Sheldrake tests telephone telepathy

Here's a little test we could do with three of us. Person A could email Person X at 2:59. Person B could email Person X at 3:00. Let's see how accurate the time stamps are.

I'll be person X.

~~ Paul
 
What time is it now? It's 09:33ish here, so it 3.00 10.00 my time? If so, I volunteer to be person A.
 
James, your message was posted at 4:34 my time. You're five hours ahead of me.

Do we have another volunteer?

Meanwhile, James, send me an email at exactly 10:00 pm (22:00) your time. I'll PM you my email address.

Edited to add: I guess by sending at a certain time we mean clicking on whatever it is that actually transmits the message to your server.

~~ Paul
 
Okay, James and Claus are persons A and B. Guys, post here what parts of the day are good for you. We'll run trials on Thursday and Friday.

I'm available between 9:00 and 17:00 US Eastern time.

~~ Paul
 
Impressive. I got James's message at 17:00 and it was stamped 22:00.

James, try again at 22:15 your time, if you're around.

~~ Paul
 
Oh, so you didn't want me to send it now? Oh dear, this has to be the 8 millionth stupid thing I've posted today. I think I better go home now.

I shall be in front of a computer until about 3pm your time tomorrow and 1.30pm your time on Friday. So any reasonable time for you is fine by me.

EDIT: just noticed Paul's post. Maybe I'm not so stupid. I shall repeat at 10.15.
 
It occurs to me that we don't know what time our email applications display. Do they display the time stamped by the sender's SMTP server or the recipient's server? Must find out ...

~~ Paul
 
Two more accurate time stamps from James, and one from a friend of mine.

So we know that the time stamps can be accurate. I doubt they always are.

~~ Paul
 
Which is why we have to rely on the time stamp from the mail form from the web page. :)
 
CFLarsen said:
Originally posted by Interesting Ian
I can't point to any experimental data. It's kind of from personnal experience, from anecdotes, and what I instinctively feel.
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Funny, but I never saw you as a "touchy-feely" guy. Guess I was wrong...

You can't back up your claim, then. OK. Your claim is therefore invalid.
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Ummm . . fraid you're gonna have to come up with something better than that! LOL


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Originally posted by Interesting Ian
Oh it can't be That's because it's real. Science deals with measurements. That's because it deals in a world of unreality
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I hope you are joking. You certainly have been unable to back up your posts!
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Of course I'm not joking! I take the minimal task of science to be a process of building mental representational models patterning and ordering our mental experiences (or qualia). If you wish to maintain science amounts to more than that, then I remain to be convinced :)

Our experiences, our raw emotions, the redness of red as experienced etc, none of them can be measured. Yet it is the prime reality from which we know anything at all! ;)
 
Interesting Ian said:
Ummm . . fraid you're gonna have to come up with something better than that! LOL
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Actually, no. You made a claim. You couldn't back it up. It's that simple.

Interesting Ian said:
Of course I'm not joking! I take the minimal task of science to be a process of building mental representational models patterning and ordering our mental experiences (or qualia). If you wish to maintain science amounts to more than that, then I remain to be convinced :)

Our experiences, our raw emotions, the redness of red as experienced etc, none of them can be measured. Yet it is the prime reality from which we know anything at all! ;)
Click to expand...

Say what?? Is there a translator in the room?
 
My wife and I were discussing the email telepathy protocol. Remember, the receiver sends her guess at 9:59, while the sender sends his message at 10:00. Imagine this scenario:

1. Sender's clock says 10:00, so he sends a message to the recipient and the experimenter. His server thinks it's 10:00, so the message is stamped 10:00.

2. Recipient receives the message, but her clock says 2:58. She reads the message.

3. At 2:59, she sends her guess to the experimenter. Her server thinks is 9:59, so the message is stamped 9:59.

If the experimenter doesn't notice the order of arrival of the messages, or they arrive out of order, he won't be able to tell that the recipient cheated.

~~ Paul
 
Guys,

I applaud the initiative here, but I think e-mail or internet based experiments are a horrible idea. There is absolutely no security! Nothing can prevent participants from pming each other here or e-mailing each other seperately to skew results. This was one of my main complaints against Schwartz's Afterlife Watching Experiment.

An experimenter cannot rely on trust. Ever. This is Schwartz's greatest failing in my opinion, and one we cannot risk repeating. As much as I'd love (and I mean absolutely freaking love) to pick up where CSICOP left off with skeptical investigations of paranormal claims, I think this is a really bad idea.
 
I hear what you're saying, Mark. Unless all five participants are anonymous, there is really no way to stop cheating. I know that Sheldrake wouldn't use anonymous participants, since he thinks the relationship between the participants is important. The same goes for telephone telepathy.

When I thought of this idea, I wasn't intending that we perform a tight, publishable experiment. I was more interested in trying it out to see if we could understand what was really going on.

~~ Paul
 
A thought just occured to me regarding the telephone experiments. Could the callee pick up clues by noting exactly when the caller called relative to the precise time he was supposed to call?

~~ Paul
 
I've been tracking Sheldrake's BS for years. I'd volunteer to help, but I'm too biased.

I'm also temporarily on the outs with most folks around here, all 'cause people didn't like a silly joke I made. That's another matter.

Lastly, I have no idea what Ian is saying, since he's the single person who resides on my ignore-list, but I'm sure he's being completely idiotic. I brought up Sheldrake a year ago, and he was the first one to defend the quack.
 
This is too complex. Prelimimary experiments should be as simple as possible. Someone said the n is too small.
Nope. Test one person who claims this ability.
The falsifiable question is, "Can this person tell which one of two people will be calling when the phone rings better than chance using the Binomial test, where p=q=.5?"
Disable the receiver's mike and speaker (to eliminated any leakage) and caller ID.
Only let the phone ring once, in case the patterns mentioned earlier could provide cues.
Draw 50 red and 50 green chips (without replacement) from a blind box to determine who calls next.
After 100 trials, if you get more than 62 hits, I'd be statistically surprized, and ask for some direct replications.

One of the annoying things about feculant pararesearch like Schwatrz's is they are unnecessarily complicated with bells, whistles and EEGs to cover the lack of controls.
Misdirection.
 
The paper reports results above chance for familiar callers and at chance for unfamiliar ones. It tries to give the impression that this would be expected on the hypothesis of telepathy, which supposedly is stronger between people familiar to each other. How does that follow? If I am more likely to get a telepathic signal from a familiar caller, then when I don't get such a signal I can conclude that the caller is likely unfamiliar. So I should guess above chance for unfamiliar callers too.
 
About the Sheldrake experiments: Apart from the obvious possibilities for fraud, I'm getting more and more suspicious of those statistics. My problem is that wrong guesses are not mapped. I think somebody already mentioned this: If most guesses fall on a one caller, the hit rate for that caller will invariably become high. So they should actually, instead of just counting hits, use the hit/miss rate for guesses on each caller.

Also, there is one more serious flaw in the protocol: Since the identity of the caller is disclosed the the callee every time, then even if a phenomenon WAS disclosed, the test would not be able to tell if it was telepathy, precognition, or combination of those.

Hans
 
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