Parapsychology: the control group for science

Some people have conjectured in the past that we might be in danger of a sort of global cooling. (Note: some things said about this by those who profess to disbelieve in anthropogenic climate change are false.) Understanding large-scale climate phenomena may help to predict natural disasters like hurricanes. The climate is extremely important for life on earth (human life included). I think there would be plenty for climate scientists to do "if the scare of global warming were eliminated".

(In fact, there is near-total agreement among climate scientists about global warming. So probably most changes in climate-scientist opinion on this topic would make for greater uncertainty and therefore more funding...)

[EDITED to add: At least one person has downvoted this; no one has replied to it. I would be interested to know what about it is downvote-worthy; it looks OK to me even on rereading. If I've made some idiotic mistake, I can't fix my brain unless someone points it out to me...]

Yes, I know that's what you meant, but the point of my comment is that unlike with parapsychology, the object of study for climatologists definitely exists, whether or not AGW is real. Any individual climatologist who started to think that AGW might not be real won't think "this is the end for climatology", because climate exists either way.

And of course if they worry that funding for climate research might drop as a result of what they've found, they can console themselves with the knowledge that their new belief allows them to earn twice as much money working for an oil-industry funded body such as the CEI.

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One in a bajilion? Guys, the numbers matter. 10^-9 is very different from 10^-12, which is very different from 10^-15. If we start talking about some arbitrarily low number like "one-in-a-bajillion" against which no amount of evidence could change our mind, then we're really just saying "zero" but not admitting to ourselves that we're doing so.

Other than that, I agree with Yvain and have found this to be perhaps the most belief-changing so far on LW!

You're right that I completely missed the Bayesian boat, and I'm going to have to start thinking more before I speak and revise my estimates down to <1%.

But I'm still reluctant to put them as low as you seem to. The anthropic principle combined with large universe says that whatever complexity is necessary for the existence of conscious observers, we can expect to find at least that level of complexity. Questions like consciousness, qualia, and personal identity still haven't been resolved, and although past experience suggests there is probably a rational explanation to this question, it isn't nearly dissolved yet. If consciousness really is impossible without some exotic consciousness-related physics (Penrosean or otherwise), then our universe will have exotic consciousness-related physics no matter how complex they need to be. And since evolved beings have been so proficient at making use of normal physics to gain sensory information, it's a good bet they'd do the same with exotic consciousness-related physics too if they had them...

...is a somewhat hokey argument I just invented on the spot, and I'm sorry for it. But the ease with which I can put something like that together is itself evidence that there are enough possible sides of the issue that hadn't been considered (at least I hadn't considered that one; maybe you've been thinking about it for years) that it needs at least a little more room for error than two in a bajillion (sorry, Alex).

I also disagree with your assessment of the amount of evidence. Have you ever read any good books by intelligent believers in the subject? It's not all John Edwards psychic chat shows. I also think you might be double-counting evidence against psi here - psi doesn't exist so we know any apparent evidence must come from human psychology, therefore there never was any apparent evidence in the first place. Or have you read the studies and developed separate explanations for each positive result?

Anyway, let's settle this the LW way. Give me your odds that psi exists, and we can make a bet at them. If it's one in a million, then I'll give a cent to your favorite charity on the condition that you give $10,000 to my favorite charity if psi's shown to exist within our lifetimes (defined however you want; possibly as evidence sufficient to convince any two among Randi, Dawkins, and Eliezer that psi is >50% likely).

One in a bajillion? You are saying you actually know how complex psi is without even saying what aspect of psi you are talking about.

We know biology is very complex. So when testing a supplement like creatine, the pseudoskeptic could say "biology is extremely complex. We do not know the mechanism that makes creatine work so I assign a very low bayesian probability. Today I feel like a hundred trillion to one".

Keep in mind this is after several studies have shown an effect in the predicted direction whose odds are not easily explained by chance. Indeed, there is nothing wrong with you assertion about complexity just the subjective part where you assign a number to a phenomena you are not very familiar with.

Good point, with the qualifier that many people (including professional philosophers) presently find themselves unable to wrap their heads around the idea that they have no non-material consciousness. The "argument from absurdity" against materialism is alive and kicking.

It's a fairly common thing, in videogame design, to include "cheat codes:" obscure, highly specific, and seemingly useless in-game behaviors which produce otherwise impossible results.

I am not surprised when a video game character consistently summons balls of fire out of nothingness. I would be absolutely astounded to see an actual person do this. This is because the system of rules governing a video game and the system governing a deterministic universe appear to be very, very different.

