TED - and Censorship

[Open_Minded]

Hello Mr. Spinkles

I took a look at the various papers and rebuttles linked through the Wiseman site. It looks like two scientists debating each other. To the degree that it is "standard" I don't have a bit of a problem with it. My position goes back to this statement - because it resonates with me as a lay person:

For surely the harsh rhetoric, the refusal to look at results before criticising them, and the misrepresentation of events and data is far more damaging to science than some incorrect theories and a few flawed experiments.

Mr. Spinkles - I don't intend to argue the science of this issue. I'm not qualified to do so. I am coming at this from the perspective of a lay person. Something else resonated with me in the Skeptico article:

In 2008, when asked about the research into remote viewing (supposedly a form of extra-sensory perception) Prof. Richard Wiseman said “I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do... Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionise the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions.

Though again what is an ‘extraordinary’ claim can often be extremely subjective and proponents of ideas deemed to be extraordinary often claim to be treated unfairly

Wiseman's admission that "by the standards of any other area of science, that remote viewing is proven" raised my eyebrows to say the least. So... I did a bit more looking and found the following:

Recently, journalist Steven Volk was surprised to discover that leading skeptical psychologist Richard Wiseman has admitted that the evidence for telepathy is so good that “by the standards of any other area of science, [telepathy] is proven.” Mr. Volk goes on to write, “Even more incredibly, as I report in Fringe-ology, another leading skeptic, Chris French, agrees with him.”

Mr. Volk might even be more surprised to learn that back in 1951 psychologist Donald Hebb wrote this:


“Why do we not accept ESP [extrasensory perception] as a psychological fact? [The Rhine Research Center] has offered enough evidence to have convinced us on almost any other issue … Personally, I do not accept ESP for a moment, because it does not make sense. My external criteria, both of physics and of physiology, say that ESP is not a fact despite the behavioral evidence that has been reported. I cannot see what other basis my colleagues have for rejecting it … Rhine may still turn out to be right, improbable as I think that is, and my own rejection of his view is—in the literal sense—prejudice.”


Four years later, George Price, then a research associate at the Department of Medicine at the University of Minnesota, published an article in the prestigious journal Science that began:


“Believers in psychic phenomena … appear to have won a decisive victory and virtually silenced opposition. … This victory is the result of careful experimentation and intelligent argumentation. Dozens of experimenters have obtained positive results in ESP experiments, and the mathematical procedures have been approved by leading statisticians. … Against all this evidence, almost the only defense remaining to the skeptical scientist is ignorance.”
But Price then argued, “ESP is incompatible with current scientific theory,” and asked:


“If, then, parapsychology and modern science are incompatible, why not reject parapsychology? … The choice is between believing in something ‘truly revolutionary’ and ‘radically contradictory to contemporary thought’ and believing in the occurrence of fraud and self-delusion. Which is more reasonable?”

Coming at this discussion from a lay person's perspective, I will note the following:

1. TED taking this material down only after an uproar by skeptics smacks of politics, rather than an impartial hearing.
2. The following quote from the Skeptico article resonated with me as well.

   Throughout the summer of 1981 the book was reviewed by a wide range of scientists and although the reception was mixed, it was not all negative by any means. Then on 24 September 1981 the book was reviewed in Nature by the then editor John Maddox (although the piece did
   not give the author’s name, it was later revealed to be Maddox who wrote it). The piece was entitled ‘A book for burning?’ and was highly critical of A New Science of Life, Dr Sheldrake and his theories. Although the article said the book was ‘the best candidate for burning there has been for many years’, Maddox never actually called for the book to be burned, in fact what the article did say was “[Dr Sheldrake’s] book should not be burned (nor confined to closed shelves in libraries) but, rather, put firmly in its place among the literature of intellectual aberrations.”

   • This quote resonated with me because it the actions of Maddox came off looking like the church's treatment of scientists in past centuries. Maddox's attitudes and actions were dogmatic (to say the least).
3. Professor Wiseman's admission that: "[FONT=&quot]by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do... Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionise the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusion" Also stands out.
   [/FONT]
   • [FONT=&quot]Firstly - "outlandish" by who's determination?
     [/FONT]
   • [FONT=&quot]Secondly - back to the Epoc Times article: "[/FONT]
     Like Price and Hebb before them, both Wiseman and French hold that the claim of telepathy is so extraordinary that we need a greater level of evidence than we normally demand. Why should this be so? Most people believe in the reality of telepathy based on their own experiences, and are puzzled by the description of telepathy as “extraordinary.”
     It is even more puzzling when surveys show that a large proportion of scientists accept the possibility that telepathy exists. Two surveys of over 500 scientists in one case and over 1,000 in another both found that the majority of respondents considered ESP “an established fact” or “a likely possibility”—56 percent in one and 67 percent in the other.
     Polls such as this suggest that most scientists are curious and open-minded about psi. This, however, does not seem to be the case in one field: psychology. In the former study, only 3 percent of natural scientists considered ESP “an impossibility,” compared to 34 percent of psychologists."
   • Thirdly - as a lay person watching this type of research (and the way the scientific community treats the research) I am one of those people who .... " believe in the reality of telepathy based on their own experiences, and are puzzled by the description of telepathy as 'extraordinary.'"

From a lay perspective (and I do realize there is a difference here - that is why I willingly identify myself as a "lay person" in this area) I am not only puzzled, I see bias. Maybe because I've personally been the recipient of bias when I was younger and more willing to divulge my experiences to other people. I've since learned to "shut my mouth" and only my family and close friends (and well I've written about it here - for the first time in decades) know.


What baffles me ... is that this type of treatment goes against what I was taught of the sciences. When I graduated college it was with a B.A. in Business Administration and a minor in Environmental Sciences. My Environmental Sciences minor was one semester credit short of being a double-major alongside Business Administration. So... I've had my fair share of Science courses (Biology being high on the list). Part of my instruction was to pay attention to what happens in nature.


As was stated earlier - but it bears repeating here -

Why should this be so? Most people believe in the reality of telepathy based on their own experiences, and are puzzled by the description of telepathy as “extraordinary.”


It is even more puzzling when surveys show that a large proportion of scientists accept the possibility that telepathy exists. Two surveys of over 500 scientists in one case and over 1,000 in another both found that the majority of respondents considered ESP “an established fact” or “a likely possibility”—56 percent in one and 67 percent in the other.

The label of "extraordinary" here is not coming from "what happens in nature". Because regular human beings (like myself) accept these things as well within the realm of "normal". If an objective scientist was simply looking at the human experience for cues, then PSI research would make perfect sense.

The only conclusion I can draw - as a lay person - is that there are those within the Science community who see their materialistic world-view crumbling and they are acting out emotionally.

And back to my original point .... the scientists responding emotionally are

far more damaging to science than some incorrect theories and a few flawed experiments.

for lay people to trust the results of science ... scientists can not afford the kind of emotional and biased responses exhibited in this situation.

 

[Mr Spinkles]

Open_Minded,

I believe the reason you interpret the responses of scientists as an emotional prejudice against telepathy is because you are not familiar with the full experimental record on this subject. The record shows that apparent "psychic" phenomena are much more prone to fraud, self-deception, and confirmatory bias than other areas of scientific investigation. Furthermore, unlike most scientific fields, the very existence of psychic phenomena is implausible to begin with on the basis of the entire body of experimental knowledge (i.e. including what we know from physics and psychology).

Before proceeding into the history of experiments on psychic phenomena, however, it will be helpful to to illustrate what I mean by considering the case of particle physics. Basically, in particle physics, the data is usually some kind of noisy signal, and a spike in the data indicates the existence of a new particle. Over the years after many experiments were done, a "publication bias" became evident in favor of discovering new particles, rather than attributing data spikes to chance. The true story is complicated, but it was something like this: if five different physicists performed five different experiments, four of them would see nothing but noise, and therefore they saw no need to publish the result. But one of them would see a large spike in the noise which had only a 20% probability of occurring by chance. This physicist, eager to publish the result and get credit for the discovery of a new particle before his competitors, would then publish this data and claim he had discovered a new particle with 80% confidence. As you can imagine, this cluttered the scientific literature with a spurious number of hasty new particle discoveries; and it caused much confusion and disappointment, of course, when follow-up experiments failed to reproduce the results and concluded the "discovered" particle never existed, after all. Think of all that labor and taxpayer funds inefficiently wasted over a wild goose chase!

