Sheldrake tests telephone telepathy

[Pyrrho]

Just to explain to anyone who hasn't read the paper: the callers were chosen by rolling a die.

Pyrrho, would you (or anyone else) mind expanding on these comments? What would be a truly random method? I thought pseudorandom number generation was the best we could do. Also, how does the fact that the set of callers is limited to 4 adversely affect the statistics, compared to say, limiting it to 100 callers? Wouldn't this just change the expected hit-rate from 1/4 to 1/100? Would 50 trials where you had to choose between 100 callers produce more rigorous results than 50 trials where you had to choose between 4?

Love the TAM2 idea, by the way. Although unless I win the lottery, I won't be attending.

Sorry, it's speculation on my part, and I did state that I am somewhat ignorant of statistics. I cannot give anyone a definitive answer as to what statistical flaws, if any, exist in Sheldrake's experiments. I'm just not that well informed when it comes to statistics. It just seems to me that the sample size is far too small to be relied upon for meaningful results.

 

[Interesting Ian]

Originally posted by Interesting Ian
Who should be blind to what?

Test subjects should not know their score till after the experiment. Neither should experimenters. This eliminates a lot of possibilities for cheating.

Right, so in the filmed experiments the callees are immediately told afterwards if their guess was correct? Could you list all these possibilities down for being able to cheat on being told this information? (that is for the filmed experiments - it is agreed on all hands that the unfilmed experiments are a load of crock as Paul described them).

 

[Interesting Ian]

II
The subjects specifically said "I believe I have telepathic powers/abilities"?

Hans
According to the paper, they advertized for people who thought they had telepathic abilities. So, yes.

I was just wondering if it were the sort of people who believe they have tremendous powers and who make all sorts of ridiculous claims and even screw people for money, or whether they are simply recruiting everyday people like you and me, but who often feel they know who it is when the telephone rings.

II
Could you name these possibilities for the filmed experiments?
Hans
Well, lack of blinding for sure. And biased test subjects.

You'll have to forgive me, but what do you mean by lack of blinding? Who is not being blinded to what precisely?

I think it's going to be impossible to recruit wholly unbiased subjects. They're either going to tend to believe in tel telepathy or not. The important point is closing any possible loopholes for cheating.

Remember also that people who believe they have never experienced any telephone telepathy (and who therefore would be less disposed to believe in TT) would very likely do less well in the experiments even if telepathy does exist!

 

[Diamond]

You know, I'm often left with a nagging feeling about the statistics in these psi experiments, but I don't know near enough statistics to really delve into that aspect of the experiments. We need a couple of resident statisticians at our beck and call; ones who won't mind reading whacky paper after whacky paper in great gory detail.

Perhaps we should form the Committee for the Statistical Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. We'd have a great acronym, anyway.

~~ Paul

The acronym's already been taken by some hack organization...

 

[JamesM]

Right, so in the filmed experiments the callees are immediately told afterwards if their guess was correct?

Yes, this is also true for the unfilmed experiments. It appears it was done to provide "immediate feedback". I'm not sure what purpose that was for - perhaps there is anecdotal evidence to suggest this is useful for focussing telepathic powers? It does seem the sort of thing you'd want to exclude from the experiment if possible.

Remember also that people who believe they have never experienced any telephone telepathy (and who therefore would be less disposed to believe in TT) would very likely do less well in the experiments even if telepathy does exist!

Well, maybe - we want to use this experiment to prove telepathy exists before investigating how its strength varies with attitude towards psi effects. A statistical problem with only picking people who think that they are telepathic w.r.t. the telephone is that it becomes hard to know to what population the results can be generalised to - just to other people who believe themselves to be able to telepathically tell who's phoning them?

 

[CFLarsen]

I really have no idea. How on earth should I know? But anyway, do the majority of articles in skepticReport dwell upon positive evidence for paranomal phenomena? Or is it skewed towards reporting negative results?

The articles are not "skewed", but written from a skeptical POV. If you have any evidence of a paranormal phenomenon, please suggest an article and I'll look at it.

 

[Interesting Ian]

I was just wondering if it were the sort of people who believe they have tremendous powers and who make all sorts of ridiculous claims and even screw people for money, or whether they are simply recruiting everyday people like you and me, but who often feel they know who it is when the telephone rings.

The advertisement actually said:

{quote}
“Do you know who is ringing before you pick up the phone? Good pay for fun and simple experiments as part of psychic research project.”
{/quote}

Which suggests that the people who responded are predominantly those who ofen feel they know who it is when the telephone rings (rather than the former I mentioned above). I have to say I think that's absolutely fine if they are simply concerned with demonstrating telephone telepathy exists, rather than attempting to generalise about particular telepathic abilities amongst particular groups of people.

