Goertzel on Psi in H+ Magazine

This pattern has played out many, many times. Unreplicated studies claiming to show psychic powers are not uncommon. They always either have flaws in their methodology that explain the results, or fail to replicate (either because it was an artifact of publication bias and a low p-value, because of a methodological flaw that was not recorded, or because of cooked data). I am four-nines confident (p=0.9999) that either this study will fail to replicate, that someone will point out a flaw in its methodology, or that when I look for a flaw in its methodology myself I'll find one.

And quite frankly, both Ben Goertzel and the editors of H+ Magazine should've reached the same conclusion. Reporting on an unreplicated study claiming precognition is stupid and irresponsible, and doing so dramatically lowers Ben Goertzel's and H+ Magazine's respect in my eyes.

One of the comments in the article links to a paper which describes the failure to replicate Bem's results: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1699970

I've been seriously considering setting up a web application to try and massively replicate the results of this study.

~55% of natural science college professors believe in some kind of ESP, as do ~35% of psychology college professors.

I can't really form a coherent response to that.

Thank goodness, because I was starting to wonder whether I should be worried about Ben Goetzel's AGI project. This puts my mind at ease, at least for a while.

That article lost me at the word "pseudoskepticism", which has various denotative definitions but in practice usually means "but you're being nasty to my interest."

Interesting. I'm a little disappointed at the incorrect application of the "file drawer" effect by the article cited in the introduction, which should assume a normal distribution rather than all real studies being perfectly neutral. In general I would have liked to see a mention of more powerful statistical techniques - check out funnel plots, they're sweet.

Still, the experiments cited look very interesting. You'd think that, if it were that easy, the world would look different. But I guess we'll see. I'll go test myself for latent psychic powers after lunch - the guy didn't put his programs up on his website, which is pretty negligent in the computer age.

I read Goertzel's recent paper on "Morphic Pilot Theory", which sketches a possible framework for PSI phenomena of the inexplicable synchronicity type.

As far as I could understand, the idea is that the seemingly causally unconnected phenomena are mutually affected by nonlocality from the Bohmian interpretation of quantum physics. The anomalous cognition part comes in as some kind of conservation of algorithmic information, where the Bohmian configuration state tends towards having a low Kolmogorov complexity, this shows up as the same pattern acausally showing up in several places at once. I guess human and animal brains are then assumed to have been evolved to make what use they can of this phenomenon.

I can't really evaluate the paper. I've never looked into Bohmian QM in any detail and would have to work up my physics to get there. I do get that the paper is very speculative, but it is interesting in positing zero ontologically basic woo to work. On the other hand, PSI with quantum physics is a well-deserved crackpot indicator, and I'd really need to know more about the generally physicist-approved version to tell if this stuff is off the deep end or not.

It doesn't appear to me that the article sufficiently addresses the very specific issues raised in Jaynes, Chapter 5--which is an odd thing for an AGI researcher to ignore.

Apparently experimenters had a chance to "correct" spelling errors, in non-blind fashion.

https://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/bems-esp-research/

So I took the test. (thanks Morendil) And then I said "huh," and got some friends to take the test.

I got 50%/36%, but my friends got normal numbers, one quite below chance, around 30%/42%.

So this generates some hypotheses: The sensible hypothesis: Due to extra steps and human interaction, the variance of the the results is higher than I or the author anticipated, leading to normal fluctuations getting called "statistically significant."

The fun hypothesis: I'm psychic and my friends aren't.

The obligatory hypothesis: The computer program is flawed, either accidentally or intentionally.

Testing time!

Very interesting. I've thought for a long time that the boringness of the Rhine cards might influence the results.

If the experiment is tracking a real effect, it should be stronger with the subjects' preferred sort of erotic pictures.

http://www.ruudwetzels.com//articles/Wagenmakersetal_subm.pdf

Does psi exist? In a recent article, Dr. Bem conducted nine studies with over a thousand participants in an attempt to demonstrate that future events retroactively affect people’s responses. Here we discuss several limitations of Bem’s experiments on psi; in particular, we show that the data analysis was partly exploratory, and that one-sided p-values may overstate the statistical evidence against the null hypothesis. We reanalyze Bem’s data using a default Bayesian t-test and show that the evidence for psi is weak to nonexistent. We argue that in order to convince a skeptical audience of a controversial claim, one needs to conduct strictly confirmatory studies and analyze the results with statistical tests that are conservative rather than liberal. We conclude that Bem’s p-values do not indicate evidence in favor of precognition; instead, they indicate that experimental psychologists need to change the way they conduct their experiments and analyze their data.

So, a year and a half later, has this experiment been replicated?

Freud once said that Jung was a great psychologist, until he became a prophet.