It became evident that there were other biases at play, too, some of them already well-known to psychologists, such as the confirmation bias, and so on. The point of the story is this: physicists realized they needed to take steps to mitigate their own, documented "experimenter bias". Part of the answer was to raise the standard of evidence. Particle physicists agreed as a general rule they would not publish the discovery of a new particle unless the confidence was over 95% (or thereabouts). This would cut down the probability of cluttering up the scientific literature with misleading results, adding confusion and wasting resources on wild goose chases. Many other extremely rigorous methods were adopted to maximize the chances of objectivity and minimize the chances of experimenter bias, some of which you can read about here (PDF): http://www.slac.stanford.edu/econf/C030908/papers/TUIT001.pdf

The point is that today, particle physics is known to be extremely rigorous and the standards of evidence extremely high. The standards of evidence for detecting a new particle are much higher, perhaps, than in other fields, such as a typical benchtop biochemistry experiment, where experimenter bias has not shown itself to be such a big problem. (That is probably because compared to particle physics, in an ordinary mundane biochemistry experiment the stakes are lower, and there is less wiggle room for different (biased) interpretations.)

And yet still, some published results in particle physics are dismissed when they claim something that is implausible on the basis of known physics. A year or two ago, for example, the OPERA experiment reported detecting neutrinos traveling faster than light. While most physicists were open to this possibility in principle, as a working hypothesis they assumed that the OPERA experiment had made some kind of error. To the uninitiated, this probably seems like closed-minded dismissal of anything outside the mainstream. But in fact, it was a reasonable hypothesis based on weighing the entire body of experimental evidence (not just one experiment). And the hypothesis that OPERA had made a mistake turned out to be correct.

So that explains why it is perfectly reasonable to raise the standard of evidence in a particular field, when that field has a demonstrated bias in favor of detecting things which are not actually there.

Now let's review what is known from the experimental record about so-called psychic phenomena. As you will see, it suffers from much more serious problems than particle physics, particularly fraud. (Prove that a physicist is a fraud, as in the Jan Hendrick Schon scandal, and it's a huge deal. Psychic frauds OTOH are a dime a dozen.) They are such pervasive problems that we are justified in assuming all psychics are frauds, or self-deceived, until proven otherwise. Other problems with psychical research include poor experimental controls, and the implausibility of the claimed phenomena to begin with (i.e., the many experiments of physics). Ergo, even higher standards of evidence are called for than in particle physics. And the working hypothesis that whenever experimenters detect something implausible, they have made a mistake, is even more justified in psychic research than it is in particle physics.

In support of my assertions above, let's review a sample of key findings in the history of psychic research or "parapsychology":

*****************
1770s: Benjamin Franklin and other scientists are commissioned by the King of France to test a popular belief in psychic healing called "mesmerism". In response to being "mesmerized", people seem to be healed, collapse into hysterics, etc. But controlled tests show that these effects occur only when subjects believe they are being "mesmerized", not when they actually are. Franklin et al. conclude that it is belief in mesmerism, and not the actual existence of mesmerism, which produces the effects. In other words, it is a psychological, not psychical, phenomenon.

Early 20th century: Houdini demonstrates that many self-claimed psychics and spiritual mediums are fakes, and learns how to reproduce their (apparently) psychic feats using ordinary means. These means include outright criminality but also techniques which exploit human psychology, such as "cold reading".

Mid 20th century:
Physicists perform experiments which seem to convincingly demonstrate psychic abilities in certain test subjects. The results are published in the world's top science journal, Nature. A number of scientists are lead to believe that a test subject named Uri Geller has genuine psychic abilities, until James Randi and other magicians show how Geller's apparently psychic feats can be reproduced using trickery:
[youtube]JXv3TvB4LNI[/youtube]
James Randi and Uri Geller.

James Randi oversees "Project Alpha" which shows that physicists searching for psychic phenomena could be deceived by frauds, even when various controls were imposed (videotaping, having two researchers present, etc.)

Zener cards are used to try to demonstrate psychic phenomena but James Randi shows that apparent telepathy using Zener cards can be reproduced using ordinary means:
James Randi and Zener cards

Late 20th and early 21st centuries:
The U.S. National Academies of Science issues a report on enhancing human performance, with an eye on military applications. Reviewing experiments done by academia and the US military, the report concludes there is "no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena."

The US military shuts down "Project Stargate" after concluding that ~30 years of experiments have failed to demonstrate convincingly that any psychic abilities exist, or that they can be used to get any information of practical intelligence value.

A simple test demonstrates that practitioners of "therapeutic touch" cannot actually feel human "energy fields", even though they seem to sincerely believe they can. The results are published in the Journal of the American Medical Association with Emily Rosa, a nine-year-old girl, as first author, who becomes the youngest person to ever publish an article in a peer-reviewed medical journal.
*****************

 

[Mr Spinkles]

And it continues right up to the present day. For example, recently a study was published claiming to detect psychic powers. The study tested whether college students could predict random events, such as a flash on a computer screen, and said the results were "statistically significant". But a follow-up study found no effect. So the merry-go-round of psychic research goes nowhere, unlike in, say, particle physics, where sometimes an actual effect is detected, and actually reproduced in follow-up experiments. Wiki sums it up best:

"The essential problem is that a large portion of the scientific community, including most research psychologists, regards parapsychology as a pseudoscience, due largely to its failure to move beyond null results in the way science usually does. Ordinarily, when experimental evidence fails repeatedly to support a hypothesis, that hypothesis is abandoned. Within parapsychology, however, more than a century of experimentation has failed even to conclusively demonstrate the mere existence of paranormal phenomenon, yet parapsychologists continue to pursue that elusive goal."

That's why this whole field tends to be dismissed as pseudoscience. Because of its record as a field, and the evidence. Dismissing something based on evidence is okay in science.

You can imagine how easy it is for hard-working scientists to occasionally overreach and get emotional when they criticize bad science ... you have particle physicists raising the standard of evidence on themselves to avoid wild goose chases. Meanwhile, psychic researchers want us all to lower the standards and really go for every wild goose chase. No one would ever be expected to believe in a particle which was detected in one experiment slightly better than chance, but then not detected in a follow-up experiment ..... but psychic researchers want us to really squint, and tilt our heads, and lower our standards of evidence so you can find psychic effects in a sea of non-reproducible studies. They want us to not only waste time on wild goose chases, but chase the same goose over and over. It's obnoxious and that's why some scientists overreach in their criticism. Such occasional overreaches do not imply that it's unscientific to be dismissive of psychic research.

 

[Mr Spinkles]

Open_Minded,

BTW just to bring back my argument to your specific points, you were concerned by Wiseman's statment: "I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do..."

I think what he's saying is that in areas of science not plagued by fraud and false-positives, when a paper comes out claiming to see something, we usually have no reason to believe it is fraud or a false-positive. If someone does a basic benchtop biochemistry experiment and claims that protein A binds to protein B, I have no reason to doubt this. But in the field of parapsychology more rigorous standards of evidence are called for because this field has a problematic track record. The track record is so bad that when a study comes out claiming to see psychic phenomena, my working hypothesis is that the study is wrong and a good follow-up study will not see the effect. This is not an unscientific approach on my part, it's just the best and simplest hypothesis in light of the evidence.

 

[Open_Minded]

Hello Mr. Spinkles:

Thank you for your response. You make some excellent points. Yes - I do appreciate the high and rigorous standards that physicists hold themselves to. Yes - the field of psychic research has had more than its share of quacks and frauds. But ... that is not the whole picture here.

Firstly - just in the case of Rupert Sheldrake - you are going to have a hard time convincing me that he is either a fraud or a quack. I am not coming at this as a scientist, I am coming at this as a human being with my own experiences in this area. As I mentioned - in an earlier post - I learned to "shut up" about my experiences a very long time ago. By the time I was a teenager in fact. It took me years to "become comfortable in my own skin" because of the western scientific mindset and the pressure this puts on individuals to just "shut up" and follow the Newtonian Clockwork view of the universe even if it means denying oneself.

I quoted Sheldrake's bio earlier. This is a man who comes from an esteemed, mainstream science background. You and I both know the risks any legitimate scientist takes to study PSI, Sheldrake took those risks and he took them knowingly, and he has paid the price. Yet ... he still continues onward ... he still continues "fighting the battle". From where I sit - I'd never have the courage to do such a thing. I don't tell anyone outside my family. And quite frankly my family only knows what they see for themselves. They know the unexpected phone calls they get just as they are dealing with a personal crisis, etc...

What they don't know are the experiences they don't see and that I just "shut up" about. Only my spouse knows those, and then only some of those, such is my (even at 55 years old) internal pressure to "shut up". And here's the thing, had I been born in a different culture with a different world-view (rather than scientific world-view of America) it's entirely plausible to say that I would have grown up with an entirely different attitude towards my own experiences and been more open and forth-coming.

So ... as a lay person who:

1. Has these experiences
2. Gets feedback from others in my life that they notice this in me as well
3. Grew up in a scientific world-view
4. And even today - after years of learning to come to terms with this aspect of myself - keeps silent on the issue
5. Sees someone with Dr. Sheldrake's background "take on the establishment"
6. Knows the scientific establishment is as entrenched as any other political/professional establishment (I've watch my scientist brother deal with more establishment politics then I ever thought I would and he has "towed the party line" and knows that he does. He's just waiting for retirement at this point.)

