as i pointed out the last time this came up ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23067492 )
the most simple answer, the answer with the most historical analogues (think government-funded remote viewing research well into the 1980s): it's a grift.
the most simple answer, the answer with the most historical analogues (think government-funded remote viewing research well into the 1980s): it's a grift.
Over 85% of our operational missions have produced accurate target information...approximately 50% of the 700 missions produced usable intelligence
- from https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788...
50% is very high because they are generating things like plans, locations, facility layouts, not yes-no answers.
If you're still having trouble believing this, but consider yourself an open-minded person I encourage you to try RV for yourself. I believe there is a subreddit that is not terrible. For RV, I don't think you need to believe it works, nor have a theory how it could, in order to get results, however keeping open-minded is useful to getting and interpreting the data you receive in RV.
Ray Hyman was commissioned (by the same government agency that released the document you posted) to review their work and found it to be disingenuous and a farce - you can read more of what he has to say here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100709201315/http://www.csicop...
In the meantime, take a look at this (I acquired it from Mr Puthoff himself just now, especially for you)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R8Kop6mFSmjm1gWCxiPotUtgtGT...
Right now i do believe what i can do real, and i believe the results reported in these papers are real also. I would love it if there were a better resource collection for these results and I think I'm going to build a simple website bringing that together.
You make a very strong case for your skepticism, but let me try to add more information to that. What you make of that is up to you.
I think the argument that it's a grift is easiest to unpick because of the paranormal nature of this topic you can see from your own skepticism and widespread skepticism of it that these kind of things are held to a higher standard of evidence and a greater scrutiny then say other defense contractor projects that use more conventional technologies. From that point of view I think it's more likely that a random you know defense contractor tender response is going to be some sort of a grift because it's going to promise that it can deliver XYZ results but it's not actually going to do that and the reality is you see that commonly these projects go over budget and over time. so it's actually more likely that a random defense software project is going to be a grift rather than the sort of paranormal stuff once it's been accepted and funded through multiple rounds of scrutiny and assessment.
Because people are so unwilling to believe it and because it's sort of a dangerous topic to be involved with you know it has to be able to deliver results because people are more likely to pull funding from it. So I think that's a useful heuristic argument and I think it's a valid response to counter the sentiment that it must be a grift because . The fact that it is funded and in a program makes it much more likely that it's not a grift especially that it's relatively less of a grift compared to other more conventional programs.
I also don't think that all of the documents relating to this is some sort of psyop or disinformation because from my assessment maybe I've covered less than 5% of all the documents but they look to be documents from different time periods with different authors different styles and the documents are all in different formats it just seems like it would be too much effort to fabricate all of these documents.
So I believe that the programs were real programs and they're not grifts they did deliver results and I believe that's reflected in the documentation that's been released.
To address your other points
they weren't, though. the truth is that SRI was running these studies in an unscientific fashion (read some of those results and see how liberally they counted something as "accessing the target")
50% of collection missions having usable intelligence is very high because they were producing complex diagrams, locations, layouts. You say they weren't, and perhaps you are claiming that they're not producing these things but here's a list of sample papers where you can clearly see they are producing these things as output of the RV transcript sessions.
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-0...
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-0...
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-0...
If you want to find many more just go to the CIA for reading room and search for "remote viewing transcripts drawings".
Alternately you're saying they weren't assessing things properly by being too loose with how they marked getting on target. But in my experience there's a confidence score that clearly reflects the proportion of accurate irrelevant and inaccurate elements in the data. And the period at SRI was basically pilot research to develop protocols and procedures that could be taught to military people and reproduced and there was sufficient success in those pilot phases that military programs were introduced and the 50% usable intelligence figure comes from the operational phase after 700 missions. So they were actually tasked to be an intelligent source for various operations and the 50% usable figure was not SRI research, it was the military assessing the results.
So your claim that either they weren't producing complex results or that they weren't getting sort of credible results it's not supported by the evidence that I've seen.
There's no perfect intelligence collection source there's flaws in all kinds of data from all kinds of sources of intelligence and so this sensor is not unique in that it has not a perfect accuracy but it still provides useful information.
to make money off of several lunatics in the military who were funding their research.
I honestly don't get the impression that the military people involved in this project were lunatics. I'm not saying there have not been any lunatics in the military nor am I saying that there have been no lunatics involved in remote viewing or other side projects. But from my contact with the documentation about this I honestly don't think any of those people will lunatic they seem more like people who perhaps are on the spectrum from skeptical to open-minded but they seem to share a sort of courage required to calmly assess evidence and adopt a rational conclusion even if it flies in the face of like a culturally normative sort of taboo.
