A mechanism for cognitive influence at a distance? | Hacker News Reader

A mechanism for cognitive influence at a distance?

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

15 pointsthomyorkie17 comments

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ib/parapsychology_the_control_group...

Also worth noting that this can't explain a lot of the parapsychology findings even if true: these pulses don't go back in time like eg Bem's findings, there's no obvious way that they would modulate a radioactive number generator's choices of binary bits (the most credible experimental setup), and they can't physically go far which eliminates all experiments in which subjects are separated by more than a few hundred feet.

(That is: even if parapsychology was 'right' in the sense that something like these electromagnetic waves did occasionally affect cognition and could be used to transmit information in limited circumstances, it was still wrong overall, falling for all sorts of things like Geller's spoon bending, successfully managed to produce many false positives despite the most stringent measures, and can be considered a control group for the scientific method.)

But how does he know "their null hypotheses are always true"? He seems to take it as a given. Why?

Edit: is it just me or did they boot this off the front page manually?

Yeah, that's the problem with the article... it's just as biased as the people they're lambasting. Not to say that the parapsychologists have any results that stand up.

Yeah, it appears they did remove it from the front page manually.

Who is "they" and what is "manually"?

This post declined in rank because users flagged it.

It seems to me that flagging a submission should result in an admin review, not in an automatic reduction in the submission's points.

Because the null hypotheses are supported by our current understanding of physics, which has a ton of evidence for. Our prior for this type of study should not be not "50/50", but rather "all of physics so far vs this guys".

I agree that this study is probably 99.9999% wrong, but ...

Were is the mistake? Do someone have access to the original paper and can explain the experimental flaws?

First I thought that 4 pairs of subjects was too low, but with this experiment I'll be surprised to get successful 1 pair that can be tested by independent experts in high controlled situations (i.e. Randi)

They say that they tested with 6 EM patterns. If they used more than 6 (for example 20) it's easy to get a p<0.05 result and filter most of the unsuccessful patterns. https://xkcd.com/882/

Did they repeat the experiment? (I think so.) Did they get the successful result every time for the 4 pairs or after using the average?

Was it a double blind experiment?

Without the original paper is difficult to know.

I don’t understand this. To the extent that parapsychology studies are well designed, the scientific community should be open minded enough to try to reproduce the results.

Yes, in an ideal word it would be easy to reproduce all the well designed experiments. But it's costly

* Time and Money.

* You have to assign a graduate student or a postdoc to reproduce the experiment. He/She will get probably a null result that cant publish anywhere (or in a low impact journal if lucky).

* It's necessary to copy all the devices. Probably the equipment in the research article is custom made and not available of the shelf, so it's necessary to make the modifications.

* It's necessary to gather and manage the volunteers and the staff. Get a quiet place that is available at the right time and be sure that everyone is there.

* If you can't reproduce the result, the original team can claim that you didn't follow some detail that they didn't explain in detail in the paper. So someone has to repeat the experiment again.

* If you reproduce the result, you have to check carefully that there are no side channels that explain the result, because if someone discover them later you can be labeled as a crackpot for life.

* It's more easy to make a small variation of a well known experiment. You will probably be successful an you will get another paper for you and your team members. (If you are feeling lucky you can try an interesting modification. It's less sure because it can fail, but if it successful you will get more fame (and can share a little of it with your team members).)

The abstract doesn't mention a control group of non-siblings. I would think that would be a prerequisite for concluding anything.

And a test where nobody is hooked up at the transmitting end but the signals are still turned on... there's a lot of potential for the receiver being influenced solely by the hardware setup if it is not properly isolated room to room(electrical, light, sound).

Also interesting: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20887774

At least one of the authors is in both papers.

If I am going to believe this I am going to need real independent reproducibility. A lot of it.

Wow:

"The results suggest that an appropriate altered state of one brain can effect specific predictable frequencies of the electroncephalographic activity of another distant brain which is genetically related."

Can someone explain why this was suddenly removed from the front page?

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