Well from that perspective - and I realize it is not your perspective - you'll have to forgive my bias towards Dr. Sheldrake.


More importantly to the larger discussion ..... earlier I posted this comment:

What baffles me ... is that this type of treatment goes against what I was taught of the sciences. When I graduated college it was with a B.A. in Business Administration and a minor in Environmental Sciences. My Environmental Sciences minor was one semester credit short of being a double-major alongside Business Administration. So... I've had my fair share of Science courses (Biology being high on the list). Part of my instruction was to pay attention to what happens in nature. As was stated earlier - but it bears repeating here -

Why should this be so? Most people believe in the reality of telepathy based on their own experiences, and are puzzled by the description of telepathy as “extraordinary.”


It is even more puzzling when surveys show that a large proportion of scientists accept the possibility that telepathy exists. Two surveys of over 500 scientists in one case and over 1,000 in another both found that the majority of respondents considered ESP “an established fact” or “a likely possibility”—56 percent in one and 67 percent in the other.

It flies in the face of common human experience to take a position that psychic phenomena are "extraordinary". They are no more "extraordinary", to most people, than is someone in the family with artistic or musical abilities. The only difference being that in the scientific western world-view there is a stigma attached to you if you have the experiences, you are not perceived as "logical", you are perceived as more "emotional". Hence the reason I don't talk about them. What the scientific community is missing in its bias (and I do see bias) is what is happening in nature, what has happened consistently in nature across cultural boundaries and time.

You mentioned the Bem study. Again - I am a lay person and I fully admit I see this study through the eyes of a lay person. But ... I do have my fair share of experience with politics in general and there are some things that stand out in my mind about this situation.

Firstly Daryl Bem works at Cornell University. Again - Cornell is an upstanding institution. So let's just take a deep breath here before we start throwing around words like "fraud", "quakery", etc.... or even "pseudoscience". I do think it is not to be expecting too much to give Cornell enough credit for maintaining high standards for its staff. So... (from my perspective) pulling out the word "pseudoscience" and applying to work done at Cornell is pushing the edges of "objective analysis".

Secondly - let's look at another article about the Bem research and the scientists who are disputing his research:

Can people truly feel the future? Not according to new research by Jeffrey Rouder from the University of Missouri and Richard Morey from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Their study uses a novel statistical approach that doesn't support claims that extra-sensory perception exists. ......

According to Rouder and Morey, in order to accurately assess the total evidence in Bem's data, it is necessary to combine the evidence across several of his experiments, not look at each one in isolation, which is what researchers have done up till now. They find there is some evidence for ESP -- people should update their beliefs by a factor of 40.

In other words, beliefs are odds. For example, a skeptic might hold odds that ESP is a long shot at a million-to-one, while a believer might believe it is as possible as not (one-to-one odds). Whatever one's beliefs, Rouder and Morey show that Bem's experiments indicate they should change by a factor of 40 in favor of ESP. The believer should now be 40-to-1 sure of ESP, while the skeptic should be 25000-to-1 sure against it.


Rouder and Morey conclude that the skeptics odds are appropriate: "We remain unconvinced of the viability of ESP. There is no plausible mechanism for it, and it seems contradicted by well-substantiated theories in both physics and biology. Against this background, a change in odds of 40 is negligible."

So... in other words .... if an experiment comes back with "good" results and you don't like the results, then come up with a new novel statistical approach, decide your odds are more appropriate than the original odds and put it out there as science.

I got tell you, I about burst out laughing when I read that one. It reminded me of something I used to hear my mother (who was a hospital floor nurse) say on quite a frequent basis, "I can play the game, just give me the rules".

And more applicable to my own career, I build and manage databases. You have no idea how often my clients have called me in to analyze data and "prove" that they need money for something. It may be budgets, it may be grants, but it all boils down to giving the people they have to answer to the data they want to see, in the way they want to see it. I come up with "novel statistical approaches" on a monthly basis.

If it smells like politics, it probably is politics, even if I am a lowly "lay person".

 

[Mr Spinkles]

Open_Minded,

If you've had personal experiences of a mystical nature and they make you happy, great. I'm not here to take that away from you. If however you are interested in critically evaluating whether you have the powers you seem to have, you could try testing them under controlled conditions. It is not uncommon for good, honest, intelligent, creative people to experience things in their lives which lead them to believe they have mystical powers, even when they do not. It's nothing to be ashamed of, we're all human and we are all subject to these errors of human psychology.

This is very common and well-known to psychologists. The video below is typical. Look at what happens when these charming British people who believe they can use dowsing rods are tested (watch from 23:20 - 30:00; warning: if you don't like Richard Dawkins, please just ignore him; don't allow your dislike for him to obscure what's going on in this segment):
[youtube]0CyMglakWoo[/youtube]
Richard Dawkins - The Enemies of Reason Part 1 - YouTube

You and I both know the risks any legitimate scientist takes to study PSI, Sheldrake took those risks and he took them knowingly, and he has paid the price. Yet ... he still continues onward ... he still continues "fighting the battle".

I think he's mainly paid the price for distortion, targeting the lay public, and doing non-reproducible research (or inconclusive research, at best). I'm a physicist so I could tell right away he was distorting the approach of physicists when he claimed things like "it's an unquestionable dogma that the fundamental constants of Nature are truly constant". Statements like that probably make him look like a hero taking on the establishment to a lay audience. But I know better, and I can tell you from my own experience, it's not an unquestionable dogma. The fundamental constants seem to be constant but maybe they do change a little, it's an open question and many physicists are working hard on it. So for me this guy's credibility goes way down right from the get-go.

And then, being the open-minded scientist that I am, I looked at his psychic dog study. Sheldrake (and you) insinuated that "the establishment" was too closed-minded to do follow-up experiments. Not true. Wiseman did follow-up experiments. More points get knocked off Sheldrake's reputation, in my eyes. Furthermore, the best possible spin on these experiments is that the data admits multiple interpretations, and therefore do not unambiguously establish the phenomenon claimed. Forgive me for not falling out of my chair and abandoning my "establishment" hypothesis that dogs aren't psychic, that they go to the window for lots of reasons and perhaps guess based on clues when its owner might be coming home.

And what "price" has he paid? Criticism. If you do bad science, you get criticized. Sorry. Even if you do good science, your work will be subject to criticism. The antidote to criticism is not complaining, but doing better science.

It flies in the face of common human experience to take a position that psychic phenomena are "extraordinary".

It's extraordinary compared to the best available scientific evidence. You are right it's not an extraordinary claim compared to the anecdotal stories of many people, or the common perceptions of some people in uncontrolled conditions. But our best scientific evidence indicates that common experience, memories, anecdotal evidence, etc. is often quite flawed and unreliable. The claim that dowsing works would not be "extraordinary" compared to the people in the video above, but it would be extraordinary compared to the best evidence, which indicates those people are mistaken and dowsing doesn't work.

You mentioned the Bem study.

I did? Where?

 

[Ouroboros]

This video on TED? The debate about Rupert Sheldrake’s talk | TED Blog

(18 min Rupert Sheldrakes presentation, on TED.com)

 

[Ouroboros]

There are two things going on here

1. Censorship of a site who's stated mission is "TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design."
2. And the larger conflict happening within the sciences

I look forward to the thoughts of others .....

I found the video on TED. Granted it wasn't in the regular list. It was on the TED blog. But what evidence is there that it was banned? And if it was, was it for the said reasons or for any other reason?

Here's is the TED response to "banning" the TEDx video: http://www.ted.com/conversations/17189/the_debate_about_rupert_sheldr.html

Thanks to all who participated in this conversation on TED's decision to move Rupert Sheldrake's talk from YouTube to TED.com. It was scheduled as a 2-week conversation, and has now closed. But the archive will remain visible here.

We'd like to respond here to some of the questions raised in the course of the discussion.

Some asked whether this was "censorship." Now, it's pretty clear that it isn't censorship, since the talk itself is literally a click away on this very site, and easily findable on Google. But it raises an interesting question about curation. Should TED play *any* curatorial role in the content it allows its TEDx organizers to promote? We believe we should. And once you accept a role for curatorial limits, you have to accept there will be times when disputes arise.

A number of questions were raised about TED's science board: How it works and why the member list isn't public. Our science board has 5 members -- all working scientists or distinguished science journalists. When we encounter a scientific talk that raises questions, they advise us on their position. I and my team here at TED make the final decisions. We keep the names of the science board private. This is a common practice for science review boards in the academic world, which preserves the objectivity of the recommendations and also protects the participants from retribution or harassment.

Finally, let me say that TED is 100% committed to open enquiry, including challenges to orthodox thinking. But we're also firm believers in appropriate skepticism, or critical thinking. Those two instincts will sometimes conflict, as they did in this case. That's why we invited this debate. The process hasn't been perfect. But it has been undertaken in passionate pursuit of these core values.

The talk, and this conversation, will remain here, and all are invited to make their own reasoned judgement.