I think this is a great moment to introduce you to a Master of Strategic intelligence thesis by someone out of the I think it's the defense intelligence college. it contains a lot of great military references and comments by military people about these programs and I think it helps provide a sort of rational perspective as well as addressing you know comments skeptical concerns and I really highly recommend you have a read of it cuz I think it's a valuable document that might add to your perspective about this.
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-0...
so I honestly think the skeptical perspective about this that denies the reality of it that says it's a fraud a result of two things one is it's basically a sort of laziness and a poverty of looking at the research about it and the second thing that I think that it is a result of is is people taking advantage of others who were not willing to go to the research and look it up to kind of spread this misinformation for who knows whatever motivations.
the bar is so low for this kind of stuff that you can just continue the grift for decades of "further studies", especially when claiming the soviets were doing it too.
I think the reality is, and i believe you see this too, is that the bar is far higher for this "kind of stuff" than for other more conventional tech. And no doubt saying the Sovs were doing it added motivation, but the same could be said for many projects of that era.
and don't you find it alarming that Puthoff from SRI is one of the guys involved in To the Stars, which is inarguably a grift?
Well slightly yes. I can't say definitively that two stars is a grift but it certainly doesn't inspire me with total confidence. But then again who knows? I'm not exactly sure how to assess what it is and I think it's quite complex for anyone to do that. But at the same time you know putoff is just one of the people who's been involved in these projects and if you look into the research all of these other names that are not mentioned so often in public start to come up. again I'm not really sure what that is reflective of is it something where it's like putoff is someone who simply wants to make himself publicly known about this whereas other people don't want to come forward about this, is putoff some sort of a disinformation plant or could it be something else. I think it's probably just as likely but harder for most people to accept that you know there are all of these sort of technologies that are real and their programs that deal with them but there's quite little but some public knowledge about that and then there are a few people who you know are basically lead scientists in that area and they their work cuts across a lot of those programs. so i actually don't think the fact that someone is involved in this or not when there's in reality many many people involved in this over many years, I don't think that fact is actually informative and I don't think it should kind of prejudice your judgments about this.
From you Hyman link:
This is because the current claim is based entirely upon a negative outcome — the sole basis for arguing for ESP is that extra-chance results can be obtained that apparently cannot be explained by normal means. But an infinite variety of normal possibilities exist and it is not clear than one can control for all of them in a single experiment. You need a positive theory to guide you as to what needs to be controlled, and what can be ignored. Parapsychologists have not come close to this as yet.
What he's saying is that you can't claim anything from statistically significant results because you know they could be due to any number of unknown mechanisms. But the same general criticism could be made of any scientific measurement. So to me as sort of someone with a science background this sort of anti-scientific perspective is completely bogus and irrational because on the one hand you want the public to accept the results of science but on the other hand you have this person standing up and saying in fact you know all of science is bogus but trust me you know this is a scientific perspective. Which is of course crazy and false.
I think this kind of craziness is basically emblematic of how far you have to reach and the sophistry you have to kind of use try to spin that all of this data is somehow you know not acceptable.
I'm surprised that this sort of general dismissal on gets any traction with you. I know it seems compelling because the guy speaks in an authoritative tone and provides a sort of comforting rejoinder to the somewhat unsettling new information that psychic phenomena is real. So my framing of this is it's sort of like a PR exercise and basically a sort of public service from the agency to release this seemingly discrediting information. it's basically like to ensure that the release of these documents is not too upsetting or too disturbing.
But I think if you want more perhap coherent skeptical analysis of remote viewing data you should examine the AIR report.
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-0...
However why should you accept the conclusions of this particular analysis when there's so much data there that you can look at and think for yourself and work at your own conclusions.
I'll finish up by making what I think is the strongest point about this that I can make it's that the kind of data that you can generate from remote viewing is so specific in terms of images diagrams colors events people places times that when there is overlap with something that happened in the past or the present or the future between coincidence as a way to dismiss it it's basically impossible because the amount of information that's there and the impossibility of having any way of obtaining that information means that like the probability of you are in a single session or a handful of sessions creating the correct overlap of that information is it's virtually impossible and so I don't think coincidence is a valid dismissal. It's vanishingly low hit that randomly. And because of that the remote viewers only need to be right once but the skeptics have to be right every single time. Because if the remote viewers are right just once it proves that there is something that cannot be explained through you know regular means. and if you're willing to open your eyes and look at the evidence or even if you're willing to try this for yourself I believe that you will see that the remote viewers have been right not just once but many many times.