Sheldrake tests telephone telepathy

I reread the entire videotaped experiment paper last night. I see nothing that controls for the passage of information via the difference in times on the clocks of the callers and callee. In fact, there is no mention of clocks at all.

So, to add to Jeff's list:

Employ a mechanism to randomly select when the caller will call, in the range +/- 15 seconds around the official call time.

69dodge, perhaps the callee doesn't realize that "no telepathy" means one of the unfamiliar callers. Perhaps she just guesses randomly when there is no telepathy. Although you'd think she would subconsciously pick up on that pattern.

Hans, they do use the hit/miss ratio when they use the percentage of hits, right? Perhaps I don't understand what you mean.

All psi experiments suffer from not being able to distinguish telepathy, precognitiion, micro-PK, and remote viewing. This will continue until they start testing real theories instead of experiment results.

~~ Paul
 
American said:
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.
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I respect and would defend Sheldrake for his ideas and his courage to oppose convention. Calling someone a "quack" is a rather prejudiced point of view if you judge new ideas to be irrational because they are based on unfamiliar principles.
I wouldn't defend him for sloppy experimentation. Thats a different issue.
 
davidsmith73 said:



I respect and would defend Sheldrake for his ideas and his courage to oppose convention. Calling someone a "quack" is a rather prejudiced point of view if you judge new ideas to be irrational because they are based on unfamiliar principles.
I wouldn't defend him for sloppy experimentation. Thats a different issue.
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What is new about any of the ideas that Sheldrake puts forward?
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:

Hans, they do use the hit/miss ratio when they use the percentage of hits, right? Perhaps I don't understand what you mean.
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I think what Hans and Patnray are getting at is the following question: if telepathy isn't occurring, then is the probability of me guessing any caller 0.25?

I would say that this is by no means assured, especially on the unfamiliar/familiar test. Sue never guessed that either Carole or the BT computer were calling, so there was no chance of her being right on those occasions. This means the guesses that she "should" have been making for Carole and BT were going to someone else - Jayne, it would appear. Thus she gets a high hit-rate for Jayne and a very low one for BT and Carole.

Now, Carole has never met Sue, and obviously Sue has never met the BT computer. Jayne was one of her friends. So: a high hit-rate for a friend and a very low one for an inanimate object and someone she's never met. Evidence that telepathy works best for people you know? Or just evidence that the probability of guessing Carole or BT was lower than that of her friends? To sort out whether this is accounted for in the p-values reported, I'll have to go through the numbers. I might get the chance to do this over the weekend, if no-one else wants to have a crack at it before then.

Could we control for the above problem by doing a series of 'blank' trials with a computer always phoning up, and then using those guesses to work out the raw guessing probabilities?

Apologies to Hans and Patnray if this is not what they're talking about and/or I'm talking complete rubbish (a highly likely scenario).
 
What I am getting at is this: They take the hit/miss rate of the CALLER, that is every time the callee guesses rightly for caller A, it counts as a hit, but every time she guesses at somebody else, but A is the caller, then it counts as a miss. Now if you instead took the number of GUESSES on caller A and compared it with the number of CALLS by caller A, you would in many cases get a different ratio. I don't know how much difference it would make generally, but it would certainly make a difference for the tests where two callers were aquaintances and two were not.

HAns
 
See, I knew I'd get it wrong.

So, we'd want to compare

the hit-rate of recipient R given that A was the caller

and

the hit-rate for recipient R given that R guessed the caller was A.
 
Darat said:


What is new about any of the ideas that Sheldrake puts forward?
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I haven't seen any similar ideas to morphic fields in the last 25 years. Could be wrong. He will have taken inspiration from someone in the past I'm sure but by "new" I mean in the sense of application.
 
davidsmith73 said:


I haven't seen any similar ideas to morphic fields in the last 25 years. Could be wrong. He will have taken inspiration from someone in the past I'm sure but by "new" I mean in the sense of application.
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Thanks.
 
Hmmmm . . some pretty interesting stuff on parrot telepathy in this book. Can't see anything particularly wrong with his experimental protocol either.
 
Hans, I calculated the (no. guesses) / (no. calls) ratio for the four human callers in Table 3. I got 0, 1.86, 1.52, and .55. So she certainly overguessed on her familiars. I'm not sure what this tells us, though.

~~ Paul
 
However you perform statistical analysis with the results presented in this paper you are going to get a significant effect that suggest that the subjects in the study were able to guess the caller more frequently than chance alone suggest.

The point is that the "study" is seriously flawed. There are insufficient controls and it is probable that the guesser recieved clues about the caller. Futhermore examination of the spread of the data suggests that the data has been altered in some way to exagerate the number of correct guesses.

So its a badly designed study and they fiddled the data.

:cool:

PJ
 
davidsmith73 said:
Calling someone a "quack" is a rather prejudiced point of view if you judge new ideas to be irrational because they are based on unfamiliar principles.
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Not because they are based on "unfamiliar principles", david, but because the are based on unfounded hypotheses. And because the hypotheses violate Occam's razor or known scientific principles. Please do not mischaracterize what skeptics are saying.

But this paper of Sheldrake's does not simply qualify as "quack". It moves squarely into the "crank" arena. This research design is not merely deplorable; it is laughable.

Cheers,
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Hans, I calculated the (no. guesses) / (no. calls) ratio for the four human callers in Table 3. I got 0, 1.86, 1.52, and .55. So she certainly overguessed on her familiars. I'm not sure what this tells us, though.
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Shouldn't that be "0, 2, 1.52, .55"?

