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So yeah, new ESP paper, what will be the inevitable flaw that comes out when it's out
agentk13
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So I'm sure a few a few of you have heard about this:
So, what will the problem end up being? I'm betting that the computer gave subconscious clues by having slight color distortion on the areas with something behind the "curtain."
One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.
...
In one classic memory experiment, for example, participants study 48 words and then divide a subset of 24 of them into categories, like food or animal. The act of categorizing reinforces memory, and on subsequent tests people are more likely to remember the words they practiced than those they did not.
In his version, Dr. Bem gave 100 college students a memory test before they did the categorizing — and found they were significantly more likely to remember words that they practiced later. “The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words,” the paper concludes.
In another experiment, Dr. Bem had subjects choose which of two curtains on a computer screen hid a photograph; the other curtain hid nothing but a blank screen.
A software program randomly posted a picture behind one curtain or the other — but only after the participant made a choice. Still, the participants beat chance, by 53 percent to 50 percent, at least when the photos being posted were erotic ones. They did not do better than chance on negative or neutral photos.
“What I showed was that unselected subjects could sense the erotic photos,” Dr. Bem said, “but my guess is that if you use more talented people, who are better at this, they could find any of the photos.”
So, what will the problem end up being? I'm betting that the computer gave subconscious clues by having slight color distortion on the areas with something behind the "curtain."
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That was the main criticism. It didn't use Bayesian analysis
Getting past peer review is surprising, though.
Edit: Maybe he's actually doing a study on how often a terrible research paper can get published if you bullshit enough.
Surprise! It's 100% of the time*!
This. If you do enough ESP experiments, one will find 'significant' results because that's how randomness works.
And then when the numbers are very similar to the 'normal' people we can all lol and lol.
Well, that's what significance testing is for.
Problem is that every now and then even significance testing will have false positives. Consider a well-designed, entirely scientifically rigorous (double-blinded, etc.) battery of tests for ESP. Repeat it enough times - not even intentionally, perhaps over decades and by different researchers - and there will randomly be false positives; results which are significant (given their sample sizes, etc.) despite an underlying absence of ESP.
IAPW we log all such experimental data and so on, allowing future researchers to combine past and new data, but this is difficult to do.
Are we sure he didn't accidentally prove time travel instead of ESP?
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