Straight Talk: The Ganzfeld (Advocates & Skeptics only)

[ProfWag]

[craig weiler]

Hi Craig,
Actually, Ice Age is by far better with the statistics and deserves the shout out. I have a good grasp of the theory and I know what a good p value looks like, but I can't do the calculations.

As you can see, Arouet and Profwag have done an admirable job of informing themselves on the subject, and I mean that sincerely. About 95% percent of the skeptics I encounter are complete idiots spewing nothing but talking points while having not bothered to inform themselves at all. These two might be overly conservative and stubborn with their viewpoints, but they are confronting the evidence head on and not running away from it. I have respect for them.

They do have something in common with nearly every other conservative person I have ever encountered; they don't do a good job of stepping back and seeing things as a whole. They are far more comfortable examining "things", sometimes in too much detail. I think that at some point this inhibits good decision making because it ignores the concept of "enough."

A skeptic would criticize me for how I look at the Ganzfeld and how easily I come to the conclusion that it is legitimate. To their mind, you have to examine every last detail and if anything is not in place, it throws the whole thing into question. It is a very left brain approach, and while it has its strengths, it also has weaknesses.

They fail to see it from a right brain approach; that is, to see it as a whole. Things such as:
1. It has been picked over by skeptics for 30 years and modified accordingly
2. A lot of researchers have been involved at different times and different places.
3. The results stay basically the same regardless of these differences.
4. It agrees with other research in this field.
5. It agrees with field observations.
6. It behaves like entanglement.

It is not any one of these things that I have mentioned, but all of them together along with the actual ganzfeld studies that is convincing. To grasp that, you need to be comfortable with a right brain approach.

[Arouet]

[craig weiler]

Ersby isn't the tightest. Removing outliers just drags down the numbers without giving better data. Think of it this way: The bottom is closed because the study will not go much below chance levels, while the top is open; the numbers can go up to 100%. If you take away a high outlier and then take away a purely chance level, you will ALWAYS skew the results downwards.

In reality, this is just a clever way of statistical cherry picking.

[Arouet]

[_Ice_Ages_14_Aces_]

[_Ice_Ages_14_Aces_]

[_Ice_Ages_14_Aces_]

Aroulet,

Thanks for informing me more about Ersby's meta-studies. I knew his meta-studies were flawed since he used one-tailed and trimmed out the outliers...

Even though if I get rid of Ersby's meta-studies and combine only Andrew's and the 1974-2004 MA, it would still be highly statistically significant with an overall 29% hit rate. (I guess JREF members who conducted their own meta-studies aren't realiable either.)

As for the 32% vs 27% hit rate you had mentioned why would that bother me???? I don't how that could possibly be a problem. In fact, there are a huge number of cases that show that all forms of human performance vary widely from one moment to the next, even among experts. Can an expert in basketball constantly get a hit rate let's say 80% of the time??? No, but that doesn't mean that expert can never reach an 80% hit rate. Even if the expert did got an 80% hit rate, it's very possible that 80% hit rate would vary in the other long run. Besides, aren't P-Values less than 0.000001 not good enough for you???

TTYL (Talk to you later)......

[Arouet]

The issue is that the tighter studies had lower hit rates.

Anyhow, I'm slowly making my way through the Ersby thread on JREF. They've been talking about the outliers - someone said that even Radin had said outliers should be removed. Jessica Utts said they shouldn't be removed just because they were outliers, but Ersby said he removed them to make the studies homogeneous.

Still making my way through the thread, will see the conclusions...

[Arouet]

[craig weiler]

This is moving into denier territory, rather than skeptical. As countless people have pointed out, skeptics have to be skeptical of skeptics. This business of treating the words of skeptics as gospel and giving them no scrutiny whatsoever is ahem, unfortunate. Automatically claiming that Ersby's meta analysis is somehow better is ridiculous. You don't know that.

What is it about the positive outliers that would cause them to be removed?

In fact, at least one is a study that used artistically gifted students and the study quality is ranked rather high. (But as we've seen, study quality is not a factor in the results, so this is a non issue.)

It was a standard replication study, so why remove it? Arouet, you never ask this question, you follow the skeptic narrative like it was the Word of God.

You're being very selective on what you'll question and what you won't based solely on your views.

[Arouet]

With all due respect, it may be you who is not looking at this objectively. I'm not sure you really carefully read the post I quoted.

Linda wasn't saying anything like you are suggesting. In fact, she was saying not to remove them just because they were outliers. But rather because those studies were not homogeneous. She said that if you are going to remove just because they are outliers that would introduce bias. She also made some suggestions for how to make the meta-study even more homogeneous which would allow one to treat all the trials as one big experiment. When the studies are heterogeneous you just can't do that.

If you've read the ganzfeld thread you will see that it is a thread filled with debate, with differing views. it is a myth that skeptics never disagree with each other. Proponents may like to think so, but I don't think it holds up to scrutiny.

Read the post again, and maybe you'll see why I thought it was interesting to post.

[craig weiler]

Yes, I did read it. It is skeptic nonsense that demonstrates a complete lack of understanding about psi or human potential. It is an attempt to skew results towards null to fit the skeptic narrative. Duh.

In particular, the removal of artistic individuals or siblings is completely uncalled for.

If we are going to examine whether people can shoot a basketball from a foul line and get the ball through the hoop by anything but chance, you don't remove the people who are most likely to succeed. What kind of blank up logic is that?

The objective is to determine whether the task can be done at all, not whether it can be done by a homogenous group of people. Is this really so hard to understand?

As I said, this is veering into denier territory.

(I'm off to work and won't reply for a few hours.)

[Arouet]

I still don't think you're reading it properly.

She wasn't saying don't look at artists she was saying that to combine studies in a meta-study the criteria has to be homogeneous for the results to be considered in any way reliable. Otherwise its simply inappropriate to do a meta-study. The have to be identical methodologies. Otherwise you should't be trying to combine results.

I'm no stats expert but that certainly sounds reasonable to me!

[craig weiler]

ARRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!

No, it's complete nonsense. If we are testing for the EXISTENCE of home runs, then ALL properly tested data about hitting home runs is valid unless they are tinkering with the study methods, such as blindfolding people. If one study happens to use major league baseball players there is no good reason to exclude them just because they hit more home runs because the study itself remained the same. Is that any more clear to you?

Homogenizing the results does not produce more reliable data, just more homogenous data that is not necessarily more reliable.