Thanks for listening.

Chris Anderson, TED Curator

Curators' job is just as difficult as forum moderators. Sometimes they have to make a cut, and sometimes it falls too far to the left or right. The alternative is to have a "TED" that allows everything, literally everything. Every kind of weird, strange, odd idea welcome. Where should they cut? Nowhere? Allow everything? No censorship?... well... that would be chaos. Even Youtube restricts videos. They "censor" videos that breach copyright. Is that wrong? Are they "banning" videos or just following a guideline as well as they could? Perhaps the video was removed from TED without proper cause, but my understanding is that it has been reinstated. The day when TED are putting UFO abductee and lizard shadow government conspiracies online, they've gone too far to the other side.

With that being said, Sheldrake isn't completely wrong (except for the issue of "constants").

Regarding the constants of physics, here's an article from a popular science magazine in 2010: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19429-laws-of-physics-may-change-across-the-universe.html

Another point too is that TED has gained a lot of popularity over the years, but even so, it doesn't have a special responsibility to the public or the world to be open to every idea out there. Every forum for discussion has a different spin on what they allow or not. There's no set rule to what a public forum must allow or not. If a magazine only printed articles about sewing, and then someone sends an article about rock climbing, do they have a right to "ban" this article or do they have a responsibility to the public to publish this article even though it's not within their guidelines? I think TED's curator and team are the ones in charge for deciding what TED can publish. Normally, with any organization, that's how it works and if they sponsored the event, they own the material.

Oh, and I saw somewhere that Sheldrake is wrong about the claim that the government doesn't sponsor alternative research: http://nccam.nih.gov/about/budget/institute-center.htm. NCCAM gets 100 mil/year for "Complementary and Alternative Medicine." But I haven't looked through the video or read his book or investigated what NCCAM actually does, so I can't say for sure either way.

But again, he's not completely wrong about everything. There's a bias in science just like in everything else. French chefs are totally convinced that the only proper way to cook food is with the french style. And C# programmers swear that MS.Net is the best since sliced bread, while Java programmers do the same for JVM. It's human.

 

[Open_Minded]

I found the video on TED. Granted it wasn't in the regular list. It was on the TED blog. But what evidence is there that it was banned? And if it was, was it for the said reasons or for any other reason?

Hello Ouroboros:

For some background see this post

Also - you've read TED's position on the situation - here is another perspective.

The flap is over two videos of TEDx talks delivered in the UK in January that were summarily removed from TEDx's YouTube channel (TEDx is the brand name for conferences outside the main TED events that are allowed to use the TED trademark, such as TEDxBoston or TEDxBaghdad -- so far, about 5,000 such events have used the name). This amounts only to semi-censorship because the videos were reposted on TED's blog site. Yet the reputations of the two presenters, Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock, were besmirched. In a letter to all the TEDx organizers, Chris Anderson, the head of TED, proposed certain "red flag" topics, among them health hoaxes and the medicinal value of food but also the general area of pseudoscience. The response has been decidedly negative -- scientists don't like the suppression of free thinking -- and among the thousands of comments aired on the Internet, one pointed out that Sheldrake and Hancock spoke at a TEDx conference explicitly dedicated to ideas that challenge mainstream thinking.

There's no need to stir the coals. TED has been badly singed already. At a cursory glance, much of Anderson's letter sounds reasonable: TED has every right to give guidelines to conferences using their name. Who's in favor of health hoaxes and pseudoscience? As it happens, Sheldrake's talk was on "The Science Delusion" and covered ten dogmas in mainstream science that need to be examined; there wasn't a hint of bad science in it. Hancock's talk was on consciousness and psychedelics, a topic without fangs for anyone who has heard of the Sixties, much less lived through them. Even as the videos were begrudgingly reposted, TED felt justified in tagging them as "radical" and attaching a "health warning".


Yet something quite pivotal is occurring that inflames strong feelings. The decision to remove the two videos was apparently instigated by angry, noisy bloggers who promote militant atheism. Their target was a burgeoning field, the exploration of consciousness. For generations bringing up consciousness as a scientific topic was taboo........

Curators' job is just as difficult as forum moderators. Sometimes they have to make a cut, and sometimes it falls too far to the left or right. The alternative is to have a "TED" that allows everything, literally everything. Every kind of weird, strange, odd idea welcome. Where should they cut? Nowhere? Allow everything? No censorship?... well... that would be chaos. Even Youtube restricts videos. They "censor" videos that breach copyright. Is that wrong? Are they "banning" videos or just following a guideline as well as they could? Perhaps the video was removed from TED without proper cause, but my understanding is that it has been reinstated. The day when TED are putting UFO abductee and lizard shadow government conspiracies online, they've gone too far to the other side.

Ouroboros - I don't disagree with this assessment. What I find troubling is that TED's actions in removing - and then re-posting the video came after an outcry from one group of people. This smacks of "politics" to me - pure and simple.

Another point too is that TED has gained a lot of popularity over the years, but even so, it doesn't have a special responsibility to the public or the world to be open to every idea out there. Every forum for discussion has a different spin on what they allow or not.

Again - I don't disagree. But ... as TED just learned, they may not have to be "open to every idea out there", but their own audience will hold them accountable when they cross the line.

And that's all part of this process of human discovery. I do accept that. My point in starting this thread was to point out a bias within the scientific community when it comes to the type of research that Sheldrake conducts.. These types of discussions are also part of the process of human discovery. It's my own little way of challenging the "Status quo".

With that being said, Sheldrake isn't completely wrong (except for the issue of "constants").

But again, he's not completely wrong about everything. There's a bias in science just like in everything else. French chefs are totally convinced that the only proper way to cook food is with the french style. And C# programmers swear that MS.Net is the best since sliced bread, while Java programmers do the same for JVM. It's human.

And that has been my point all along. The scientific establishment is as entrenched as any other political/professional establishment, it has the same problems with human ego as any other political/professional establishment. This is the entire point of the matter (to me anyway).

 

[Open_Minded]

(sigh) Oh... Mr. Spinkles .... I'm not even sure where to begin .....

Firstly - please understand as you are reading my thoughts that I am not angry as I write. I simply share these thoughts with you as one human to another.

If you've had personal experiences of a mystical nature and they make you happy, great. I'm not here to take that away from you

... well I have had "personal experiences of a mystical nature" and they have been wonderful. But... I wouldn't put my premonitions within that category. Honestly I wouldn't. I've experienced both the "mystical" and premonitions for as long as I can remember. And premonitions are just premonitions (to me anyway).
And...

If however you are interested in critically evaluating whether you have the powers you seem to have, you could try testing them under controlled conditions. It is not uncommon for good, honest, intelligent, creative people to experience things in their lives which lead them to believe they have mystical powers, even when they do not. It's nothing to be ashamed of, we're all human and we are all subject to these errors of human psychology.

This is very common and well-known to psychologists. ...

Mr. Spinkles I've mentioned this before. But now - because what I said before did not seem to connect with you - I'll elaborate. I've had my years of skepticism about premonitions. Everything you said above, I've said to myself. From the time I was a young teenager into my mid-twenties I actively suppressed premonitions, I actively denied them, I actively denied a part of myself.

To be clear:

1. I've never used dowsing rods
2. I've never gone to a psychic
3. I don't go to fortune tellers (and I don't believe in them)
4. I just simply get premonitions - it's not all that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. (Although it can be a very big deal when someone answers my telephone call with crisis sized news - that they are currently in the middle of).
5. And ... it took me years to come to terms with this - but I finally reached a point of acceptance about myself and realized I didn't have anything to be ashamed of.

You say, "This is very common and well-known to psychologists". What is common and well-known to psychologists is what they can take away from it if they've no actual experience with it. This has been my whole point. psychologists and scientists are human beings just like the rest of us. Psychologists and scientists have their biases as well. Thankfully there are scientists who are pushing the edges and demanding that these issues be addressed. Back to the Epoch Times article that I linked to earlier.

Psychologist James Alcock recently wrote that the claims of parapsychology “stand in defiance of the modern scientific worldview. That by itself does not mean that parapsychology is in error, but as the eminent neuropsychologist Donald Hebb pointed out, if the claims of parapsychology prove to be true, then physics and biology and neuroscience are horribly wrong in some fundamental respects.” ......

However, a number of leading physicists such as Henry Margenau, David Bohm, Brian Josephson, and Olivier Costa de Beauregard have repeatedly pointed out that nothing in quantum mechanics forbids psi phenomena. Costa de Beauregard even maintains that the theory of quantum physics virtually demands that psi phenomena exist. And physicist Evan Harris Walker has developed a theoretical model of psi based on von Neumann’s formulation of quantum mechanics.

Ray Hyman’s 1996 argument (in the Skeptical Inquirer) that the acceptance of psi would require that we “abandon relativity and quantum mechanics in their current formulations” is thereby shown to be nonsense. Contrast Hyman’s statement with that of theoretical physicist Costa de Beauregard, who has written “relativistic quantum mechanics is a conceptual scheme where phenomena such as psychokinesis or telepathy, far from being irrational, should, on the contrary, be expected as very rational.”

