.'"

I like a good ghost story as much as the next guy. Always have. Have even had some fun with such at the expense of friends.

But there is a difference between enjoying and believing.

This past week the San Fransisco Chronicle had a piece about a para-normal conference held in the city titled "Investigations of Consciousness and the Unseen World: Proof of an Afterlife." From the article:

These academics take their paranormal work seriously; they also risk ridicule on campus and struggle to find sources of funding to investigate what happens after we die. One of the issues they face is whether an afterlife is provable by scientific method. Some, like Julie Beischel, who co-founded Arizona's Windbridge Institute for Applied Research in Human Potential, think it is.

So. Would you be at all surprised to find out that over the last 50 years your tax dollars have gone to support such things as remote viewing, spoon bending, even attempts to walk through walls or kill with a thought?

Probably not, if you've been paying attention to what your government has been up to, and the strangeness that surrounds any authoritarian organization such as the US military and (so-called) intelligence agencies. But to see it all nicely wrapped up in three one-hour long programs for the UK Channel 4 is something else altogether. From the Google video site hosting the programs:

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Three years in the making, Jon Ronson’s Crazy Rulers of the World explores the apparent madness at the heart ... all » of US military intelligence.