 

[Interesting Ian]

The articles are not "skewed", but written from a skeptical POV. If you have any evidence of a paranormal phenomenon, please suggest an article and I'll look at it.

Personnally I feel a skeptical POV is simply a euphenism for a biased point of view. I'm only interested in an objective rational appraisal of the evidence and an appraisal of the implict philosophical presumptions regarding the nature of reality which influence our beliefs in this regard.

Nevertheless, although I'm not interested in their point of view, this is not to say that they do not say relevant things or that they might not come up with explanations for phenomena which less skeptical people might overlook.

 

[CFLarsen]

IIan,

How can you be rational without being skeptical - or the other way around? I cannot see how you can be one and not the other.

Do you have evidence of a paranormal phenomenon or not?

 

[Interesting Ian]

I have so far found two, perhaps minor, faults in paper #2:

- They are comparing the scores for different callers in the same experiment. This is not stistically sound, since the figures for callers are interconnected. Obviously, if the callee guesses wrong, she will place her guess on another potential caller, thus influencing the statistics of that caller. This will make differences appear larger (on average doubling them).

Ummmm . .you'll have to forgive me, but I don't understand what you're saying here.

- They claim that the timestamp is "burnt into the film". Since the redording is on videotape, this is obviously wrong. They are implying that the timestamps could not be faked, while obviously that is possible.

I have no idea whether you are correct or not on this I'm afraid.

 

[MRC_Hans]

I was just wondering if it were the sort of people who believe they have tremendous powers and who make all sorts of ridiculous claims and even screw people for money, or whether they are simply recruiting everyday people like you and me, but who often feel they know who it is when the telephone rings.

It is the latter category, just as it says in the paper. This debate would be simpler if you read the paper before asking.

You'll have to forgive me, but what do you mean by lack of blinding? Who is not being blinded to what precisely?

In principle, if at all possible, neither experimenters nor test subjects should be able to judge results as the experiment proceeds. This is to make cheating more difficult.

I think it's going to be impossible to recruit wholly unbiased subjects. They're either going to tend to believe in tel telepathy or not. The important point is closing any possible loopholes for cheating.

Recruiting people in order to test for an ability they believe to have is not a good way to conduct an experiement.

Remember also that people who believe they have never experienced any telephone telepathy (and who therefore would be less disposed to believe in TT) would very likely do less well in the experiments even if telepathy does exist!

Probably, and?

The imprtant thing when designing an experiment is to make it show the phenomenon it is to test for, and nothing else. Everything else is noise that reduces the value of the result, even if it confirms your theory. - This is provided you actually WANT to make an objective experiment. If you just want to make something that looks nice and confirms your belief, that is another story.

And this is what puzzles me: Designing sound experiments is a very very basic skill in the scientific community. Try to present a result from a flawed protocol through a peer review, and you'll get skinned alive.

So how come those people who are trying to prove paranormal phenomenon have such difficulties with protocols? If they cant design them themeselves, they could get any science student to do it. Take the paper above: They have gone to a lot of trouble and spent a fair amount of money, where a far better protocol would be quicker and cheaper.

I'm sorry, but I just can't help suspecting that they don't really want an objective result.

Hans

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

In addition to five or more subjects, we need a statistician. Any volunteers?

~~ Paul

 

[Prester John]

Actually it would help if they said the actual statistical tests that were used, there are rather a lot of them. Knowing this would help to evaluate the validity of the statistics. This information should be in any reputable scientific paper.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Pam Smart tells me they are doing email telepathy experiments now. Here is the protocol:

You need to send me the names and details of your four emailers, and your own details, on the form below. They should be family members or good friends, ideally people who you think you are likely to respond to telepathically. If you cannot think of four such people, then you
should pick three. I will then serve as the fourth. You will need to
contact these people to make sure they agree to take part and that they are free to do so.

You need to decide a time when you can sit quietly by your computer and your emailers are
also by their computers so I can tell them if they have been picked, and
so that they can email you at the exact time that has been prearranged.
You need to make sure that your callers are available at the time you
and I have arranged. If, for some reason, the person whose picked at
random is not available when I send them the instruction to email you,
then that particular test will not happen. Please pick your
dates and times for Mondays, Tuesdays or Wednesdays, between 9am and 5pm.

You are paid £40 for a 50-minute, five-trial session, in other words £8 per trial. If a trial has to be abandoned because your emailer is not available or the timing of the email is wrong, then of course there will be no payment for that trial.