Now you will read the above article from your perspective and see entirely different things in it than I do. And - as you said earlier - "It's nothing to be ashamed of, we're all human and we are all subject to these errors of human psychology". So we see different things when we look at this issue. That's fine - I get that - and accept it - and feel no need to convince you I am "right" and you are "wrong". My point in quoting the above piece is simply this ... there are scientists looking at PSI and "seeing" the same thing that I "see". That PSI is not "extra-ordinary", that within the quantum world-view it would be expected.

I accept completely - that the scientists I am referring to have their biases as well. I fully accept that "time and experimenting" will settle it.

But... what you miss when you offer the video you offered, is that I've already gone that route. I've already questioned my experiences extensively. I've already denied them extensively - for over 10 years. I've already read, heard and studied all the "rational" arguments against things like premonitions. Dawkins didn't say anything in that video that I've not already thought of, studied, tried to adopt as a "coping mechanism" or a way to suppress something that would not be suppressed.

What you missed when you made this statement .... "If you've had personal experiences of a mystical nature and they make you happy, great. I'm not here to take that away from you" is that premonitions don't "make me happy".

Again Mr. Spinkles, I'm not angry as I write this. I'm 55 years old and long since passed the point in my life where a skeptic's misunderstanding of the situation upsets me. I'm just trying to communicate that's all.

These experiences don't "make me happy". Most of the time they are like a trees on the landscape of my life. They are just there, that's all. Yesterday I was in my home-based office working on my computer and got a fleeting (yet quite intense picture) in my head of my elderly 89 year-old neighbor falling. I rolled my desk chair over to the window and sure enough his 86 hear-old wife was trying to help him get up from a sitting position. Thankfully he landed on his rear-end, rather than his back and head. But .... still ... the experience didn't make me happy. I don't even know how to explain this (sigh).

One of the reasons I denied and suppressed these experiences for as long as I did is the very legitimate concerns about becoming superstitious. One has to learn to navigate the subtleties of something like this. Because I could have been sitting at my desk and had the thought that my neighbor fell, and it could have been nothing more than a random thought. But there is a difference between a premonition and a random thought, there is. I can't explain it, anymore than I can explain what it feels like to love someone.

What I can tell you is - that others notice it in me - so it is not 100% subjective. What I can tell you is that when premonitions happen they do NOT make me happy. What I can tell you is that if you had offered to "take that away from" me when I was in my early 20s, I would have given them to you and gladly walked away. I've reached a point in my life where I accept this aspect of my life the way my grandfather accepted his blindness. He went blind when he was in his teens. I remember someone asking him when he was quite elderly, if he wished he could "see". My grandfather said, "I can see, just with different eyes from you". He had reached a point where he accepted physical blindness, both the good and bad of it. He had reached a point where he could, "see, just with different eyes". Premonitions are just "seeing with different eyes" that's all. I maintain, that they are a natural part of a quantum reality. You maintain something different.

There was a time when I thought I was "fooling myself", now I understand that time period was one of denying myself, and that it was not a healthy way to deal with something the scientific establishment denies.

Probably the healthiest way would be to "come out of the closet" but I'm not there yet. I just get up every day, like every other human being and go about my life. And when I get a premonition I try to handle it as rationally as I can and downplay anything someone else might see in it.

You may not think my experiences are real - and that's o.k. But... I will say this ... if science had the "answer" for these experiences I would have grabbed onto it a long time ago. There is an answer, but it is NOT denial of ones own experiences to the detriment of ones health (and that's about where it reached before I hit 10 on the pain scale and decided maybe I didn't have to deny myself after all). Dawkins can call it listening to my own "feelings" over empirical evidence. The evidence to me is that I became much healthier AFTER I accepted my own evidence and let science be where it is at.

What this whole thing has taught me is that science can only go so far. Hopefully, in time, the scientific establishment will catch up with the scientists in this quote from the Epoch Times article:

Two surveys of over 500 scientists in one case and over 1,000 in another both found that the majority of respondents considered ESP “an established fact” or “a likely possibility”—56 percent in one and 67 percent in the other.

Bottom line... I don't know what the establishment is so afraid of.... I truly don't understand why something like telepathy or premonitions within the general human population threatens anything except an out-dated and obsolete materialistic world-view.

 

[Open_Minded]

Hello Mr. Spinkles

Hello Mr. Spinkles ... Went over the word limit and am finishing up here.

Originally Posted by Open_Minded You mentioned the Bem study.

I did? Where?

Here

And it continues right up to the present day. For example, recently a study was published claiming to detect psychic powers.

 

[Ouroboros]

Hello Ouroboros:

For some background see this post

Also - you've read TED's position on the situation - here is another perspective.

Yeah. There are no excuses for that. "Radical" and "Health warning" is going to excess. Things like that don't belong to a professional organization.

Ouroboros - I don't disagree with this assessment. What I find troubling is that TED's actions in removing - and then re-posting the video came after an outcry from one group of people. This smacks of "politics" to me - pure and simple.

True. They didn't treat it professionally. TED is not expected to present videos of all angles of all topics, but they're expected to behave in a professional manner.

Again - I don't disagree. But ... as TED just learned, they may not have to be "open to every idea out there", but their own audience will hold them accountable when they cross the line.

Sure. Agree.

And that's all part of this process of human discovery. I do accept that. My point in starting this thread was to point out a bias within the scientific community when it comes to the type of research that Sheldrake conducts.. These types of discussions are also part of the process of human discovery. It's my own little way of challenging the "Status quo".

There is a bias for sure. That bias was probably reflected in TED's decision. My beef was mostly only about that TED is not expected to be a representative of science nor be responsible for publishing any topic of any kind. It is their choice, but they can be reasonable about it.

The thing that I reacted most to was the choice of the word "banned." It was rejected, but banned... usually choice of strong (and somewhat inaccurate) words points to a political motive from the disgruntled to sway opinion.


And that has been my point all along. The scientific establishment is as entrenched as any other political/professional establishment, it has the same problems with human ego as any other political/professional establishment. This is the entire point of the matter (to me anyway).[/QUOTE]

 

[Mr Spinkles]

Open_Minded,

I would like to see the source of the "two surveys" mentioned in your Epoch Times article. I would be quite surprised if most scientists considered ESP "an established fact" or "a likely possibility" as I know barely any who would consider it the latter, and probably none who consider it the former.

 

[Mr Spinkles]

Open_Minded,

Concerning the Ritchie study which tried to reproduce the Bem study, Bem has been quoted as saying:

A team of researchers collaborated to accurately replicate Bem’s final experiment, and found no evidence for any psychic powers. Their results were published in the journal PLoS ONE. Bem — explicitly contradicting Carter’s suggestion that skeptics set out to discredit his work or refused to look at it — acknowledged that the findings did not support his claims and wrote that the researchers had “made a competent, good-faith effort to replicate the results of one of my experiments on precognition.”

Emphasis addded.

Here is the Ritchie study published in PlosOne. You tell me, did they use a spurious "novel statistical approach" or did they use the exact same approach Bem used?

Calculating the ‘Differential Recall percentage’.

Perhaps the most straightforward way of assessing participants' performance involves subtracting the number of practice words recalled from the number of control words recalled, and testing the significance of the outcome by conducting a one-sample t-test against a theoretical mean of zero.

However, Bem analysed his results by calculating a weighted ‘Differential Recall percentage’ (DR%) for each participant. The DR% was equal to ([(P−C)×(P+C)]/576)×100, where P was the number of ‘practice’ words recalled and C was the number of ‘control’ words recalled. The DR% ranged from −100% to 100%; a positive DR% indicated that more practice words were recalled than controls, whilst a negative score indicated that more controls were recalled. A score of zero indicated recall of an equal number of practice and control words. The significance of the DR% was determined by conducting a one-sample t-test against a theoretical mean of zero. To allow a direct comparison between the outcomes of the replication attempts and Bem's original study, all three experiments employed the DR% as the main outcome measure, with the ‘unweighted’ measure reported for completeness.

1- or 2-tailed p-values?

One-tailed t-tests are reported throughout Bem's paper [1]. This approach has been criticised on the basis that it may inflate Type I errors [6]. Bem and colleagues have defended the procedure [4], noting that, for instance, Experiment 9 was a replication of significant effects obtained in Experiment 8 (although it should be noted that Bem also used one-tailed tests in Experiment 8, i.e., before the effect in question had been replicated). In line with Bem's original analysis and the arguments subsequently presented by Bem and colleagues [4], the results of all three replication attempts reported here were analysed using one-tailed p-values.
...

Discussion

This paper reports three independent attempts to replicate the retroactive facilitation of recall effect [1]. All three experiments employed almost exactly the same procedure and software as the original experiment. In addition, they used the same number of participants as the original study and thus had sufficient statistical power to detect an effect (our three experiments combined had 99.92% power to detect the same effect size).