Anyway, what it tells us is that the null hypothesis should not be: P(correct guess) = 0.25.

Take Jayne, who called 21 times and of those 21 was guessed 17 times. The table lists a p-value of 1 in a million. That p-value, I think, was computed assuming that P(guessing Jayne) = 0.25. However, out of 70 trials, Jayne was guessed 32 times. We might suppose that on each trial Sue guessed Jayne with a probability of 32/70 = 0.457 > 0.25 simply because they knew each other, with no telepathy involved. Taking that as our null hypothesis yields a p-value of 1 in a thousand. More significant than the standard 1 in 20, certainly, but much less impressive than 1 in a million.
 
69dodge, I think 1.86 is correct for Gayle, no?

I'm no statistician by any stretch, but I don't see why we would use the number of times she actually guessed, rather than assuming she guesses 25% of the time. Imagine she guessed Jayne all the time. Then the p value for Jayne would be excellent, but for the other three it would be 1.0. I see how this would matter if the callers weren't chosen at random, but they are.

~~ Paul
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
69dodge, I think 1.86 is correct for Gayle, no?
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Oh, I see now. You excluded the 2 times Gayle was guessed when BT called.
I'm no statistician by any stretch, but I don't see why we would use the number of times she actually guessed, rather than assuming she guesses 25% of the time.
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I'm not a statistician either, but here's my thinking. If we can show that what happened would be very unlikely unless telepathy were involved, then we might reasonably conclude that telepathy was involved. If what happened wouldn't be too unlikely provided only that the probability of guessing each person was something other than 25% (each person's probability being the same for all calls, independent of the actual caller, of course), then that's all we can conclude. There's no need for telepathy.
Imagine she guessed Jayne all the time. Then the p value for Jayne would be excellent, but for the other three it would be 1.0.
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Assuming a null hypothesis of 25% guessing, right?
I see how this would matter if the callers weren't chosen at random, but they are.
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The callers were chosen at random, but Jayne happened to be chosen more often than anyone else. That was just chance, not telepathy.

The null hypothesis should be that the probability of guessing someone is independent of whether that person is actually the caller. There's no reason a priori to suppose that all the probabilities are 25%. I think that a hypothesis test for independence of a contingency table is more appropriate here than a simple binomial test with probability 1/4.
 
69dodge said:
However, out of 70 trials, Jayne was guessed 32 times. We might suppose that on each trial Sue guessed Jayne with a probability of 32/70 = 0.457 > 0.25 simply because they knew each other, with no telepathy involved.
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On some of those 32 occasions, Jayne really was calling, though, wasn't she? And that might really have been down to telepathy, not guessing, so should those occasions not be excluded from calculating the guess-probability?

That simplified methodology that Jeff Corey suggested looks more and more appealing...
 
BillHoyt said:

Not because they are based on "unfamiliar principles", david, but because the are based on unfounded hypotheses. And because the hypotheses violate Occam's razor or known scientific principles. Please do not mischaracterize what skeptics are saying.
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What do you mean by unfounded hypotheses ? Sheldrakes ideas have not been positively tested by any means but I wouldn't call him a quack just because he formulates a hypothesis that uses principles contradictory to known ones. I know that some people do. Please don't mischaracterize what I am saying.
 
David said:
Sheldrakes ideas have not been positively tested by any means but I wouldn't call him a quack just because he formulates a hypothesis that uses principles contradictory to known ones.
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He has no hypothesis about unknown principles. He has no theory at all. The experimental hypotheses are about the result of the experiment, about the statistics, not about any underlying theory. That makes it impossible to rule out all possible mundane explanations, which is why people have such a hard time accepting psi.

It's time for some theories!

~~ Paul
 
davidsmith73 said:
What do you mean by unfounded hypotheses ? Sheldrakes ideas have not been positively tested by any means but I wouldn't call him a quack just because he formulates a hypothesis that uses principles contradictory to known ones. I know that some people do. Please don't mischaracterize what I am saying.
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I did not mischaracterize what you said. Here it is again:
Calling someone a "quack" is a rather prejudiced point of view if you judge new ideas to be irrational because they are based on unfamiliar principles.
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You claimed it was "prejudiced" to refer to Sheldrake's ideas as quack. You claimed further that the ideas were called quack "because they are based on unfamiliar prinicples".

Sheldrake's idea is that people can know a priori that a certain other person is about to phone them. This hypothesis:

1. Violates Occam's razor as it requires that the caller have some yet unknown trasmitter capable of transmitting this information across space .
2. Violates Occam's razor as it requires that the called person have some yet unknown receiver capable of receiving the transmitted information.
3. Violates Occam's razor in that the energy used to transmit this information apparently is not subject to the inverse-cubed law, given some of the anecdotes of calls from distant relatives and loved ones,
4.Or, if it is subject to the inverse-cubed law, then the energy exists in some unknown EMR range where our instruments have managed to miss or misunderstand all this important psi chatter,
5. Or, it represents some totally new form of information transmission, and therefore represents another violation of Occam's razor.

The hypothesis is, therefore completely unfounded. Sheldrake then makes an utter mockery of his own hypothesis and the scientific method with this addle-brained protocol. This paper is IgNobel material and, now that I think about it, I will submit it to AIR for IgNobel consideration.

Cheers,
 
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