If we were living in the matrix, this would not be the case. It would not mean that we are necessarily in the kind of video game where there are psychic powers, but it would provide a very clear mechanism through which psychic powers could act. Such a mechanism does not appear possible in a deterministic universe, or at least in the one we seem to occupy.

Huh? "Metaphysics" refers to an incredibly wide variety of claims. But I'd say that metaphysics tries to answer questions about reality that aren't the kind of questions that can be answered by experimental science. Since we lack a good method for answering these questions our confidence in metaphysical claims is usually substantially lower than it is for empirical claims. But why should we think all metaphysical questions are radically different from scientific questions such that the answer to one can't influence our estimations of the other? Of hand I can't think of a number of metaphysical hypotheses that have been greatly effected by scientific knowledge and vice versa-- materialism, substance dualism, determinism and indeterminism, free will, eternalism and philosophies of time etc.

In this case it seems rather obvious that if we are "living in the Matrix" the probability that the basic laws of physics are complicated rather than simple is dramatically higher.

What Jack said -- you can still notice regularities in the Matrix even if it's sometimes capriciously tampered with. That is, these overlords do not automatically make our universe a high-entropy white noise bath.

I discussed some of the implications of a simulated universe and the implications of the 2nd law of thermodynamics on it here.

The universe being a simulation does not entail that the administrators of such a simulation are capricious. And that we have demonstrated the existence of a large number of natural regularities suggests they are not.

Would it really surprise anyone here if, say, 10 percent of parapsychologists are either rigging experiments, hiding negative results or falsifying data? 20%?

Thirty-seven percent.

Honorton's estimate required fourty-six unreported chance-level experiments for each of those in the meta-study, including those that themselves gave no significant support for the paranormal hypothesis.

Note that this is a bogus calculation: it says that if there was no publication bias, so that unpublished studies were just as likely to show positive results as published ones, then adding the stated number of chance studies would "dilute" the results below a threshold significance level. But of course the whole point of publication bias is the enrichment of the file-drawer with negative results. See this paper by Scargle. You need far fewer studies in the file-drawer given the presence of bias. Further, various positive biases will be focused in the published literature, e.g. people doing outright fraud will normally do it for an audience.

The number of studies needed also collapses if various questionable research practices (optional stopping, post hoc reporting of subgroups as separate experiments, etc) are used to concentrate 'hits' into some experiments while misses can be concentrated in a small file drawer.

Parapsychologists counter that the few attempts to audit for unpublished studies (which would not catch everything) have not found large skew in the unpublished studies, but these inflated "fail-safe" statistics are misleadingly large regardless.

"Honorton's estimate required fourty-six unreported chance-level experiments for each of those in the meta-study, including those that themselves gave no significant support for the paranormal hypothesis."

Why is this at all unlikely? This is a 52 year span of time, and who knows how many times each of these (only 62) 'scientists' ran the trials or tweaked the procedure before they decided they had a set of data worth submitting. Who knows how many people looked for these phenomena, didn't find them, and gave up without submission? Even without outright fraud (which I wouldn't doubt), people lie to themselves. I've worked with scientists who had evidence that their previously obtained results were bunk and submitted them anyway... 'maybe the retest was flawed...' The significant effect that was found may just be the threshold at which an investigator needs to see (or fake) results to submit a paper. There's the answer to the question Allan originally posed...

Also, on another note, not all 'forced choice' tests are conducted in the same way. Some of them involve the person looking at the card being in the same room as the guesser, and well, it's not hard to imagine ways of getting a score above chance like that.

What is this "level" attribute you refer to? Does it mean intelligence or something more?

I agree with HiddenTruth and prase. The original post is flawed, because it starts with a perfectly good idea: "if there were a group that 'did science' but was always wrong, it would be a good control group to compare to 'real science'", but then blows it by assuming parapsychologists are indeed always wrong.

FWIW, I too believe parapsychologists are probably almost always wrong, but so what? Who cares what I believe? No one does, and no one should (without evidence), and that's the point.

The parapsychologists aren't describing it, but musicians often talk as if their compositions are somehow external and they are able to tap into them.

The prodigee I was thinking of said, in response to 'Where do you get your ideas from?', 'It's like catching a split second in time and if I catch that, all the rest (i.e. the full composition) follows'.

I asked my son, who's reading maths, if there could be a formula to explain this description and he said, 'Mum, to be honest, I don't know what you're on about.'

But there was a very good Horizon programme not long after, I think presented by a mathemetician, and he came to the conclusion that one day we will have mathematical formulae for consciousness.