While Bem found a substantial effect, our results failed to provide any evidence for retroactive facilitation of recall.

Emphases added. What do you think? Did the skeptics use an unfair analysis as you suggest, or did they make "a competent, good-faith effort to replicate the results" as Bem himself says? It looks to me like the Ritchie et al. bent over backwards both in their experimental methods and their discussion of possible interpretations.

 

[Open_Minded]

There is a bias for sure. That bias was probably reflected in TED's decision. My beef was mostly only about that TED is not expected to be a representative of science nor be responsible for publishing any topic of any kind. It is their choice, but they can be reasonable about it.

The thing that I reacted most to was the choice of the word "banned." It was rejected, but banned... usually choice of strong (and somewhat inaccurate) words points to a political motive from the disgruntled to sway opinion.

Yes - I can see your point about the word "banned".

You may also be interested in this Skeptico Interview of Rupert Sheldrake. Following are a few excerpts:

Alex Tsakiris: So let me switch out of the mode of trying to put forth the TED ideas as much as I can glean them from their numerous blog posts and website comments. Let me ask you a couple of questions in general about this because the irony of this is, if not hilarious it’s certainly inescapable. I mean, a reputable scientist like yourself publishes a book claiming that science is dogmatic and then is censored by an anonymous scientific board. It’s like you can’t script that any better.
What does this say about really the whole topic of your book? And about how science can be dogmatic without even realizing it’s dogmatic?


Dr. Rupert Sheldrake: I think in a way this whole controversy and the people who have weighed in in favor of TED’s actions do indeed confirm what I’m saying. These dogmas are ones that most people within science don’t actually realize are dogmas. They just think they’re the truth. The point about really dogmatic people is that they don’t know that they have dogmas. Dogmas are beliefs and people who have really strong beliefs think of their beliefs as truth. They don’t actually see them as beliefs. So I think this whole controversy has actually highlighted exactly that.


The other thing that is highlighted is that there are a lot of people, far more than I imagined actually, who are not taken in by these dogmas, who do want to think about them critically. One of the remarkable things about these discussions is lots of people are really up for the discussion of these dogmas. They really want it to happen, far more than I’d imagined, actually. I’m impressed by that and I think this TED debate has actually helped show that the paradigm is shifting. There’s no longer a kind of automatic agreement by the great majority of people to dogmatic assertions by materialists.


Alex Tsakiris: It’s almost as if this is somewhat of a marker of the kind of events that would happen in the process of changing a paradigm.


Dr. Rupert Sheldrake: Yes. This is actually, to me, an illustration of actually seeing a paradigm shift in action. I think this controversy wouldn’t have been a controversy after all if a lot of people hadn’t thought that TED had made the wrong decision. There wouldn’t have been large amounts of thousands of comments on blogs all over the Internet. That wouldn’t have happened if the majority thought TED had made the right decision and it was more-or-less a done deal that materialism is the only acceptable form of science.


Now, I think the fact that so many people strongly about it is why there’s been a controversy and I do think we’re actually seeing a shift. Also on these various blogs and discussion forums now and then one of these standard skeptic voices comes up with all the standard arguments that we’ve all heard hundreds of times before but now they’re being shot down by people who are saying, “Okay, where’s your evidence?” and calling them on things which normally they’d get away with. That, too, is a change. It’s a kind of empowerment of people to challenge this dogmatic materialism.

I do think there is a paradigm shift in the making, Ouroboros, I really do.

 

[Open_Minded]

[FONT=&quot]Hello Mr. Spinkles:[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]

Concerning the Ritchie study which tried to reproduce the Bem study

. I don’t believe I referred to the “Ritchie study”. Specifically, I referred to this article, and a “novel statistical approach” to challenge Daryl Bem’s study. More to the point of my position, the “novel statistical” did the following:[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]

They highlight the limitations of conventional statistical significance testing (p values), and apply a new technique (meta-analytical Bayes factor) to Dr. Bem's data ….. In other words, beliefs are odds. For example, a skeptic might hold odds that ESP is a long shot at a million-to-one, while a believer might believe it is as possible as not (one-to-one odds). Whatever one's beliefs, Rouder and Morey show that Bem's experiments indicate they should change by a factor of 40 in favor of ESP. The believer should now be 40-to-1 sure of ESP, while the skeptic should be 25000-to-1 sure against it.
Rouder and Morey conclude that the skeptics odds are appropriate:

Now, beyond my initial gut reaction that taking the most extreme available odds (the skeptics odds) and applying those odds to the data is …. Well biased and extreme….. I decided to find out how Dr. Bem responded to the challenge that he use this “novel” Bayesian statistical approach. The only article I was able to find was from Dr. Bem’s Homepage – where he specifically addresses his own thoughts on using Bayesian techniques. Following are some excerpts:
The response starts out with the following:

We agree with Wagenmakers, Wetzels, Borsboom, & van der Maas (2011) that there are advantages to analyzing data with Bayesian statistical procedures, but we argue that they have incorrectly characterized several features of Bem’s (2011) psi experiments and have selected an unrealistic Bayesian prior distribution for their analysis, leading them to seriously underestimate the experimental support in favor of the psi hypothesis. We provide an extended Bayesian analysis that displays the effects of different prior distributions on the Bayes factors and conclude that the evidence strongly favors the psi hypothesis over the null. More generally, we believe that psychology would be well served by training future generations of psychologists in the skills necessary to understand Bayesian analyses well enough to perform them on their own data.
In his article “Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect,” Bem (2011) performed the standard statistical analyses familiar to most psychologists and concluded that all but one of his nine experiments yielded statistically significant support for the psi hypothesis.

The rebuttal goes on to say:

In general, we know that effect sizes in psychology typically fall in the range of 0.2 to 0.3. For example, Bornstein’s (1989) meta-analysis of 208 mere exposure experiments—the basis of Bem’s retroactive habituation experiments — yielded an effect size (r) of 0.26. We even have some knowledge about previous psi experiments. The meta-analysis of 56 telepathy studies, cited above, revealed a Cohen’s h effect size of approximately 0.18 (Utts et al., 2010), and a meta-analysis of 38 “presentiment” studies—from which Bem’s experiments 1 and 2 derived—yielded a mean effect size of 0.26 (Mossbridge, Tressoldi, and Utts, 2011).
Surely no reasonable observer would expect effect sizes in laboratory psi experiments to be greater than 0.8 — what Cohen (1988) calls a large effect. (Cohen notes that even a medium effect of 0.5 “is large enough to be visible to the naked eye” [p. 26].) Yet the “default prior” that Wagenmakers et al. (2011) use (known as the standard Cauchy distribution) has probability 0.57 that the absolute value of the effect size exceeds 0.8. It even places probability of 0.12 on effect sizes with absolute values exceeding 5.0, and probability of 0.06 on effect sizes with absolute values exceeding 10! If the effect sizes were really that large, there would be no debate about the reality of psi. Thus, the prior distribute on they have placed on the possible effect sizes under H1 is wildly unrealistic.

And ….

In choosing to present the standard frequentist analysis of his data, Bem (2011) noted that Response to Wagenmakers et al. There are, of course, more sophisticated statistical techniques available...but they do not yet appear to be widely familiar to psychologists and are not yet included in popular statistical computer packages, such as SPSS. I have deliberately not used them for this article. It has been my experience that the use of complex or unfamiliar statistical procedures in the reporting of psi data has the perverse effect of weakening rather than strengthening the typical reader’s confidence in the findings.... This is understandable. If one holds low Bayesian a priori probabilities about the existence of psi — as most academic psychologists do — it might actually be more logical from a Bayesian perspective to believe that some unknown flaw or artifact is hiding in the weeds of...an unfamiliar statistical analysis than to believe that genuine psi has been demonstrated

Mr. Spinkles – what stood out to me in my original citation of the Science Daily article was the skeptics extremist approach to their statistics. Again .. “The believer should now be 40-to-1 sure of ESP, while the skeptic should be 25000-to-1 sure against it. Rouder and Morey conclude that the skeptics odds are appropriate… “


Had I been sitting at a computer with one of my clients and they wanted to take an extreme position like that with their data my advice would have been strongly against it. Firstly – extremes statistics are rarely accurate in the “real world”. But… beyond that, in these types of situations, extreme statistics reveal extreme political positions. Honestly, a client has NEVER suggested to me that I should take such extreme liberty with the data. And do you know why, because they’d be laughed out of the running. Seriously …. If they’re trying to get more money for their departments, projects, research, etc.. they have to go in showing that they understand the bigger picture. And part of that is understanding the competition, understand who else is asking for the money. To go into a budgeting or grant process with the attitude that my department, project, research, agency, etc… has the only valid position is to kill one’s chances at getting the funding. One needs to go in with a bit of humility; if not in attitude at least the data should reflect reality. If it doesn’t reflect reality – you’re doomed. It does not reflect reality to assume that only the “skeptics odds are appropriate”.