I will co-ordinate the test and will need their email addresses of the
people you have chosen (and also their telephone numbers and postal
addresses). I will email the person chosen by the throw of the dice to
ask them to email you at the prearranged time. Please tell your
emailers that if they have not received an email from me 5 minutes
beforehand they have not been picked and should avoid thinking about you.

You have a one in four chance of guessing correctly.

Again, highly significant results.

~~ Paul

 

[Interesting Ian]

IIan,

How can you be rational without being skeptical - or the other way around? I cannot see how you can be one and not the other.

Do you have evidence of a paranormal phenomenon or not?

--- and from another post:

II
Why should skeptics know more about experimental design than non-skeptics?

Hans
Very interesting question. Ideally they should not, but it seems they do. Could it be because correctly designed experiments invariably produce negative results for paranormal phenomenon? Thus those that understand experimental design unavoidably BECOME skeptics.

No Hans I do not think this is correct. I suspect that what makes us become skeptics or believers is not so much a question of rationality or irrationality, but rather one of psychological predispositions. A predisposition which is moulded to a very large extent by our implicit presumptions about the underlying nature of the world and what possible phenomena it could be expected to exhibit.

To make myself more clear, the skeptic will generally tend to prefer any "normal" explanation, no matter how far fetched and unlikely it might be, to a paranormal explanation. This is simply due to the fact that he or she considers himself to live in a world where such things are simply not possible. We live in a world wholly explicable in terms of natural laws ie everything that ever happens, all phenomena, can be traced back and subsumed under general theories describing the world which are written in the language of mathematics. In particular, all our behaviour is governed by physical laws, just as much as the behaviour of a boulder is governed by physical laws as it rolls down a hill.

Myself and others, on the other hand, do not subscribe to this naturalistic picture of the world. I do not believe that consciousness is an object in the world like all other objects in the world. Rather it is that which percieves and is aware of objects and processes in the world. Moreover I do not believe that my behaviour is circumscribed by algorithmic laws, but rather my behaviour can arise spontaneously as an instantaneous exercising of my will. In other words I believe that consciousness is something other than the objects of consciousness. Given this it is entirely unclear to me why something like telepathy should not exist. Indeed, if anything, I am surprised it is not more prevalent than it apparently appears to be.

 

[JamesM]

Actually it would help if they said the actual statistical tests that were used, there are rather a lot of them. Knowing this would help to evaluate the validity of the statistics. This information should be in any reputable scientific paper.

They give the tests: the exact binomial test for testing the null hypothesis of a 25% hit rate; the Stouffer method for the meta-analysis; the Fisher exact test for comparison between the 1st and 2nd trial & familiar and unfamiliar callers.

In the videotaped experiments, the Cochran and Armitage trend test was used to compare the success of the trials with the participant's confidence in the guess.

If I get the time this weekend, I may take a look at some of the numbers in the paper.

 

[JamesM]

Email telepathy? This is something we could be able to handle even more easily than telephone telepathy, right?

Anyone want to try and design a protocol? Do easily accessible-via-the-web anonymous email servers still exist?

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I have started a thread to act as the experiment notebook for our telephone telepathy experiments:

http://www.randi.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24807

My concern with email telepathy is delay in transmission of email messages. Does anyone think that will be a problem? We could switch to email telepathy, but then we would be attempting to replicate experiments that haven't been published. We could also do both.

~~ Paul

 

[Interesting Ian]

So how come those people who are trying to prove paranormal phenomenon have such difficulties with protocols?
Hans [/B]

Well I think on the whole they don't do they? Even I am aware (despite my comparative lack of interest in this subject) that parapsychogist experimental protocols are tighter than in any other area of science. Why are you under the delussion in thinking otherwise?

Of course Sheldrake is not a parapsychologist, nor is Schwartz.

The difficulty here is that we're not dealing in a hard science and can't expect humans to behave in such a regularly predictive way as one would expect electrons to behave. Also, because of the naturalistic presumption that skeptics hold, such phenomena is a priori considered to be extremely unlikely, meaning that effectively no standard of evidence would ever satisfy him or her.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Ian said:

Given this it is entirely unclear to me why something like telepathy should not exist. Indeed, if anything, I am surprised it is not more prevalent than it apparently appears to be.

Perhaps two individual consciousnesses cannot communicate directly.

Also, because of the naturalistic presumption that skeptics hold, such phenomena is a priori considered to be extremely unlikely, meaning that effectively no standard of evidence would ever satisfy him or her.

It's hard to be satisfied without a theory.

~~ Paul