I stand by my assessment of the tact suggested in the Science Daily article. It is wildly biased for any scientist to posit that on a spectrum of beliefs (as reflected in statistical analysis) the only valid conclusion is the “skeptics” odds. It just flies in the face of objectivity.

 

[Open_Minded]

Now …. You brought up the Ritchie study.

Overall what impressed me about the Ritchie Study is their honest attempt to really replicate Bem’s study. This is honest science and I am impressed. Bem and Ritchie collaborated and Bem felt as though his work got fair treatment.
So… as to your questions

What do you think? Did the skeptics use an unfair analysis as you suggest, or did they make "a competent, good-faith effort to replicate the results" as Bem himself says? It looks to me like the Ritchie et al. bent over backwards both in their experimental methods and their discussion of possible interpretations.

I think:

1. Ritchie did a fine job and Bem felt he got fair treatment.
2. If Bem were into pseudoscience, he would not have:
   • Published in a peer-review journal
   • Nor helped Ritchie replicate the results
   • Nor defended Ritchie's work, when he was given the opportunity to be disparaging about it.
3. Beyond your reference to the Ritchie study, in the bigger picture, Bem himself did NOT feel as though he got fair treatment from skeptics who – by Bem’s own words…

Surely no reasonable observer would expect effect sizes in laboratory psi experiments to be greater than 0.8 — what Cohen (1988) calls a large effect. (Cohen notes that even a medium effect of 0.5 “is large enough to be visible to the naked eye” [p. 26].) Yet the “default prior” that Wagenmakers et al. (2011) use (known as the standard Cauchy distribution) has probability 0.57 that the absolute value of the effect size exceeds 0.8. It even places probability of 0.12 on effect sizes with absolute values exceeding 5.0, and probability of 0.06 on effect sizes with absolute values exceeding 10! If the effect sizes were really that large, there would be no debate about the reality of psi. Thus, the prior distribute on they have placed on the possible effect sizes under H1 is wildly unrealistic.

Back to the use of Bayesian statistical procedures. Bem makes it clear that he agrees these procedures have benefits and that the psychology “would be well served by training future generations of psychologists in the skills necessary to understand Bayesian analyses well enough to perform them on their own data.”

But do not lose sight of Bem’s overall position here… He stated in his own response to the extremist statistical challenge that … “they have incorrectly characterized several features of Bem’s (2011) psi experiments and have selected an unrealistic Bayesian prior distribution for their analysis”.

So… Bem did not give the same kind words to his statistical detractors as he did to Ritchie. And for good reason, his statistical detractors took the extreme position that their “skeptics odds” were the only valid odds to go with.
Beyond that – and this is worth noting – the software on a professional’s computer is (OR SHOULD BE) reflective of industry standards. I know this, I’m in the software business. I build software and get the phone calls when the standards change. My software must be able to accurately take into account all standards within the office using it, and within the larger industry. It was a red flag to me that Bem noted in his rebuttal the following:

In choosing to present the standard frequentist analysis of his data, Bem (2011) noted that Response to Wagenmakers et al. There are, of course, more sophisticated statistical techniques available...but they do not yet appear to be widely familiar to psychologists and are not yet included in popular statistical computer packages, such as SPSS. I have deliberately not used them for this article

Again – the extreme position of his statistical detractors is revealed in this reality. SPSS does not include the necessary tools to do the more sophisticated analysis. This should be a real red flag to you as well… to anyone reading this. If the software isn’t on the average computer of someone doing this research, then the techniques are not in wide usage, they are not yet the industry standard.

Bem supports the use of more sophisticated statistical analysis, but - it is not there yet. And even when it does become the standard, using extreme analysis as was suggested in the Science Daily article is what my clients would call a WAG …. (Wild A…. Guess). ( Just saying )

Now I’ve a question for you ….
Do you think the scientific establishment is as entrenched as any other political/professional establishment, that it has the same problems with human ego as any other polical/professional establishment??????

 

[Mr Spinkles]

Do you think the scientific establishment is as entrenched as any other political/professional establishment, that it has the same problems with human ego as any other polical/professional establishment??????

Entrenchment and ego exist in science, of course, we're human beings not demi-gods. But to equate the situation in science to "any other political/professional establishment" is a ridiculous exaggeration. Go watch a political debate or the maneuvering of lawyers in a courtroom, or listen to a telemarketing sales pitch. Then go watch the Q&A session at a scientific conference. It's night and day. Imagine a scientist raising his voice in front of a cheering crowd of physicists at a rally, saying "And we believe that Einstein's theory is correct! Now, my opponent apparently thinks he's smarter than Einstien.." (crowd boos) "Thanks for coming out everyone and be sure to vote for the SMART GUY'S theory at the ballot box tomorrow!" (cue inspirational music) ... No, is not exactly like a political rally or a telemarketing pitch or a lawyer's tactics in a courtroom. It's a PowerPoint with graphs. And data. And logic. Hopefully a joke or two to liven the presentation. And the audience wants to get at the truth, not what makes them feel good. Why? Because when they go back to their labs, feeling good or insisting on being right all the time won't help them. If you aren't good at changing your mind in the face of evidence, or trying new things, you will be like the guy who troubleshoots his computer by clicking like crazy and mashing the keyboard .... your experiments will make no sense, they won't work, and you won't succeed as a scientist. This doesn't mean scientists are super-human but it does mean that they must be, relatively speaking, especially good at paying attention to the evidence rather than personal prejudices.

But that's my personal opinion and I doubt it will persuade you. So let's get away from opinions, and focus on facts. The most generous possible interpretation of the relevant facts of your case are:

1. Some scientists like Bem publish studies claiming to observe psychic phenomena.
2. Some studies criticize the results of Bem et al., but their analysis is flawed.
3. Other scientists repeat Bem's study, but the effect is not reproducible.

What do we conclude from these facts? A. Sometimes, some scientific studies are flawed--namely #2, and possibly #1 as well; B. The existence of psychic phenomena has not been established.

For a theory to be correct, Open_Minded, it has to stand up to ALL criticism, including and especially the BEST criticism. If Bem's psychic effect is not reproducible, then there is no scientific evidence for it. Period. It doesn't matter if someone, somewhere, published flawed criticism of Bem (and I'm just assuming you are correct and the criticism was flawed, for the sake of argument).

Is Bem doing "pseudoscience"? You be the judge. The reason skeptics call it that is not because Bem is dishonest. It's because normally, if something is real the more you study it the more the data establish an unambiguous, robust, reproducible effect. At some point a good scientist should listen to what the data is saying (no effect) and move on. To soldier onward for 100 years without being able to establish anything suggests prejudice in favor of psychic powers, and against the null hypothesis--prejudice inhibiting scientific progress, hence, pseudoscience. Personally I wouldn't call Bem's study pseudoscience per se .... but the dogged insistence on doing these kinds of studies, even after a poor 100-year track record, AND claiming the evidence supports psychic phenomena but "the establishment" won't accept it ... that is definitely pseudoscience. Whether Bem himself fits that bill or not, I don't know.

 

[Open_Minded]

Hello Mr. Spinkles:

Entrenchment and ego exist in science, of course, we're human beings not demi-gods. But to equate the situation in science to "any other political/professional establishment" is a ridiculous exaggeration. ...... This doesn't mean scientists are super-human but it does mean that they must be, relatively speaking, especially good at paying attention to the evidence rather than personal prejudices.

But that's my personal opinion and I doubt it will persuade you...

It's not so much about persuading me...

Firstly - this conversation (for me at least) is not a competition. It's a dialog, it's a way for folks of different points of view to become more familiar with each other....

The degree to which ego and entrenchment exists in science is surely a subjective view. I don't disagree there. ... and for the purposes of this discussion - my biased point of view doesn't need to come into play.... Once again Skeptico comes through with a fascinating interview with both Dr. Richard Wiseman and Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. Since these two men are on different sides of the issue - a lot of interesting insights come out of the interview.

In my humble opinion the world is "what we see it to be". That is our ego, even if we are aware of ego - the dynamic is still in play. This interview is a fascinating example of that dynamic and it addresses the point I've held all along - there is a bias within the scientific community when it comes to PSI research. Following are some excerpts from the interview

The interview itself is fascinating and very enlightening. Throughout the interview Wiseman keeps coming back to the need for replication. Towards the end of the interview Sheldrake goes into details about replication - it follows:

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake: First of all, when it comes to Ganzfeld, there have been many studies, there have been many meta-analyses. You did one that showed as a matter of fact, most other meta-analyses have shown there was an effect. So there’s been a dispute, but not every experiment in Ganzfeld works. Not every clinical trial of an antidepressant like Prozac works. In medicine when you’re dealing with human phenomena, in clinical trials, a whole other field, sometimes they give positive results, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it’s no better than placebo. That’s why meta-analysis is used in these areas where you don’t have total reproducibility. Medicine is a perfect example of a science where you can’t just go into a lab and get the same effect every single time with drugs because it’s a complex situation. So meta-analysis seems to be a perfectly valid way of going about it in most psi phenomena like Ganzfeld. Most meta-analyses do show replicable effects.....

When it comes to telephone telepathy, a field in which I’ve worked for quite a number of years now, my own experiments replicated. I’ve done one for television which was replicated under controlled conditions. It’s been replicated at the University of Amsterdam. It’s been replicated at the University of Fryeburg. These are all published replications in peer-reviewed journals. So again, I just don’t recognize this picture that you’re painting.


I’m trying to do a replication with Chris French but he’s been saying he’s about to begin for the last nine months and as of today they still haven’t begun. I have tried to work with skeptics, principally with Chris French, but he’s so busy being a skeptic in the media or on television there’s not much time left for the heavy lifting of actual experimental work. So I just don’t recognize this picture of failure to replicate.

The host of the show picks up on this need for replication and takes it to a fascinating conclusion for the show. I actually had my hopes up that there would be collaboration instead of conflict and contests of ego....

Alex Tsakiris: Why do you say that? Who is saying they won’t sign up on that program? I think there’s plenty of folks that I’ve spoken with that would sign up on that deal right now, would want to prospectively lay out the terms for replication and get everyone involved. I think we could find the folks to do it. Qualified folks.


Dr. Richard Wiseman: If you could then that’s great. If we could all sit around the table and for something like the Ganzfeld which is very well understood in terms of methodology, would be a very good one. We could all sit around the table, we get 10 studies, we’re going to do it, and that’s fine. I would add the caveat that having gone through that entire procedure, if it all turns out to be null, you can’t jump ship to another paradigm. Or maybe you can once more, but you can’t carry on in the future forever like that.


Alex Tsakiris: I think you’d get people to agree with that, too.
Dr. Richard Wiseman: Okay, then in which case, that would be absolutely fine. My guess is that people who have gone out there and done this stuff will be kind of reluctant to say that. That’s my guess. They might say in public, but when push comes to shove, in a very high-profile, important activity like that, they may not feel quite so confident. I may well be wrong.


Alex Tsakiris: I don’t want to speak for Dean Radin, but I think Dean Radin does those kinds of experiments every day. I visited him for an interview at his location a few months ago and he sets up and does those kinds of things, if not on a daily basis, on a very regular basis. Yeah, I think we could find folks that you would agree are qualified to do that kind of thing. I’m sure we could get Dr. Sheldrake to participate in some way in that, as well. I don’t want to speak for you, you’re right here on the line, Dr. Sheldrake.


Dr. Rupert Sheldrake: As I said, one of the things I’m trying to do is develop automated procedures like the automated telephone telepathy test. It’s already up and running. And do replications using an agreed procedure which would be standardized for everyone because it’s automated, with different groups doing it. I’m already trying to do that. I’m already trying to do it with skeptics, Chris French’s group. The problem is to get them to do it because they’re too busy doing other things. We’ve got the funding.


Alex Tsakiris: I think Dr. Wiseman’s offering to participate in that process and at least be one of the people at the table, engaging with other skeptics to do that. Is that right, Dr. Wiseman?


Dr. Richard Wiseman: Yes. I must say I’m not just saying this off the top of my head. I’ve sat around the table with parapsychologists where we have tried to come up with these sorts of procedures. Where they’ve been very confident that they would get an effect and they have not displayed that confidence. They kind of said, “Well, it kind of seemed to work in the past, but you never know, and so on.” So I’m not coming from a total position of not having any experience of that.

But certainly, I think the way forward would be to get 10 people, a number of skeptics, and a great number of parapsychologists, to agree on what is the best shot. Currently, what’s the best shot? It would be really interesting to know whether they can agree with that, to be honest. Because maybe one would go, “Ganzfeld,” another would go, “telephone telepathy,” another would go, “presentiment.” It might be very difficult to even get that consensus.

Alex Tsakiris: I think from practical terms you’re saying we couldn’t have very many, but I think we could say if it was Ganzfeld and telephone telepathy, then it’s just a matter of agreeing on some kind of protocol, prospectively, and some kind of path towards publication and peer review. I think all those things are very doable. It just takes an effort and an interest on all parties to do it.

I think everyone agrees that something like that is necessary to break us out of this logjam that we seem to be in in terms of spinning around. This discussion we’re having here could have been had 5 or 10 – it was conducted 5 years ago and 10 years ago, so we need something to break us out of this.

Dr. Richard Wiseman: I completely agree with that. It’s one of the reasons I wrote the article. I think the worry is that if the field carries on as it’s carried on in the past, there’s not going to be any difference than we’re going to have if other people are having this discussion in 10, 20 years’ time. Instead of, I think, where there could be a real sense of closure one way or the other. That’s not to say that sense of closure isn’t difficult. It might take onboard Rupert’s point about ideology at play, as well.

But I think we can certainly help the process by going right and instead of everyone doing different things and pulling in different directions, and so on, let’s sit around the table. We’ve got limited resources; it’s getting harder and harder to do any kind of fringe science within mainstream activities at the moment, parapsychology included. Let’s use those limited resources in a sensible way.

Ahh the show ended on such a high note...

But after the show - came the email exchange and my mother's old adage, "I can play the game, just give me the rules" came back to haunt me......

 

[Open_Minded]

Email exchange following the debate:

From: Alex Tsakiris
Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 9:48 AM
Hi Dr. Wiseman… thanks again for joining me on Skeptiko a few weeks back (almost ready to air). Your dialog with Dr. Sheldrake was terrific. Of course, it will wind-up being just another forgettable debate if we don’t follow-up along the lines discussed. To that end, I have contacted several psi researchers about your suggestion/proposal.
Dr. Roger Nelson (Global Consciousness Project), Dr. Dean Radin (presentiment) and Dr. Sheldrake (telephone telepathy) have all expressed willingness to explore the possibility of creating a forum for “skeptics and believers” (everyone hates those terms, but we’re stuck with them) to collaborate. Here’s a suggested (very high level) game-plan:
1 – Identify and invite forum participants… perhaps you could identify who you would like to invite on “your side” for each of the above experiments. I’ll ask the same of Nelson, Radin and Sheldrake (but those three will probably be sufficient).
2 – Review current research. I’ll ask each psi researcher to compile a summary of their research including published and unpublished documentation. The group will review the research and make recommendation for future collaborative experiments.
3 – Fund small-scale psi replication experiments.
4 – Report results.
Sound reasonable? Please let me know any suggestions you may have. I’d like to schedule a follow-up discussion (our first forum of skeptics and believers) for March… doable?
Best, Alex
From: Dr. Richard Wiseman

Hi Thanks for that – I think the first stage would be for the proponents to come up with their ‘best shot’ – that is, the design which they, as a group, believe has the best chance of eliciting psi effects. Will be interesting to see if they can do it!

cheers Richard

From: Alex Tsakiris
Ok, but it’s hard to sell such a, “give me your best shot” offer to psi researcher. They believe they have replicated experiments demonstrating psi effects… they’re likely to shoot back with, “give me YOUR best shot”… this gets us nowhere.
I’d like to find a way to keep the dialog going and move things in the direction/spirit of your proposal without setting too many preconditions. We gotta lot of smart guys here… you will figure out the proper next steps. I just want to make sure y’all keep talking.
Are you in for an hour long conference call in late March? We can set direction/timeline/goals/etc. during this first session and aim for something like what you’ve suggested for the second forum. Also, happy to invite a skeptical journalist/podcaster to jointly participate… I’d suggest D.J. Grothe’s ForGoodReason.
Best, Alex
From: Dr. Richard Wiseman

If they think that then it is just a question of them saying which data base and conditions are the best. I really think the first stage is for them to identify their strongest evidence and say that they think the effect will replicate. When we tried to do this in Vancouver no one would promise anything.

From: Alex Tsakiris
I think everyone needs to feel comfortable with the process… and the fairness of it… that’s why I’m suggesting we use the first session to jointly decide “stages” and the like.
Will you agree to join us for such a session?
Alex
From: Dr. Richard Wiseman

I am just sooooo busy at the moment that I am turning down stuff all over the place. I don’t really want to get sucked into something. I would suggest that you have the initial chat with the proponents and see where it goes..........

From: Alex Tsakiris
This is a non-starter. We’re at about round 20 in this email exchange and I can’t even get your “buy-in” for a call on basic groundrules.
The perception among some psi proponents is that you don’t “play fair” regarding psi science. I don’t think this email exchange is going to change that… but it may surprise a lot of skeptics.
Let me know if you change your mind regarding a dialog with psi proponents without preconditions.
Thanks again for taking part in the Skeptiko interview and for sharing your views via email.
All the best,
Alex

Ahh .... politics at its worst ..... (sigh)